![]() ![]() And Chimes at Midnight was the victim of disputes by the several sources that financed it: The legal haggling over who had the distribution rights prevented widespread public exhibition and release on DVD until very recently.Ĭallow is not one to psychoanalyze Welles. As RKO had done with Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons 16 years earlier, the studio, Universal, took over Touch of Evil after a sneak-preview audience panned it, trimmed it heavily and released it on the bottom half of a double bill. The two major movies, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, for example, were both seriously mishandled in distribution. “He was just irritatingly there, a constant reminder of the disappointment he had caused.”Ĭallow’s biography aims at correcting that image of Welles, emphasizing the significant artistic achievements of this period and the reasons they were undervalued. “Welles had committed an unforgivable crime in American eyes: he had failed, but refused to give up,” Callow says. Much has been written ever since about the man who, after triumphs in New York theater and on radio, went to Hollywood to make the film masterpiece Citizen Kane, but never again regained those heights. In 1952, the New York theater critic Walter Kerr called Welles “possibly the youngest living has-been.” Welles was stung by the epithet, and it stuck. In 1955 came Welles’s audacious staging of Moby-Dick in London, which received rave reviews and which Callow says Welles considered “the best thing he had ever done in any medium.” And in 1958 he made Touch of Evil, “every frame” of which, Callow asserts, “celebrates the art of film.”īut it was also the period when his reputation took its severest hits. It covers the years from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, which were bracketed by two Shakespeare films: Othello in 1952 and Chimes at Midnight in 1965. And this year we have One-Man Band, the richly detailed and immensely readable third installment of Simon Callow’s projected four-volume biography. Given the difficulty of seeing Welles steadily and seeing him whole, it is no surprise that the best biographies have approached him piecemeal: Last year, Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson devoted 800 pages to just the first 25 years of his life. Biographers also have to contend with the fact that Welles was a gifted and artful liar, capable of dropping hints that he was the product of an affair his mother had with King Edward VII, that when he was 9 years old he had dined with Hitler or that he had had an affair with Eva Peron. Get too close and all you see is the pedestal, part of an inscription or maybe a toe. For would-be biographers, Orson Welles is the colossus on the horizon that grows larger – and more incomprehensible – the nearer you approach. ![]()
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