Presenting Orson Welles
Oct. 27th, 2008 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBefore I hit the road again, I paid a visit to YouTube. Now one of my interests happens to be Orson Welles, and I was delighted to discover people put up clips. So, instead of the big Orson essay I've yet to write, some illustrations why these films are worth watching, oh gentle viewers.
Of course one has to start with Citizen Kane. Which actually isn't my favourite O.W. movie, but it does deserve the legendary status it has. The problem with legendary status, of course, is that it keeps some people from watching, equating "legendary" with "dull". So, here's the original trailer, in which Orson W. is being a shameless tease and mocks the concept of trailers. To wit: there are hardly any scenes from the film in it. Instead, there are scenes exclusively filmed for this trailer, as well as an introduction of the actors, all of whom, like Welles himself, had never done a movie before and as radio and stage actors were new to a good deal of the audience. Whom you won't see is Orson Welles, either as Charles Foster Kane or as himself. Instead, you see a microphone and hear his voice. Which was one of the most famous in the business and his biggest stock in trade throughout his life. It's marvellously cheeky, and he was the only actor/director who could have pulled it off.
Okay, one actual scene from Citizen Kane, to illustrate what Orson did with "the biggest train set ever given to a boy" (O.W. about a film studio). Nicknamed "the breakfeast scene", this scene illustrates in five minutes the start, falling apart, and ending of Kane's first marriage. It's been imitated countless times in subsequent movies, but here's the original.
After Citizen Kane, it was an uphill struggle to get the money, and he never had as much artistic freedom. "Getting the money" meant acting in other movies to earn it, a lot of which weren't that good, but sometimes he got lucky and ended up in a classic, which was the case with The Third Man. (Reviewed in this very journal.) He only had about ten minutes of screentime, but Harry Lime, amoral charming villain extraordinaire, is arguably the role most people still associate Orson Welles with. It helps that Harry is talked about all the time throughout the film until after about two third of it, he makes his entrance, which remains one of the big movie entrances. It's also one of the few times you see Welles on screen as he actually looked at the time of filming. He usually made himself look either better (Kane) or worse (Touch of Evil), depending on the role, and used to joke that "I have the face of a depraved baby". So, anyway. Our hero, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) has tried to find out what exactly happened to his late friend Harry, only to discover Harry was up to no good and there is something extremely fishy about his "death". And then this happens:
Contrary to urban legend, Welles didn't write his lines or the script nor did he help with the filming, but there was one notable exception. One scene he did adlib, according to both scriptwriter Graham Greene and himself. It promptly became one of the most quoted speeches in film history.
Back to Orson's own films. The Lady of Shanghai is weird in that he is totally miscast in the role he took (film noir hero), but the directing and the other actors are brilliant, and the grand finale remains one of the big showcases of directorial virtuosity. Again, it, too, ended up imitated quite a lot. If you're unfamiliar with the film, Rita Hayworth (in the process of divorcing Orson when this was made) as Elsa, the femme fatale of the film, Everett Sloane (one of Welles' favourite actors from his Mercury Theatre days onwards - he was Bernstein in Citizen Kane, for example) is her husband (they have the film noir love/hate relationship, not Elsa and her lover), and Welles is Michael, Elsa's fall guy who originally made the mistake of seeing her as the innocent needing to be rescued out of the evil clutches of her husband.
One film which should be way more known than it is: The Trial. This is definitely one of my favourite Welles films, and favourite film versions of a book that you'd think defies filming. Welles gets both the paranoia and the humour in Kafka (when other people forget about the humour element), and the repressed and then twisted sexuality. He also made a virtue out of his lack of cash and used the location he had - the former Gare d'Orsay in Paris, later to become the Musee d'Orsay but at this point empty - brilliantly, and coaxed terrific performances out of Anthony Perkins as Josef K., and of Romy Schneider as Leni. This time, he cast himself just right, in a supporting but important role, as the advocate. Here's a scene in which poor Josef K. talks to the advocate, who is playing cat and mouse with him:
Citizen Kane aside, the film usually named by art critics as Welles' masterpiece is Touch of Evil. I'm more an Othello woman, but Touch of Evil is great, from first to last shot. The opening shot is one of these examples of a director doing a gambit - a long, long shot, uncut - and doing it right (the suspense keeps building, the audience isn't bored by the display of "look what I can do"). Observe:
Touch of Evil, proving the cliché of there being no small roles, just small actors, features Marlene Dietrich in a cameo that nonetheless has tremendous impact. Here she is, meeting Welles' corrupt sheriff (with whom she has a history) in a scene that basically every Welles biographer ever jumped upon (as with all his films, Welles co-wrote the script) because of one particular line. Guess which one.
Sadly, I couldn't find Othello clips, but someone did put up Chimes at Midnight. This was Welles taking poth parts of Henry IV. plus some bits of Henry V. and making it basically "The Tragedy of Sir John Falstaff". He tried this for the first time in his early 20s, on stage, when it flopped, and kept on trying it until filming this late in his life when he finally had reached Falstaffian age, but autobiographical background aside, the sequence here contains what is arguably the best battle scene in a historical movie, full stop. Why? Because Welles, with a minimum of actors and cash at his disposal, actually manages to get across the brutality of warfare without prettification in a cinematic and devastating way. It's the anti-Agincourt a la Olivier (though Branagh's battle scene from his version of Henry V is a blatant homage, except with Branagh, the Te Deum afterwards changes the mood entirely). Oh, and everyone's acting is top notch again.
Lastly, here's a scene from one of my favourite movies, Ed Wood, in which Ed (still my favourite Johnny Depp performance - the rest of you can keep Jack Sparrow), about to become immortal as the worst director of all times, meets his idol, Orson Welles. Vincent d'Onofrio does a great Orson, and he'd have loved the invention.
Of course one has to start with Citizen Kane. Which actually isn't my favourite O.W. movie, but it does deserve the legendary status it has. The problem with legendary status, of course, is that it keeps some people from watching, equating "legendary" with "dull". So, here's the original trailer, in which Orson W. is being a shameless tease and mocks the concept of trailers. To wit: there are hardly any scenes from the film in it. Instead, there are scenes exclusively filmed for this trailer, as well as an introduction of the actors, all of whom, like Welles himself, had never done a movie before and as radio and stage actors were new to a good deal of the audience. Whom you won't see is Orson Welles, either as Charles Foster Kane or as himself. Instead, you see a microphone and hear his voice. Which was one of the most famous in the business and his biggest stock in trade throughout his life. It's marvellously cheeky, and he was the only actor/director who could have pulled it off.
Okay, one actual scene from Citizen Kane, to illustrate what Orson did with "the biggest train set ever given to a boy" (O.W. about a film studio). Nicknamed "the breakfeast scene", this scene illustrates in five minutes the start, falling apart, and ending of Kane's first marriage. It's been imitated countless times in subsequent movies, but here's the original.
After Citizen Kane, it was an uphill struggle to get the money, and he never had as much artistic freedom. "Getting the money" meant acting in other movies to earn it, a lot of which weren't that good, but sometimes he got lucky and ended up in a classic, which was the case with The Third Man. (Reviewed in this very journal.) He only had about ten minutes of screentime, but Harry Lime, amoral charming villain extraordinaire, is arguably the role most people still associate Orson Welles with. It helps that Harry is talked about all the time throughout the film until after about two third of it, he makes his entrance, which remains one of the big movie entrances. It's also one of the few times you see Welles on screen as he actually looked at the time of filming. He usually made himself look either better (Kane) or worse (Touch of Evil), depending on the role, and used to joke that "I have the face of a depraved baby". So, anyway. Our hero, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) has tried to find out what exactly happened to his late friend Harry, only to discover Harry was up to no good and there is something extremely fishy about his "death". And then this happens:
Contrary to urban legend, Welles didn't write his lines or the script nor did he help with the filming, but there was one notable exception. One scene he did adlib, according to both scriptwriter Graham Greene and himself. It promptly became one of the most quoted speeches in film history.
Back to Orson's own films. The Lady of Shanghai is weird in that he is totally miscast in the role he took (film noir hero), but the directing and the other actors are brilliant, and the grand finale remains one of the big showcases of directorial virtuosity. Again, it, too, ended up imitated quite a lot. If you're unfamiliar with the film, Rita Hayworth (in the process of divorcing Orson when this was made) as Elsa, the femme fatale of the film, Everett Sloane (one of Welles' favourite actors from his Mercury Theatre days onwards - he was Bernstein in Citizen Kane, for example) is her husband (they have the film noir love/hate relationship, not Elsa and her lover), and Welles is Michael, Elsa's fall guy who originally made the mistake of seeing her as the innocent needing to be rescued out of the evil clutches of her husband.
One film which should be way more known than it is: The Trial. This is definitely one of my favourite Welles films, and favourite film versions of a book that you'd think defies filming. Welles gets both the paranoia and the humour in Kafka (when other people forget about the humour element), and the repressed and then twisted sexuality. He also made a virtue out of his lack of cash and used the location he had - the former Gare d'Orsay in Paris, later to become the Musee d'Orsay but at this point empty - brilliantly, and coaxed terrific performances out of Anthony Perkins as Josef K., and of Romy Schneider as Leni. This time, he cast himself just right, in a supporting but important role, as the advocate. Here's a scene in which poor Josef K. talks to the advocate, who is playing cat and mouse with him:
Citizen Kane aside, the film usually named by art critics as Welles' masterpiece is Touch of Evil. I'm more an Othello woman, but Touch of Evil is great, from first to last shot. The opening shot is one of these examples of a director doing a gambit - a long, long shot, uncut - and doing it right (the suspense keeps building, the audience isn't bored by the display of "look what I can do"). Observe:
Touch of Evil, proving the cliché of there being no small roles, just small actors, features Marlene Dietrich in a cameo that nonetheless has tremendous impact. Here she is, meeting Welles' corrupt sheriff (with whom she has a history) in a scene that basically every Welles biographer ever jumped upon (as with all his films, Welles co-wrote the script) because of one particular line. Guess which one.
Sadly, I couldn't find Othello clips, but someone did put up Chimes at Midnight. This was Welles taking poth parts of Henry IV. plus some bits of Henry V. and making it basically "The Tragedy of Sir John Falstaff". He tried this for the first time in his early 20s, on stage, when it flopped, and kept on trying it until filming this late in his life when he finally had reached Falstaffian age, but autobiographical background aside, the sequence here contains what is arguably the best battle scene in a historical movie, full stop. Why? Because Welles, with a minimum of actors and cash at his disposal, actually manages to get across the brutality of warfare without prettification in a cinematic and devastating way. It's the anti-Agincourt a la Olivier (though Branagh's battle scene from his version of Henry V is a blatant homage, except with Branagh, the Te Deum afterwards changes the mood entirely). Oh, and everyone's acting is top notch again.
Lastly, here's a scene from one of my favourite movies, Ed Wood, in which Ed (still my favourite Johnny Depp performance - the rest of you can keep Jack Sparrow), about to become immortal as the worst director of all times, meets his idol, Orson Welles. Vincent d'Onofrio does a great Orson, and he'd have loved the invention.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 11:20 am (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 03:40 pm (UTC)You're welcome.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 03:45 pm (UTC)Three Cheers! but I just think I should say...
Date: 2008-10-27 11:30 pm (UTC)...that as much as Vincent D'Onoffrio looks spot on like a young Welles in the ED WOOD clip, that it was Maurice LaMarche doing the dubbing as Welles in that clip.
This is the same Welles voice that he based the character of THE BRAIN in PINKY AND THE BRAIN on, and it was entirely based on the infamous frozen pea radio spot that was done here in Toronto for a British production company in the 1970s.
Re: Three Cheers! but I just think I should say...
Date: 2008-10-28 08:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 05:38 am (UTC)I couldn't find a clip, unfortunately. He has only one line, but it's his facial expression that really sells it. It is not the look one would expect from a studio chairman who has just had a talking pig, frog, chicken, bear, and various whatevers walk into his office. Priceless.