Orson Welles, Not Just a Film Director
He travelled about quite a bit in his youth, painting and vagabonding. He experienced England, Ireland, Germany, Morocco and most notably Spain, where he fought in the bullring as a fearless matador. Explaining to English theater directors that he was a beloved actor in his native USA, he managed to convince them, and he thus began a famous career as an actor. As he said, “I began at the top, and I’ve been going down ever since.”
Returning to America, he devised a classic hoax when he chose Grover’s Mill, New Jersey as the site of a Martian invasion. In 1938, a radio broadcast he directed terrified thousands across the country. The production, which featured stupefied eye-witness accounts, breaking news bulletins, and dramatic musical interludes, was in fact just a fiction created by Mercury Theatre On the Air, a showbiz troupe that would become notorious for its next involvements with Orson Welles, notably Citizen Kane.
The 1941 film is today widely considered to be the greatest of all time, due to its innovative flashback-laden narrative structure and its state-of-the-art deep-focus cinematography. However, it was a commercial disaster that helped bankrupt the once-prosperous RKO studio. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate whom the film was based on, launched a massive campaign to sully the name of Orson Welles and all involved in Citizen Kane, and when Welles was mentioned at the Academy Awards that year (he was not nominated for any award), he was loudly booed.
Of course his name rebounded eventually, but his career was dogged by difficulties, both financial and personal. He started and failed to complete film adaptations of Don Quixote, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick and Catch-22. Still, he is rightly thought of as one of cinema’s heavyweights. Citizen Kane, the Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil enjoy reputations as silver screen classics. Welles is remembered as the quintessential actors’ director, never sacrificing the power of dramatic acting for the spectacle of the screen. A born theater-actor, to be sure.
Although his Hollywood career was vindicated in the 1980s by a D.W. Griffith award from the Directors Guild of America, many believe his career was on the whole one of unrealized ambitions, and that his failures outweighed his successes. As a “film auteur,” he enjoyed in his lifetime a better reputation in Europe. In the twilight of his life, he shilled for cheeseball Ernest and Julio Gallo wine TV commercials, and his final film role was not Brutus or Shylock or Richard III. It was as the evil robot Unicron in “Transformers: The Movie.”
All the same, his legacy as a filmmaker can be enjoyed today. And furthermore, it is unfair to his genius to remember him exclusively as a knob-twiddler or as a boozy and overweight blowhard. It is remarkable that he excelled in so many arts, in particular the terrific leap he made from radio voice-acting to film – a medium he redefined with his broad vision. He was a 20th century Renaissance Man.
