There are generally two schools of thought among the media regarding Orson Welles ("only two?" he'd have said and been mock-dissappointed): he's either the
Wunderkind, the wonderboy of stage and film who created one perfect movie and then squandered his promise on self indulgence, cameos in other movies and weird projects of his own, or he's the life long patron saint of independent cinema, whom Hollywood never forgave for
Kane (because of all the Heart trouble it caused) and sabotaged ever after, while he heroically took on any number of jobs in order to get his own movies made outside the studio system. Basically: it's all Orson's fault, or it's all Hollywood's fault. It won't surprise me that I'm a firm believer of "neither" or "both/and" - which is why Simon Callow is my favourite biographer of his -: I find most (not all:
Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin has the parable of the frog and the scorpion that subsequently was declared folklore, but you can keep the rest of the film) of the movies directed by Welles fascinating, some of them I love (my favourite isn't
Citizen Kane, btw, though I do love it - depending on my mood, my favourite is either
Othello or
Touch of Evil, with
Chimes at Midnight on a regular second spot). As far as Orson Welles as an actor in other people's films is concerned, he's not one who can disappear into a character - not physically: as a
voice actor, he could, and of course the radio was for quite a while his favourite medium. If you have the time, check out some of the Mercury Radio productions which are available on cd; while Welles' voice was one of the most instantly recognizable in any medium, he really is amazingly flexible with it, and knew it, and had a serious case of "let me play the lion, too", which is he usually has more than one part - notoriously Dracula
and Van Helsing in the radio
Dracula, for example. But on film, where he has to use his entire body, the character has to fit, or he sticks out like a sore thumb. (Otoh if a part fits, you get Harry Lime in
The Third Man.)
What makes Welles such a great director is that combination of extremely visual imagination, the ability to find poetry and expression via images which was already there long before he ever went to Hollywood. Here's the description Norman Llyod, who played Cinna the poet in the production of
Julius Caesar Welles directed at age 22, gave of the key scene in which the mob, coming directly from Caesar's funeral and Antony's speech at same, seizes on a poet who happens to bear the same name as one of the conspirators:
Orson would argue with you as he ate, and you got angrier. I thought we'd reached an impasse. But no - he went my way. And when
he went your way! - I played the first part of the scene fro pantomimic comedy. Gut a lot of laughs. Just becoming aware of this crowd and thinking they had recognised me as a celebrity. Stuffed my pockets with these poems. He seized that right away. They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate. He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too. The way he moved me - there were laughs, and then the laughs got chilly. Taking out these poems. Orson's direction: the last thing I scream is THE POET. Rush down the ramp - I just disappeared - just this hand, bathed in red light.You can see why film and Welles were made for each other to the same degree that Welles and the microphone were. And not just in the case of
Citizen Kane, where he had all the budget and all the experts at his disposition, but also in a much later film like
The Trial, where he used the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris which wasn't a railway station any longer and not yet the museum for Impressionistic art, and made it into a fantastic surrounding for Kafka's story as if it was an expensively built film set. Or
Othello, which took four years of filming - because he had to stop whenever he ran out of money - and was made at dozens of different locations but nonetheless give the impression of taking place in only one fantastically beautiful yet coldly claustrophobic citadel. He's also able to coax great performances out of most of the actors he used (not all: if a character is a spoiled brat like George in
The Magnificent Ambersons, it needs a charming actor to make the audience believes that people put up with and love him as long as they do, and Tim Holt never manages that), and these included both actors who first achieved fame via him (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead) and actors who were already famous when they worked for him, though not necessarily in the type of part he gave them (true for both Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider in
The Trial, and famously for Rita Hayworth in
Lady from Shanghai). A great many of Welles' films are based on books, and as an adapter he was, depending on your point of view, fearless or ruthless. Or is "iconoclastic" the best word? In any case, he tended to use his book sources as basic structures from which to develop the themes he was interested in, be they a trashy pot boiler like the novel
Touch of Evil is based on or William Shakespeare ("...and damned be he who first calls hold, enough").
Chimes at Midnight takes bits and pieces from
Richard II and
Henry V in addition to huge chunks from the two
Henry IV plays - and presents the net result of a life time of wrestling with these particular plays, more about that later - , unabashedly throws out anything Welles wasn't interested in, and the end result, several decades onwards, makes far newer screen productions like
The Hollow Crown look tame by comparison. Just two examples of what Welles does there as a director/adapter:
Henry IV, Part I early on has Hal reveal in monologue ("I know you all...") to the audience that he's actually not the dissolute party animal his father assumes he is but plans to ditch all his disreputable friends and this entire life style as soon as he's king, so that the contrast between his old and new self will be all the more impressive and effective.
The Hollow Crown does what a great many screen adaptions do with theatrical monologues; it makes the scene a voice over, i.e. Hal's thoughts while he walks around the scenery.
Chimes at Midnight, by contrast, makes the radical change to let Hal say this, out loud,
to Falstaff directly, with Falstaff not sure whether or not this is one of the emotionally brutal games these two play with each other. (The hypothetically unspoiled audience can't be sure, either.) This makes it a lead up to the "Banish old Jack, and banish all the world"/"I do, I will" scene between them later and avoids the artifice of either monologue to the audience or voice over.
The other example from the same film is the way Welles stages the battle of Shrewsbury. Subsequently often imitated, among others by Kenneth Branagh in his
Henry V, but never as effectively, because unlike Branagh, who can't resist resolving the whole thing in a Te Deum and triumph, Welles' staging of the battle sequence (via cinematic trickery, because he did not have the money for mass scenes) brings the whole muddy, gory business of medieval warfare across as a devastating indictement. If you get technical, it's all done via some clever cuts, but that's not how it comes across. Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, both of whom did have masses at their disposal, can only weep in envy.
( And now for Orson Welles as a person )