Orson Welles

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.

Publisher description

It is only in the editing studio that he possesses "absolute control." With scholarly erudition, Welles revels in the plays of Shakespeare and discusses their adaptation to stage and screen. He assesses rival directors and eminent actors, offers penetrating analyses of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, and The Third Man, and declares that he never made a film that lacked an ethical point-of-view. Book jacket.

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello. Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.

Orson Welles was a complete auteur, a brilliant director and scriptwriter, a prodigious actor of memorable physique and a figure of legend.