Orson Welles: Three Views

Orson Welles’ death on October 10, 1985 came as something of a shock, partly because Welles had always seemed suspended in an eternal late adolescence, but mostly because those of us who followed his career with interest were waiting for his next project, whatever it might turn out to be, to come to fruition. Wasn’t Welles about to make a film based on his experiences with Marc Blitztein’s The Cradle Will Rock in the nineteen-thirties? And wasn’t The Other Side of the Wind, a film “nearing completion” since at least the early seventies and since then entangled in an endless web of financial difficulties, soon to be released? To add to the surprise of Welles’ death (although this perhaps should have been seen as an augur instead), two full-length biographies of Welles, together with a careful study of his cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane, had been published just months earlier. A significant revival of interest in Welles seemed to be in the offing.

Although his name was, in many ways, a household word, many—particularly younger—people might reasonably wonder precisely who Orson Welles was.

Unfortunately, neither Higham nor Leaming provide a convincing answer. Admittedly, Welles spent a good deal of his time and energies creating smokescreens and erecting barriers designed to maintain himself as myth.

One suspects, from his various pronouncements, that Welles did not know himself terribly well. His public image, in any case, has always seemed sufficiently fascinating in itself. Actor, producer, director, writer, magician, bon vivant, raconteur, “boy wonder” of the stage and radio (the “Voodoo” Macbeth for the Federal Theatre; the Halloween Eve, 1938, broadcast of The War of the Worlds), creator of Citizen Kane: certainly enough here to feed our interest and curiosity. Subsequent to his early accomplishments, of course, we also have Welles in decline—the Welles of Charles Higham (and others) who could never finish a project, whose career after Citizen Kane was a series of small triumphs and major failures, who flaunted his celebrity status on talk shows and in television wine commercials, all the time growing fatter and fatter in compensation for his many disappointments.

Alternatively, we have Barbara Leaming’s Welles, a man frequently betrayed by close friends, frustrated at every turn, misunderstood, suffering because he always had to do things his way, the way of the true artist. Oddly, both biographers end up condescending to Welles, though in different ways. The real Welles, one feels, was more interesting and more complex than these 800 plus pages suggest.

In the end, of course, it is Welles’ accomplishments, not Welles himself, that matters. His life was decidedly not his finest work of art. For many, that honor belongs to Citizen Kane, a film that in its flamboyance and theatricality summarized much of Welles’ earlier work in theater and radio while it helped to redefine the potentialities of the American studio film.

Robert L. Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane stresses, perhaps excessively, the status of Kane as a collaborative achievement. Carringer concerns himself, in particular, with the writing of the screenplay, the art direction, and the cinematography. Through careful, extensive research, Carringer is able to reconstruct in detail the pre-production, production, and post-production phases of the film’s making. The result is a fascinating insight into one highly typical and at the same time remarkably untypical instance of the filmmaking process as it was practiced during Hollywood’s golden age.

If The Making of “Citizen Kane” seems to honor Welles, the thrust of Carringer’s argument ends up (like the biographies by Higham and Leaming) simultaneously undercutting him. Carringer’s discussion of the screenplay provides a good example. Although at great pains to dispute Pauline Kael’s by now notorious claim that Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote virtually the entire script, with minimal contribution by Welles, Carringer still ends up giving Mankiewicz a good deal of the final credit. But is the issue that important?

Citizen Kane is not a script, but a film. Even if Welles had not written a single word of the screenplay, the film would still be his film. In fact, the entire controversy over screenwriting credit only proves that Welles’ biggest mistake was putting his name on the screenplay at all. He simply did not realize that in Hollywood (in contrast to the theater), writing credits were not that important. Experienced directors (Howard Hawks, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock) frequently worked on the screenplays to their films without publicly acknowledging the fact. Welles, clearly, still had a few things to learn about moviemaking.

Carringer also effectively undermines Welles’ reputation by strongly suggesting that Citizen Kane is the single masterpiece of Welles’ career. But this is to take too narrow a view of art. Carringer, it seems to me—and this partly explains his emphasis on the collaborative work of technicians and artisans—values craft and polish at the expense of other, less tangible and self-evident qualities. No one would want to deny the brilliance of Citizen Kane—it is, in a quite literal sense, a masterpiece, fashioned to demonstrate its creator’s mastery of the medium, validating his entry into the guild. What is extraordinary, of course, is that Welles should have produced his masterpiece the first time out, although his background in theater and radio, as well as several experiments with filmed sequences for stage plays, had certainly well prepared him for it.

But Citizen Kane, wonderful and brilliant as it is, lacks the emotional resonance, the sense of felt life, present in a number of Welles’ other films, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Chimes at Midnight. In part because of its complex narrative scheme—a series of flashbacks narrated by Kane’s friends and enemies—Citizen Kane never allows intimacy with the central character, never really shows us what it feels like to be Kane. By contrast, other Welles-created characters—Quinlin or Falstaff, for example—press their humanity close to the camera lens and allow access to the depths beneath. For all of its technical brilliance and narrative ingenuity, or perhaps because of these qualities, Citizen Kane remains a cold film at the center.

If we look at Welles’ films as a group, undistracted by the various myths surrounding their creation, we find a remarkable body of work. Citizen Kane may be the jewel in the crown, but eh crown itself, in all of its sometimes baroque, frequently rough-hewn splendor, remains a delight to behold. Anyone who seriously considers the powerful nostalgia of The Magnificent Ambersons, the nightmarish vision of The Lady from Shanghai, the brilliant chiaroscuro of Othello, the combination of tawdriness and tragedy in Touch of Evil, and the lyric intensity and narrative flair of Chimes at Midnight cannot think of Welles as a one-movie man. And because Welles was an actor who frequently starred in his own films, the Wellesian cinema presents us with a picture of Welles more satisfying than any biography. Charles Foster Kane, Franz Kindler, Michael O’Hara, Macbeth, Othello, Arkadin, Quinlan, Falstaff, Clay—these characterizations (some, undeniably, more successful than others) evoke as well as anything can the many-faceted phenomenon that was Orson Welles. What we need now is a critical scholarly biography written by someone capable of examining, with intelligence and evenhandedness, Welles’ work in theater, film, radio, and television, while avoiding both the uncritical adulation and the tone of chastisement that too frequently defines popular writing on Welles. Perhaps Welles’ death will now provide that opportunity.