What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?
Everyone acknowledges the genius of Orson Welles, but his story has also been turned into a cautionary tale of hubris and its downfall. By the time he reached the age of 25, he directed the greatest American film, Citizen Kane (1941); according to detractors, he spent the remaining 43 years of his life squandering his gifts.
Joseph McBride never bought that story and argues passionately on the director’s behalf in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (out now in paperback). Fearless in his youth about making enemies and angering friends, Welles was punished for his independence by a Hollywood system that prized reliability. Although he disliked the Communist Party, his situation in 1940s America was further complicated by McCarthyism and the threat of being blacklisted. Welles fled for the friendlier climes of Europe, where he worked on several fascinating films. Only a few were ever released in finished form.
Welles returned to the U.S. in 1970 and became famous for being famous. He was the bearded, rotund gentleman with an ironic twinkle in his eyes, a perennial guest on TV talk shows and a pitchman for wine and other goods.
McBride became a fan while studying at UW-Madison in the ‘60s and seized the opportunity to meet the director, who cast him as a film nerd in one of his unfinished productions. He concedes that Welles “may have been in some ways his worst enemy,” but defends him against the charge that he failed to complete projects from laziness. Welles worked ceaselessly against the odds of financing his ambitions. After his death, longtime companion Oja Kodar deposited 100 crates (weighing 1.8 tons) of his unfinished films at the Munich Film Museum. Some of this backlog has been released.
Welles’ methods are illustrated by the arc of his Don Quixote. Filming began in 1955 and he was reediting it when he died in 1985. “He made movies on subjects that interested him without worrying about whether they were commercial or not” and “freed himself from the constraints of traditional production methods to work for as long as he wished on projects, rather like a writer or a painter.” Although accused of fearing completion from an anxiety of failure, McBride argues that Welles “believed his work as an artist was always work in progress.” He anticipated the way George Lucas reworked Star Wars years after release, but alas, could never find a comparable audience for Don Quixote or The Merchant of Venice.
“The real fault with what happened to Orson Welles lies with us, his audience,” McBride concludes, “who have failed to support his art as conscientiously as we should.”
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career is published by University Press of Kentucky.
