The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (442 page)

If she had been “Susan Weld” she might now be known as one of our great actresses.

Orson Welles
(1915–85), b. Kenosha, Wisconsin
1941:
Citizen Kane
. 1942:
The Magnificent Ambersons
. 1943:
Journey Into Fear
(codirected with Norman Foster);
It’s All True
(uncompleted). 1946:
The Stranger
. 1948:
The Lady from Shanghai; Macbeth
. 1952:
Othello
. 1955:
Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin
. 1958:
Touch of Evil; The Fountain of Youth
(TV). 1959:
Don Quixote
(uncompleted). 1963:
The Trial/Le Proces
. 1966:
Chimes at Midnight/Campanadas a Medianoche
. 1968:
The Immortal Story/Histoire Immortelle
. 1973:
Vérités et Mensonges/F for Fake
(d). 1977:
Filming Othello
(d).

The delving into the circumstances under which
Citizen Kane
was conceived—by Pauline Kael in
The Citizen Kane Book
, and by Welles’s colleague, John Houseman, in
Run-Through
—concentrated on literary authorship. Miss Kael’s work, especially, amounted to an attempt to dull Welles’s flashy reputation, to expose the charlatan, to reassert literary merit, and puncture performing flatus. Happily, it only played to Welles’s glorification of ineluctable failure in his bogus mogul self.

No one can now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed language of the screenplay, but no one who has seen the film as often as it deserves to be seen would dream that Welles is not its only begetter.
The Citizen Kane Book
may persuade us to reassess Mankiewicz, but he never becomes more than a clever, aphoristic, self-loathing pen-pusher. His plan for
Kane
was ingenious, malicious, and provocative. All of those qualities Welles endorsed, and shared. But he added his own nobility, which is none the less for centering on himself. Through observing his own melancholy passage as falling star, Welles made a universal portrait of failure, decline, chimes at midnight, snuffed-out pipe dream, and of the foolish playacting we devise to conceal those brutal truths.
Kane
is a lasting achievement because of Welles’s capacity for folie de grandeur, and that may be seen in his theatricality, his storytelling, and his visual imagination, as much as in his dramatization of himself.

Kane
is not simply a matter of a novice director’s immediate creation of a visual style that is simultaneously baroque and precise, overwhelmingly emotional, and unerringly founded in reality. Deep-focus photography, ceilinged sets, and exaggerated low-key lighting—such tangible effects were not born with
Kane
. Anyone can see how much Welles’s eye had learned from German expressionism and its influence on stage production in the 1930s. In France and America, elaborate, lifelike sets and comprehensive photography had been played with for ten years. Look at
The Long Voyage Home
and you can see Gregg Toland in possession of all the photographic measures of
Kane;
you may see, too, how little he or Ford knew what to do with them. The Ford film is senselessly pretty. The deep-focus, chiaroscuro image works in
Kane
(“works” is a tame word) because it dramatizes the inside of Kane’s head, curving at the edges or fading into darkness with the diffuseness of egotism.

Nor is
Kane
just the visible energy of Welles badgering away from center-screen at his fellow-actors, most of whom were colleagues of some years, already bewildered by their own confused feelings of love and resentment for the boy genius. It is also the fact that, before or since, no one in Hollywood has carved out such freedom for himself, and then used it to initiate a chorus of damnation, mistrust, and rumor that would reliably hinder him from a lasting commercial career. As if Welles would ever knuckle under to stability! He handled RKO like a conjuror. Without their being able to prevent it, he charmed, bullied, and provoked Mankiewicz, Houseman, Toland, and Bernard Herrmann into their best work for the screen. That is a sort of authorship that consists of dictating the terms in which collaborators deal with him. It was only when he had brought Hollywood to its knees, that Welles—always a chronic victim of boredom, and an actor unconvinced by his own masquerade—spurned carte blanche so that he should himself be made a Falstaffian outcast.

Kane is less about William Randolph Hearst—a humorless, anxious man—than a portrait and prediction of Welles himself. Given his greatest opportunity, Mankiewicz could only invent a story that was increasingly colored by his mixed feelings about Welles and that, he knew, would be brought to life by Welles the overpowering actor, who could not resist the chance to dress up as the old man he might one day become, and who relished the young showoff Kane just as he loved to hector and amaze the Mercury Theater. As if Welles knew that
Kane
would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent. Kane goes out of his way to destroy and isolate himself by calling Geddes’s bluff. In the same way, Welles repaid astonishing freedom by gratuitously insulting William Randolph Hearst. And in
Confidential Report
, the scorpion still stings the frog, no matter that it will destroy them both, because it is his character. Kane is Welles, just as every apparent point of view in the film is warmed by Kane’s own memories, as if the entire film were his dream in the instant before death.

Beyond question,
Kane
is the film that influenced filmmakers in the years from about 1955 onward—until then it was neglected. The reasons for that are several. We feel now how far its study of the flawed tycoon embraces Gatsby, Howard Hughes, and the American recipe of public charm and actual demagoguery. This too is the age that sees Welles coming into the inheritance of Kane at Xanadu, the aging hulk, haplessly issuing uncompleted projects. More than that, Kane expresses the nature of cinema. Kane’s enterprise is so evidently Welles’s. His surrender to glory is equally the overwhelming of the performer by his own glamour. But visually,
Kane
is about the gulf between concrete things and their mysterious, emotional meanings. There is still not a film that so grows out of that discrepancy, that is so vividly material and so deeply imaginary, that advances ultimately on a forgotten sledge and reveals to us its significance, while denying it forever to the people in the film who are in search of it. Where else is there such intense complicity between the heart of a film and its audience? Rosebud is the greatest secret in cinema, and cinema the most secretive of public shows.

The bond between Welles and Charles Foster Kane compels us to see Welles’s later work as offshoots of
Kane
, variations on its rich theme. Call the later films lesser works if you will, but consider whether everything else Welles did was not an extension and fulfillment of
Kane
. It is worth insisting that not one of his immediate followers has made a film to be compared with
Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai
, or
Touch of Evil
. Any of such lesser works would raise a director like Robert Wise from dubious variability. Charles Higham reports that Wise actually directed Major Amberson’s death scene. Which only proves Welles’s infectious power: Nothing in the rest of Wise’s work is as powerful or serious. And when we remember the firelight on the faces of Falstaff and Shallow in
Chimes at Midnight
, it seems quite natural that Wise should have identified an image implicit in Welles’s world. To be with Welles was to share his vision. Everything about the
Inquirer
is colored by Kane’s greater skill at organizing other people’s lives. It is equally a part of Welles’s dominant but evasive imagination that he urged people to make his own vague purposes manifest.
Ambersons
was terribly curtailed by Welles’s flight south for
It’s All True. Lady from Shanghai
was left to Columbia professionals to tidy up. But both now seem his work, fragmentation adding to the Xanadu clutter. He inspired actors and technicians alike, and who can doubt that Welles’s own zest for life came largely from daring or provoking people to excel themselves, to become creatures he can believe he invented.
Ambersons
deserted only focuses attention the more conclusively on Welles. That “garbled” thriller,
The Lady from Shanghai
, is unavoidably a commentary on Welles’s marriage to Rita Hayworth and, incidentally, the clearest sign of his misogyny and his shyness of attractive, mature women.

Not only his own films but his work as an actor, as a part-time conjuror, as a guest on so many worthless TV shows, are continuing facets of
Kane
. Think how often his parts in other films are distorted portraits of grandeur: as Colonel Haki in
Journey Into Fear
(43, Norman Foster), the Mercury film where Welles first essayed his magician’s ploy of directing through another man; as the barnstorming Rochester, reinhabiting RKO haunted houses in
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson); as the “Great Orsino,” sawing Dietrich in half—pretext for that mordant reunion in
Touch of Evil
—in
Follow the Boys
(44, Edward Sutherland); as the husband returned from the dead, only vaguely remembered by wife Claudette Colbert in
Tomorrow Is Forever
(45, Irving Pichel); as Harry Lime in
The Third Man
(49, Carol Reed), hypnotizing Reed into his own style and making a sophomoric speech about Switzerland a highlight of the film; as Cesare Borgia in
Prince of Foxes
(49, Henry King); as the illusionist Cagliostro in
Black Magic
(49, Gregory Ratoff); as a mighty war-making Khan (Kane) in
The Black Rose
(50, Henry Hathaway), expounding on the nature of war with the sentimental pessimism of Michael O’Hara describing the blood-lust of sharks, and borrowing the costumes for his own
Othello;
as Father Mapple, luridly overpaid for a sermon he could have done in one take, in
Moby Dick
(56, John Huston), using the money in his own mind to finance a dazzling stage production of Melville’s novel; as Clarence Darrow in
Compulsion
(59, Richard Fleischer), declaiming the need for mercy with all the hollow promise of Kane making his “Declaration of Principles”; as a bloated film director in an episode from
RoGoPaG
(62, Pier Paolo Pasolini); as the outcast Wolsey in
A Man for All Seasons
(67, Fred Zinnemann); the Swedish consul playing fire-prevention officer in
Is Paris Burning?
(René Clément), and as moved by war-torn cities as Harry Lime; in
La Décade Prodigieuse
(71, Claude Chabrol); typically lending himself to the adventurousness of
A Safe Place
(71, Henry Jaglom), in which he plays a magician who makes things vanish; a Cuban industrialist in
Voyage of the Damned
(76, Stuart Rosenberg).

The later films have every defect alleged against them. They are flawed by cheapness, by reckless or capricious casting, by impulsiveness and self-indulgence in shooting, and by Welles’s increasing reluctance to complete a project. On several occasions, he fled from the precise tedium of the cutting room, too bulky to be contained, too hopefully flighty to be pinned down to a fixed version of a work. Uncompleted films or films taken from him and spoiled by others allowed his thoughts of perfection to endure. Xanadu was such a venture, still sprawling, its smoke reaching up to the stars, never defined or finished. His failings conform to its imaginative ideal and enhance the mystification so dear to Welles, evident in conjuring and blatant melodrama.
Chimes at Midnight
was hideously postsynched, as were parts of
Macbeth;
but that blurring assists the dreamy ambiance of his Shakespeare. The weird locations and unlit darkness of
The Trial
and the anxiety of some of its acting are essential to Welles’s Kafka. Self-assertion binds carelessness together: Hank Quinlan is tripped up by his own “cane,” Mr. Clay in
Immortal Story
walks with a stick, while Falstaff clings to a gnarled walking cane.

Anything involving Welles takes on this dream of the self. A Shredded Wheat or a wine commercial sounds like “rosebud.” Guest appearances on comedy shows gobble up the humiliating context. He made Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin into other Thompson figures. Welles was always proliferating the helpless self-idealism. That is another source of his relevance to our age; not as someone who stood back and saw himself but as simultaneous participant and commentator. Without his devoted film record of his own life as a director, there would have been no
8½
, no
Persona
, no
Pierrot le Fou
. Such films might exist, but their confidence in the right to be personal while spending so much money comes from Welles.
Kane
is a source of cinema, of corrupted beauty and evanescent meanings, making most subsequent films items from Xanadu inventory. Like cinema itself, he drew together poetry and melodrama so that we no longer feel sure that one is reputable and the other suspect.

In his last years, Welles did more commercials, he narrated documentaries, he attempted to launch fresh projects and to complete old ones. He appeared in
It Happened One Christmas
(77, Donald Wrye),
The Muppet Movie
(79, James Frawley), and
Butterfly
(81, Matt Cimber). But none of those matched his provocative role as the wise man in the back row of the theatre in his friend Henry Jaglom’s
Someone to Love
(87). In short, he presided over the special chaos of his life as it closed, apparently seeking help and friends, yet secretly sealed against trespass. His unfinished films are now seeing the light of day—even pieces of
It’s All True
. But so little about the life and work of Welles is all or anywhere near true. He inhaled legend—and changed our air. It is the greatest career in film, the most tragic, and the one with most warnings for the rest of us.