Every film that Orson Welles made was distinctively an Orson Welles movie. Even something like The Stranger, which was Welles’s one attempt to make a standard studio film, still ends up looking like an Orson Welles movie. Of all the films he made, however, there might not be a more “Wellesian” Welles picture than F…
Falstaff might just be Orson Welles’s greatest film. Welles himself thought so, and many among his legion of devoted fans think so. That the film remains largely unseen in America has little bearing on this opinion. In his home country, Welles is still most closely associated with Citizen Kane and The Third Man, but among…
I think the chief accomplishment of Orson Welles’s The Trial is that it so fully traps us in its nightmare world. The movie is an adaptation of Kafka’s novel about a man named Josef K who wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. K stumbles from one…
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece. At its center is Welles himself, joyously grotesque in…
Joseph Cotten holds a peculiar place in movie history. He was a charismatic and bankable movie star in the forties, and he was a fine actor and an all-around nice guy, but he lived most of his adult life, and will likely live throughout the ages, in the shadow of his friend Orson Welles. Even…
The Lady from Shanghai is a brilliant mess. It is a film that was taken away from its director, edited thoughtlessly, scored with one song endlessly repeated, and then shelved for years before it was finally dumped on the market. And yet it’s still pretty damn close to great. Before we go further, I should…
By 1945, Orson Welles was in trouble. He had arrived in Hollywood in 1939 like a hero, been welcomed at RKO with the best contract any director had ever been granted. Of course, many of the old guard in town resented the brash radio star, and they resented him further when his first movie, Citizen…
One approaches Citizen Kane slowly because of the enormous reputation that surrounds it like the vast fields, cages, and lagoons that lead up to Xanadu. Almost no one sees it for the first time without being over-prepared for it. All the plaudits, all the scholarly works, all the pop culture references—they sprawl about the film…
May 6th, 2015 will mark the 100th birthday of the late Orson Welles. To commemorate the birth of the great filmmaker, we’ll be looking back at many of his greatest cinematic accomplishments — movies like Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai, The Trial, and Chimes At Midnight. First though, let’s pull a real Orson Welles…
Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda had one of the longest lasting friendships in the history of Hollywood. They met as young actors, became instant pals, and stayed close until Fonda’s death in 1982. Orson Welles is supposed to have said, “I thought these two guys were either having the hottest affair in Hollywood, or they…
