The Golden Age Of Hollywood

  Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)



If Orson Welles had only made Citizen Kane (1941) his place among the great directors of film history would be secure. He never quite matched Kane but continued working as a maverick in the US and Europe struggling for the rest of his life to raise funds for the films he wanted to direct, often acting to pay the bills.

Perhaps it was the fact that he had made a lot of enemies in Hollywood after Citizen Kane (1941) was revealed to be thinly veiled portrait of William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper tycoon with plenty of power back then. Before this Welles had been widely acclaimed and given complete freedom to make his first film any way he wanted, the notoriety of the War of the Worlds broadcast which caused such panic made him a household name. The freedom remained for Welles' second feature The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) but somehow the honeymoon period was over. It is a very good film till near the end when studio interference pretty much ruins it. The botched editing job took place while Welles was out of the country filming his third feature, a documentary which was never released.

So by the end of 1942 Welles was reduced mainly to acting jobs in Hollywood. He was a fine actor in films like Journey to Fear (1942) (supposedly partly directed by him, it certainly has many Wellesian touches) and Jane Eyre (1944). Later in the decade he was employed by Harry Cohn at Columbia to direct their biggest star Rita Hayworth (also Orson's wife for a time) in The Lady from Shanghai (1948), again the studio interfered with Welles' vision. He wasn't to work in Hollywood again for about a decade.

After a great acting turn as Harry Lime in Carol Reed's brilliant The Third Man (1949) Welles worked on a few intermittent directorial efforts in the Fifties and Sixties including Confidential Report (aka Mr Arkadin) (1955), The Trial (1961) and Chimes At Midnight (1966) probably the best of his attempts to bring Shakespeare to the screen. His last important Hollywood film was Touch of Evil (1958) a very dark film noir which is probably his best work outside Kane, his last released feature was F for Fake (1973). Welles was the ultimate maverick director but he was certainly no spendthrift just somebody who didn't really fit into the system.

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Written content copyright Derek McLellan,2005.
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