Template talk:Orson Welles

No dispute about The Third Man[edit]

Some user accounts are persisting with a claim that there is some "dispute" which states that Welles, rather than Reed, directed The Third Man. This is clearly false -- there is no reliable source for this claim. All books and documentaries only mention Reed. More importantly, in his 1969 interview with Peter Bogdanovich (This is Orson Welles, page 220), Welles specifically said he made only minor contributions to the film -- and stated the film was all Greene, Reed and Korda. Without any reliable citations or references, this "dispute" is fanciful rumor and violates WP policy on WP:OR and WP:BOP. I've removed all mentions of a dispute from Orson Welles, Carol Reed, and from the associated film templates for Reed and Welles. — CactusWriter | ^needles 16:15, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

It’s against Wikipedia policy to take sides in a dispute. To not present one side is to take a side by omission. It’s only in keeping with policy to mention the dispute but not endorse one side or the other. The fact that The Third Man DVD opens with Peter Bogdanovich declaiming that Welles had nothing to do with the film and that most reviews insist that Reed, not Welles, was the author, prove there’s a dispute, otherwise, there’d be no need to counter these claims. CharlesFosterKane123 (talk) 06:28, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

You are incorrect about Wikipedia's standards on neutral POV and its need to provide all viewpoints. Please read the section Undue Weight on the NPOV policy page. The accepted standard is: In general, articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all. Given that you previously failed to provide any sources, and when you finally added one yesterday, it was speculation by fringe essayist Dan Schneider, this claim fell under "tiny-minority views." However, I have not seen the The Third Man DVD, and if Bogdanovich does state that Welles was the director and not Reed, that would certainly by a significant reliable source for this claim. What exactly does Bogdanovich say? — CactusWriter | ^needles 17:28, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

It’s not a minor dispute, elsewise Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and even Welles himself wouldn’t spend so much time disputing it. The fact that they continue to flat-out deny Welles as director seems to indicate that many people do continue to dispute the idea that Reed alone directed it. I also wasn’t aware that Schneider was a fringe essayist. I noticed his article in the reference section, and thus thought it an adequate source. CharlesFosterKane123 (talk) 19:48, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Again -- there appears to be no dispute among reliable sources. And they do not "spend so much time disputing it." On the contrary, from everything I have read, everyone dismisses it out of hand -- and seems to address it only because there is a fringe minority who try to popularize the myth. You mentioned Jonathan Rosenbaum. In his 2007 book Discovering Orson Welles Rosenbaum takes exactly one sentence to dismiss the idea as a "popular misconception" (page 24). As already mentioned, the key players themselves -- including Welles -- also dismissed the idea. I have no problem if you wish to add a statement in the The Third Man article to the effect that: there were some claim that Welles might have directed the film, but that the idea has been refuted by Reed, Greene, Korda and Welles himself, and that film historians have dismissed the claim as false. However, adding the word 'disputed' to the film templates only popularizes a fringe claim, and your additions to articles on Reed and Welles appear to promote something which scholarly consensus has determined is false. I am still interested in hearing exactly what Bagdanovich says on the DVD. What exactly does he say? — CactusWriter | ^needles 19:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Why waste so much time dismissing it if it’s a mere fringe claim? Clearly, the idea has some traction. Most people who view The Third Man believe it’s a Welles film. Alot of critics seem fairly defensive in asserting otherwise. Why so defensive if it’s so obviously false? This should be treated like the JFK assassination and dissenting views should be treated the same way that the JFK article treats them.CharlesFosterKane123 (talk) 15:15, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) For the sake of expediency, I have moved this discussion to talk:The Third Man to allow comment by other interested editors. My response is there. — CactusWriter |^needles 15:31, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Major edits by Robsinden[edit]

There've been a number of edits to this by Robsinden which I believe leave the navbox suffering both in terms of content and presentation.

Firstly, I take your point on redlinks - I've converted all of them to black text for now. The point is that this navbox needed serious work when I started working on it (and more importantly, in my writing most of the many, many articles it links to), and so it's a "chicken and egg" question; eventually everything on the navbox will have an article linked to it, just when I get the time - the Radiography it links to, for instance, is still incomplete. The one thing I would say is that I'd prefer to keep the redlinks, because they encouraged other Welles enthusiasts to share the workload of filling in the gaps - as it is, it'll just be left to me to fill out the gaps, which means it will take longer, and in the meantime Wikipedia's readers will lose out!

Your proposed edits also seemed to suffer from a lack of familiarity with some of the material; for instance, you deleted a link to the 1941 Citizen Kane trailer, categorised under "Short films". This is not your average movie trailer; this was a self-contained three-minute film in its own right, featuring 100% original footage of the film in rehearsal, and of Welles at work as director. Numerous scholars consider this to be a significant short film in its own right, of note for its original cutting, narration and photography. Randomly deleting the link to this is unhelpful. Similarly, randomly deleting the link to the ballet The Lady in Ice (considered by Welles biographer Simon Callow to be a major work) is also unhelpful, particularly on the spurious grounds that it was a "play which he did not write or have something to do with the original production" (he wrote, directed, lit and set-designed the production).

It's also vital that it covers his work as a director. Welles is considered a great artist as a director. But he personally financed a lot of his films from the fees he received from acting in any rubbish that would pay him. To this end, he acted in a lot of really, really bad films. If people want a list of his bad films, that's what the filmography is for. This navbox has been structured to include everything which he directed. Yes, even sometimes his directorial work (like In the Land of Don Quixote) was hack work too, but that's a value judgment of mine, which I can't make in this navbox. The vast majority of his directorial efforts were serious work he had control over, and it is by linking to all of his work as a director across different disciplines that the reader can get a sense of Welles as an artist - which is why he is still studied in film schools the world over.

Regarding your removing years, no mention is made of this as a rule at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navbox and by way of a few examples, I'd simply point you to the Navbox of pretty much every well-known director on Wikipedia, i.e.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Alfred_Hitchcock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Billy_Wilder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:David_Leanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Jean_Negulesco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Jerry_Lewis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:John_Hustonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Peter_Bogdanovich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Roger_Corman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Stanley_Kubrickhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Terence_Fisher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Woody_Allen

The question of whether or not to add years has been discussed several times at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Navbox#Years_after_films_in_navboxes and also athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FILM and in each case, the result was "No consensus" - some people, for instance, feel that years are essential, but clustering in decades (which we both agree on here) is unnecessary!

Dates are also particularly essential in the case of Welles. An ongoing argument among critics is whether or not he was a burnt-out one-hit-wonder who didn't produce anything of note after Citizen Kane - as you can probably guess, I disagree with this view. But the main reason why the debate persists is that much of Welles's later work is not easily obtainable (for a variety of reasons explained in the articles themselves), and so a clear sense of chronology in the navbox helps put things into perspective. Additionally, Welles's unfinished projects were often long-running (Don Quixote took nearly 20 years to film), and so by deleting the range of dates given for these unfinished projects, you've eliminated the sense of overlap with these.

In the absence of any strong guidelines either way on dates, I'd respectfully ask you to leave this in the hands of those of us who have taken considerable trouble over the years to add some high-quality content on Welles to this site; and to not pick on Welles in particular, given that almost every other director's navbox isn't subject to this treatment.

Kind regards, Debonairchap (talk) 15:23, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Firstly please note that this is a navbox, not a full filmography, or a complete list of every play he has directed. Therefore redlinks (or unlinked information) is not appropriate. It is also not appropriate to link to say, Othello the play, because this links to Shakespeare's play and as it would be inappropriate to include this template on a play by somebody else, and as per WP:NAVBOX: "every article that transcludes a given navbox should normally also be included as a link in the navbox so that the navigation is bidirectional", we cannot include it here. --Rob Sinden (talk) 15:42, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

P.S. I already have excluded productions Welles wasn't concerned with, i.e. Moby Dick-Rehearsed had a revival in New York in 1962, which wasn't his work. You'll find all the supporting references in the articles, but generally, I've used the ultra-authoritative chronology of Welles's career by Jonathan Rosenbaum at the end of Welles andPeter Bogdanovich's This is Orson Welles. 15:48, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I take the point about authorship, but (a) that's precisely why it's important to stress this infobox is about directorial work - that way, no claim of authorship is made, and (b) for many of these plays, including Othello, Welles is actually discussed in the existing Wikipedia article, under notable performances/interpretations.Debonairchap (talk) 15:53, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, but your reasoning for continuing to remove plays from his directorial efforts because he was not their author is farcical. Welles is notable as a director. Not all directors write all of their material. Look at the above navboxes of directors. Are you proposing to remove half of their work as well, because they didn't write it all? This is an act of vandalism. Please undo, or I will.Debonairchap (talk) 16:04, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

No - You're wrong I'm afraid. Article was linking to Shakespeare's play Othello not Orson Welles's stage production of Othello. Are you suggesting that everyone who ever directed a stage adaptation of Othello should have their Navbox included on that page? --Rob Sinden (talk) 16:10, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

For example, linking to Voodoo Macbeth is wholly appropriate in the navbox, as this is an article specifically on the Orson Welles production of Macbeth. Linking to Macbeth (1948 film) is also appropriate, as this is Welles's film adaptation. However, linking to Macbeth is not appropriate, as this article is Shakespeare's play, and has nothing to do with Welles. However, it is appropriate to include Macbeth in a list article of Welles's stage productions. --Rob Sinden (talk) 16:21, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

No - you're wrong, I'm afraid. You've turned a navbox on work directed by Orson Welles, the noted director, into something called Work by Orson Welles. Under your new format, there's a claim of authorship which wouldn't be present if my original format was retained. Incidentally, your format's also highly misleading, since it includes a number of films undoubtedly directed by Welles, but not written by him, i.e. The Stranger, so by your own definition it doesn't stand up.

You're inventing new rules which aren't applied anywhere else on Wikipedia. Nowhere is it said that directors have to be the author of their own work for it to count as their work.

As for linking to the main Othello article, this is fully justified under the circumstances: As noted in the scholarly works of Michael Anderegg and Richard France, Welles's contribution as both an interpreter and a populariser of Shakespeare is significant, and for that alone, the navbox should link to Othello. The main Othello article discusses Welles's interpretation, and as such, provides the reader with information on that production which they would not otherwise have. (As for your example of the Macbeth film and the Voodoo Macbeth stage show, if these Wikipedia articles didn't exist, then it would be worth linking to the main Macbeth article, as again, Welles's interpretation on both film and stage is discussed there, as significant adaptations of the play. Like it or not, the articles on Shakespeare's plays aren't just about the plays themselves; they cover the production history and interpretations, too.) You can't seriously be suggesting that anyone clicking on an Othello link marked "(1951)" (a disambiguation date which you, incidentally, don't want to see included at all, for what you admit is simply a personal preference) will think that Welles was really the author of an Elizabethan play?

Again, you appear to be significantly out of your depth in jumping to conclusions on all this. Please leave it to those of us who have some knowledge of the material, and so can form a judgment as to whether or not the navbox is accurate. For instance, you took out the WPA/Mercury playscripts from the list of books written by Welles. (It's something I intend to write an article on later.) These aren't just edited Shakespeare scripts; as well as Welles's Macbeth andCaesar, it includes the script of Five Kings, a wholly original play by Welles which rearranges lines from five different Shakespeare plays, often out of context, to create a completely new narrative. I could cite many other instances, but I've written for long enough. If you check my contributions over the last few years, you will see that I am the author of a significant volume of Wikpedia material on Welles's work, whereas as far as I can see, all you have done so far on this topic is delete material for spurious reasons. Please stop meddling in and vandalising something you clearly don't understand. Debonairchap(talk) 17:22, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I've got to agree with Debonairchap on this one. The navbox seems well organized and therefore not unwieldy. And, of course, a navbox is the perfect place to put a lot of information in an outline form. Perhaps it could be set to default as collapsed to avoid overwhelming the articles in which it is placed. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:57, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Debonairchap's pomposity is absolutely astounding! The accusations of vandalism are completely misguided. It isn't about the subject matter - the issue here is the misuse of a navbox to be an all encompassing film/radio/theatreography - this is not what they are for. Please familiarise yourself with WP:NAVBOX and learn how they are supposed to be implemented. Also, have a look at WP:OWN and WP:AGF. --Rob Sinden (talk) 01:47, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

O.k., I've read WP:NAVOBX. It says, among other things: "templates with a large numbers of links are not forbidden" Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 13:21, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, for a start: "every article that transcludes a given navbox should normally also be included as a link in the navbox so that the navigation is bidirectional" - i.e. taking Othello as an example - it would have to be appropriate to include this navbox on the Othello article to include Othello in this navbox. Just because Welles happened to direct a version of the play would not meet this criteria. There are plenty of other precedents. It's not the number of links that I'm disputing, it's the relevancy. Debonairchap seems to want to use this navbox as if it were a list article. That's not the point of navboxes, that's what articles/filmographies/etc. are for. There would be no problem in including these in, say, an article called List of plays directed by Orson Welles, but it simply isn't appropriate here. Have a look an one editors reply here. Also see here regarding use of dates. --Rob Sinden (talk) 16:45, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

To say that

the Othello page should be in the Orson Wells navbox when that navbox appears on the Othello page

is not the same as saying that

the Orson Wells navbox should appear on the Othello page when the navbox includes a link to Othello. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:20, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Per the guideline, "the navigation is bidirectional". --Rob Sinden (talk) 14:42, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Here is a thought: How about if Robinson transfers the information in this navbox to an Orson Wells Works (or some similar title) article and then pares down the navbox itself (but adding a link to the new article)? Would this be a possible result that both of you could live with? Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:20, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

No - we don't need an extra navbox, we just need to tidy this one. --Rob Sinden (talk) 14:42, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I must have misinterpreted your "There would be no problem in including these in, say, an article called List of plays directed by Orson Welles ..." comment.Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 19:45, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, no, I see what you mean. You're suggesting that we do create the article List of plays directed by Orson Welles (or similar). Not sure if it would meet notability in its own right (although it might), but maybe it could be included elsewhere? Bergman's is on his filmography page, although I'm not sure that's wholly appropriate. --Rob Sinden (talk) 21:02, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

The aim of the navbox I have provided is not "an all encompassing film/radio/theatreography "of all Welles work, as you allege. That's why there's a link to a separate filmography/discography/radiography - and if you follow those links, you'll see just how much detailed info has been shunted there, to keep this navbox clear. This navbox seeks to link together all the articles relating to works directed by Welles - like a navbox on a director is supposed to. The articles linked by the navbox are also a work in progress, like pretty much everything on Wikipedia, so it should come as no surprise that the navbox includes major topics for which articles haven't yet been written - for now. This is no different to, say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Maurice_Elvey

You've deleted most of the books listed, for no clear reason. Rather than get into a futile edit war over this, I've removed the last remaining ones, and put them all into a separate bibliography, to save space. I also agree with another user's deletion of the decade breaks.

Unfortunately, you've taken it upon yourself to recategorise things having, at best, only skimmed the corresponding articles themselves, meaning that your new design has a number of factual inaccuracies. For instance, you've inexplicably listed The Big Brass Ring as "written only" by Welles, when the article makes it clear that Welles's script was never used in the final version made 14 years after his death, which bore only the faintest resemblance of recycling a few character names; and so if we're going to list that, why not Monsieur Verdoux, or the half-dozen other projects Welles wrote a draft script of which was later rewritten and made by someone else? Only they don't seem terribly relevant or notable to a list of his works - and yet you've removed some major Welles works, for an arbitrary, personal interpretation of Wikipedia guidelines.

By your own definition, The Cradle Will Rock is not a Welles play, but you've left it in: It was written by Mark Blitzstein (not Welles), and Welles simply directed the first production of it, in a blaze of publicity. Yet you've arbitrarily removed Rhinoceros, which was written by Eugène Ionesco, and Welles directed the first English-language production of it, in a blaze of publicity. What's the difference between the two?

The Othello example proves my point exactly - if a version is notable, and is actually cited in the main Othello article as a major staging or reinterpetation, then it should definitely be in the Welles navbox, and with navboxes being bidirectional, the Welles navbox should definitely be included at the bottom the main Othello article. That's not just a rule for Orson Welles - it goes for other theatre directors of major productions, like John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, etc.

And it's already the case. The Othello article contains a navbox for "Tony Award for Best Revival (1977–1993)". Nobody's suggesting Shakesperare's play won this award, it was the 1982 Broadway production which did. By your reasoning, that navbox should be deleted from the article, and since it contains a link to 'Othello' the play (not the 1982 production), that should be unlinked from the navbox, and since that would then be a redlink, that should be removed from the navbox, and the navbox would apparently say that no Tony award was given in 1982.

Obviously that's farcical. Yes, Wikipedia has guidelines to try to rein in the enthusiasm of people like me, so that when we write content we can conform to a neat and tidy, neutral set of guidelines. But the guidelines are there to suit the material in the articles, and in this case, to facilitate navigation around often-complex topics. Since it's clear that you seem, at best, only vaguely acquainted with this topic, I would beg you to think very carefully before imposing arbitrary judgments (especially when they're demonstrably not imposed elsewhere on Wikipedia) in sweeping deletions. Or if you really feel strongly about launching this one-man crusade on navboxes, why not start off by picking on some other, less contentious articles/navboxes? Debonairchap (talk) 05:51, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I may have made some errors, but there is no way that the Shakespeare plays should be linked here, and only existing articles should be included in a navbox. There's no reason not to include the books he's written in the template, but screenplays which are already included in the films section do not need to be included again. I'll make the point again. This is a navbox, not an article. A good comparison is Ingmar Bergman - his navbox does not include any of the "notable" theatre productions he directed. Also, the same for Olivier, whom you mention above. Please don't take this personally, but navboxes are not supposed to be all-encomapssing overviews of someone's career, the way you want it to be. --Rob Sinden (talk) 09:13, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I may have been generous with The Cradle Will Rock, I may have been harsh on Rhinocerous. I was trying to be fair, and I gave a few articles the benefit of the doubt. However, Welles is mentioned in the lead of the former, and it seems that Welles was instrumental in the original conception, so maybe it should stay. If this is not the case, then it should go. With the latter, he appears only to have directed an adaptation, so this should definitely not stay. --Rob Sinden (talk) 09:26, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Just a thought, but in order to preserve the information, why not create an article showing all of Welles's theatre work, as this is a much more appropriate way of including this into an encyclopedia, rather than try to bloat this already large navbox. --Rob Sinden (talk) 09:31, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

And, from WP:NAV: "Red links should be avoided unless they are very likely to be developed into articles, and even if they do, editors are encouraged to write the article first", "Unlinked text should be avoided", and "Avoid repeating links to the same article within a template". --Rob Sinden (talk) 09:43, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

• Comment I would like to point out that navboxes are not supposed to ape encylopedic articles, they are purely a navigation tool i.e. a hub of connected articles that may be of interest to the reader. To this end, I always feel the simpler the better with navboxes:

1. If an article doesn't exist, it shouldn't be in the navbox. If someone creates the article one day, they can add the page to it when they add the template to the article.
2. The King Lear article should not be linked to from the navbox. If you wouldn't put the navbox on the article itself, then the link shouldn't really go in the navbox either. TheKing Lear article is about Shakespeare's play, not the version of it directed by Welles.
3. The navbox is expressly for linking articles, not sections. Therefore articles and navboxes should have a one to one relationship. There are already links to Macbeth (1948 film) and Othello (1952 film) in the films section, there is no reason to provide them again in the section for plays.
4. As for years, again it seems to me they do not serve the purpose of aiding navigation. Someone who is interested in going to the Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil page doesn't really need to know what years they were released. As long as the article is already sufficiently identifiable, years are not neccessary. I'm aware many navboxes include them, but this is an attempt at enhancing its encyclopedic value, not its navigational function, so it is basically redundant.
5. There is no policy based reason why this navbox can't embrace authorship, but since his directorial career had a substantial span across several different mediums, I think extending it to cover other aspects of his career is an unnecessary complication. I think it would be better to limit this navbox to directed work, and perhaps create another box to cover authorship credits. Betty Logan (talk) 12:03, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I reserve the right to reconsider my opinion based on ensuing feedback, but I believe Betty (as usual) makes very good points and would support revising the template in consideration of them. Doniago (talk) 14:43, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

100 years since the birth of Orson Welles—Part 1

May 6 marked one hundred years since the birth of Orson Welles, one of the most remarkable figures in American film and theater in the 20th century.

Orson Welles, 1937

Welles began acting and directing at an early age. After gaining success in the theater and in radio in New York City in the late 1930s, he signed a contract with RKO, the Hollywood studio, and directed his first film, Citizen Kane, at the age of twenty-five. After various battles with studio executives and in the face of the anti-Communist purges in Hollywood, Welles left for Europe in 1947 and made films there as an independent, itinerant director before returning to the US in the mid-1950s. The last years of his life were dominated by unsuccessful and sometimes demeaning efforts to raise funds for various projects.

Welles died thirty years ago, leaving behind thirteen feature films. Setting aside five weaker efforts, three of them late in his career, there are eight films that make up the main body of his contribution: Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Macbeth(1948), Othello (1952), Mr. Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965). Each of these is strongly recommended to the reader.

Welles also left behind many uncompleted film works or projects, including versions of Moby Dick, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice and Don Quixote, along with countless original scripts or film fragments. In addition, of course, although it falls outside the scope of this appreciation, there is Welles’ work in the theater (famed productions in the 1930s of Julius Caesar and Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and many more) and radio (dozens of adaptations of classics and performances of original works). In addition, Welles provided the story idea for Charlie Chaplin’s remarkable Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

A special word must also be put in for the 1993 documentary, It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (Bill Krohn, Myron Meisel, Richard Wilson), which in exemplary fashion discusses Welles’ efforts to make a three-part feature, It’s All True, in Latin America in 1941-42, and includes remarkable footage he shot there.

Welles created and portrayed press magnate Charles Foster Kane, sailor and agitator Michael O’Hara, the sinister financier Gregory Arkadin and the brutal policeman Hank Quinlan, and brought to life Shakespeare’s barbaric Macbeth, doomed Othello and comic-tragic Sir John Falstaff.

As a film writer and director (along with his collaborators), Welles invented dozens of fascinating major and minor personalities. One could add to those a number of figures not originally of Welles’ creation, but whom he reworked, for example, Lady Macbeth (Jeanette Nolan), Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) inOthello, and numerous characters in Chimes at Midnight (adapted from several of Shakespeare’s plays).

Welles in The Third Man

Welles also appeared imposingly as an actor in scores of films directed—well or badly—by others, including Journey Into Fear, Jane Eyre, Tomorrow is Forever, Black Magic, The Third Man, Prince of Foxes, Moby Dick, Man in the Shadow, The Long, Hot Summer, Compulsion, Ferry to Hong Kong, The V.I.P.s, Is Paris Burning?, A Man for All Seasons, Casino Royale, The Sailor from Gibraltar and Catch-22. His reputation was such that he is credited, rightly or wrongly, with influencing the direction of a number of these films, including Journey Into Fear, Jane Eyre and The Third Man.

At its best, Welles’ directorial work contains a poetic, sensual, socially critical urgency perhaps unmatched in the American cinema. Steeped in Shakespeare and the classics, coming of age in the turbulent conditions of the Great Depression, always striving for a wide audience, Welles imbued his films with an intelligence and an intensity that make them almost unfailingly appealing.

As we wrote nearly 20 years ago: “Welles was an extraordinary talent, perhaps the greatest theatrical mind in American history. He had the uncanny ability to place people among objects and decor and set them in motion so that the dramatic problems inherent in their lives could emerge with great clarity and force.”

It is telling that Welles, whose last major work came out half a century ago, appears more contemporary, more engaging than the vast majority of our present-day film writers and directors.

At the same time, if his aspiration was to be the Shakespeare of modern American life, Welles failed at that, and the incomplete, unfinished character of his work cannot be blamed solely on a hostile and obtuse studio system. There was something unresolved and inadequate about his conceptions, including damaging illusions in American capitalist democracy and an over-concern (even if a critically minded one) with “great men,” that prevented him from treating contemporary society in an all-rounded and comprehensive fashion.

Bound up with that, Welles, always a bit of an aristocrat in his tastes and demeanor (a self-described “king actor,” i.e., one suited to play only authoritative roles), was rarely able to depict the conditions and feelings of the oppressed in a convincing manner. Filmmakers less brilliant than he in the post-World War II period were better able to represent the concrete character of working class life.

His was for the most part a world of articulate, forceful personalities engaged in dramatic encounters about significant moral and social issues: corruption, greed, treachery in high places, official brutality, the danger of tyranny. The confrontations, however, largely take place over the heads of the average citizen, who is reduced, one might say, to the role of a mesmerized spectator. The intervention of masses of people in making history almost never arises as a serious issue.

Much of the intellectual-ideological unsteadiness in Welles’ work, in our view, comes from attempting to fit events somewhat awkwardly and regressively into the mold of momentous personal chronicles in a century dominated by global civil war and the movement of vast social forces.

To treat the complexities of twentieth-century existence with “Shakespearean” objectivity, in other words, required an outlook more precise and more advanced than the Elizabethan playwright’s own.

Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane, is one of the most discussed in the history of the cinema. Perhaps in response to the semi-official designation of the work as the “greatest film of all time,” there is a tendency today to treat it with a certain degree of condescension. Citizen Kane may well not be Welles’ best work, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless, and not simply because it was directed by someone only a few months after his twenty-fifth birthday, who had never previously made a feature film.

William Randolph Hearst

The film depicts the life and times of Charles Foster Kane (Welles), a fictional media mogul, based in part on newspaper owner and multi-millionaire William Randolph Hearst, as well as a number of other American tycoons. It begins with Kane dying virtually alone in his mausoleum of a mansion in 1941 and proceeds to follow the efforts of a reporter to find out something about the man, through conversations with a number of those who knew him well.

The bulk of the film is told in a series of overlapping flashbacks. We first return to 1871, when the action occurs that largely determines everything to come. Kane’s mother (Agnes Moorehead), who runs a boarding house in Colorado, has been given the deed to a gold mine that has proven immensely valuable. She determines, against her husband’s ineffectual protests and contrary to the inclinations of her own heart, to send her young son away to the East to be raised and educated under the guardianship of a cold, stiff banker, Mr. Thatcher (George Coulouris).

French critic André Bazin suggested Welles was obsessed with or nostalgic about childhood. If so, it was an obsession with something more than the filmmaker’s own formative years, or those of one or more of his fictional characters. At issue here, in our opinion, is the childhood of modern industrial and commercial America. Welles’ first two films (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons) both begin in the 1870s, the decade following the Civil War, on the eve of the emergence of the US as an economic world power. Kane senior (Harry Shannon) mutters, “The idea of a bank being the guardian [of his son]!,” but surely the film’s implication is that financial institutions became the overseers and controllers of American life as a whole, with far-reaching consequences.

Citizen Kane

But is Welles “nostalgic” for the America that was lost? He is certainly too historically aware to believe that the US could have retained its semi-rural character, dominated by small-town life and small, family-owned business. Indeed, both films point to the narrowness and backwardness of such a sort of existence. For instance, when the young Kane’s father suggests that what “the kid needs is a good thrashing,” Mary Kane responds pointedly, “That’s why he’s going to be brought up where you can’t get at him.”

Nonetheless, there is an ambivalence in Welles about the development of modern society, which becomes more pronounced in The Magnificent Ambersons. To suggest that twentieth-century American life, with its factories and cars and “dark” cities, is principally something to be dreaded (“a step backward in civilization”), which Welles borders on arguing, is to ignore or remain blind to the historically earth-shaking and potentially revolutionary implications of that development. And this is an unsettled issue in Welles’ thinking and art that never goes away. Citizen Kane does hint in a couple of places at the possibility of social upheaval going beyond the present political set-up. In his early days as a populist muckraker, Kane informs Thatcher, the banker, that as a newspaperman he intends to look after the interests of “the working people,” adding ominously, “I think I’m the man to do it. You see, I have money and property. If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged, somebody else will. Maybe somebody without money or property. That would be too bad.”

Later in the film, a drunk Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), Kane’s longtime friend and collaborator, warns the budding mogul, “When your precious underprivileged really get together, oh, boy, that’s gonna add up to something bigger than your privilege and I don’t know what you’ll do. Sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.”

Citizen Kane

In any event, the emotional needs of the boy Charles Kane are sacrificed on the altar of economics and respectability, and that sets the tone for the entire film. Kane becomes an acquirer of things, or treats other people as things he can acquire. In the end, surrounded by statues he has bought, he turns into something resembling stone. The American dream of success and possession of money and objects becomes an unbearable nightmare.

There are portentous and somewhat laborious elements in Citizen Kane, including the opening and closing sequences set in Kane’s Xanadu mansion. There are also sequences done in an unnecessarily elaborate fashion.

But Citizen Kane also includes scenes carried off with extraordinary visual flair and even brilliance. The scene of the banquet held to celebrate the success of Kane’s first New York newspaper is one of those. Kane, still a young man, is at his most charming and charismatic, flirting with a group of dancing girls who sing a silly number about him. His new staff members, all bought from a rival, are admiring him and the women. Fun and laughter and light-heartedness seem to rule, but something sinister and unprincipled is taking place, which leaks into the party at its edges (in addition to Kane’s cheerful urging of a declaration of war against Spain!). In a corner, Kane’s assistant, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), and Leland are discussing Kane’s principles, or lack thereof.

“LELAND: Bernstein, Bernstein, these men who were with the Chronicle, weren’t they just as devoted to the Chronicle policy as they are now to our policies? BERNSTEIN: Sure, they’re just like anybody else. They got work to do, they do it. Only they happen to be the best men in the business. LELAND: Do we stand for the same things the Chronicle stands for, Bernstein? BERNSTEIN: Certainly not. Listen, Mr. Kane, he’ll have them changed to his kind of newspapermen in a week. LELAND: There’s always a chance, of course, that they’ll change Mr. Kane—without his knowing it.”

Welles’ use of deep focus, which allows every element from back to front to appear in focus, is a distinctive feature of Citizen Kane. The actions and attitudes of several characters, along with the physical décor, are available for the viewer to consider at once. At least theoretically, he or she has the choice to focus on this or that feature, or to shift visually back and forth between the various elements.

The film is by no means an unsympathetic portrait of its central figure (Kane tells Bernstein at one point., “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man”), but the artistic and psychological subtleties were lost on Hearst, who declared war on Citizen Kane and exerted his considerable influence to see, unsuccessfully in the end, that it was never shown to the public. The FBI opened its file on Welles at the time, in March 1941, declaring in one report: “The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that the film Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States [i.e., Hearst].”

Citizen Kane

James Naremore (The Magic World of Orson Welles) comments that “Kanemay not have been a thoroughgoing anti-capitalist attack, but it was close enough to ensure that Welles would never again be allowed such freedom at RKO.” Welles’ woes in that regard are well documented, and they resulted in his next film being mangled by the studio.

Based on a Booth Tarkington novel, The Magnificent Andersons follows several decades in the decline in the fortunes of the Amberson family, at one time the most distinguished family in a small Midwestern city. Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) should have married the bright, up-and-coming inventor-industrialist Eugene Morgan (Cotten). Instead she wed the passive, uninspiring Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway).

Twenty years later, Minafer is dead and Morgan is a widower with a teenage daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter), more or less the same age as Isabel’s son George (Tim Holt). Morgan, an automobile pioneer, and Isabel resume their interrupted relations. But the spoiled, impossible George, egged on by his frustrated, unmarried Aunt Fanny Minafer (Moorehead), thinks Morgan isn’t good enough for the Amberson-Minafers. Isabel dies unhappily, and the Ambersons’ economic condition goes rapidly downhill.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Moorehead in her anguish and, ultimately, hysteria is unforgettable, especially in scenes that take place in the Amberson mansion’s stairways. The final sequences of the film were not shot or edited by Welles, and simply have to be ignored. As a whole, or at least in what’s left of it, The Magnificent Ambersons is a more fluid and humane work than Citizen Kane, less focused on one individual (tellingly perhaps, it is the only one of his films in which Welles does not appear as an actor, although he does the narration), and with moments of extraordinary intimacy. Both early films benefit enormously from the presence of Joseph Cotten, who brings depth and complexity to his characters.

Welles and the left intelligentsia in the US

One of the legitimate criticisms that can be made of Welles’ film work is that it never took on one of the thorniest questions in American political life, the role and evolution of liberalism and the Democratic Party, and, specifically, that he never addressed popular illusions in Franklin D. Roosevelt. In part, this is because Welles shared many of those illusions.

The question of Welles’ political opinions and positions, and their evolution, is a large one, which can only be touched upon briefly here. In any event, it is not so much a matter of his personal views as those of the left intelligentsia as a whole in the US in the era under discussion.

In the years 1937-38, Welles was quite close to individuals in the Communist Party (CP) and to the party’s policies. He and John Houseman introduced their new Mercury Theatre to readers of the Daily Worker, the CP newspaper, in a September 1937 article headlined “Theater and the People’s Front.” The new theater group, they explained, would be “another step … towards a real People’s Theatre in America.”

According to Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front (a source of useful information, but a deeply wrongheaded book, which whitewashes the role and impact of Stalinism), “By the spring and winter of 1938, Welles was a regular part of Popular Front events: in February, he introduced a New Masses [Communist Party cultural magazine] concert; in March, he and [composer Marc] Blitzstein [The Cradle Will Rock] appeared at a Workers Bookstore symposium on the ‘Culture of the People’s Front’; in April, he appeared at the American Student Union’s Peace Ball.”

Welles’ 194-page FBI file, initiated in March 1941 just prior to Citizen Kane’s opening, lists a host of organizations, “said to be Communist in character,” with which he had associated himself, including the Negro Cultural Committee, the Workers Bookshop, the American Youth Congress, the People’s Forum, the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and many more.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

One FBI memo, dated November 1944, asserts flatly, “Welles has been a consistent follower of the Communist Party line.” Another memo a month later reports on the “Salute to Young Americans Dinner,” sponsored by the American Youth for Democracy, “the successor to the Young Communist League.” The memo explains that “Welles concluded his remarks by stating that Fascism in the United States was still possible until all the greedy people in this country had been killed.”

Although unable to find any record of Welles’ membership in the Communist Party, probably because he never joined, top FBI officials in 1944 placed Welles’ name on the agency’s secret Security Index. This list contained “the names of those individuals who can be considered to be a threat to the internal security” of the US and who would be rounded up and interned in the event of a national emergency. His name was removed from the Index in September 1949, after he had been in Europe for a couple of years.

There is no difficulty in proving that Welles was a fellow traveler of the Communist Party into the war years and perhaps still by the end of the war, but what precisely does that mean? “At various times,” notes James Naremore, “he called himself a Socialist, remaining strongly anti-fascist yet somehow within the ‘pragmatic’ ethos of the New Deal.”

In Socialism, Historical Truth and the Crisis of Political Thought in the United States, David North notes the profound impact of the Wall Street Crash on the American intelligentsia, producing as it did “within this social milieu a certain sense of urgency, a heightened interest in social problems and even a degree of sympathy for radical politics.”

These sentiments often translated into a general sympathy for the Soviet Union. This was deepened when the Stalinist Communist International adopted the policy of the “Popular Front” in 1935. According to this political line, the various Communist Parties were to ally themselves with, and support in every way, the liberal and progressive parties of what the Stalinists referred to as the “democratic” bourgeoisie.

North explains, “Parties, politicians and governments were no longer defined and analyzed on the basis of class interests they served. Rather, they were to be evaluated as either ‘fascist’ or ‘antifascist.’ The political independence of the working class and the goal of socialism were to be sacrificed in the interest of what was really an imperative of Soviet foreign policy.”

The admiration among liberals for Soviet accomplishments and support for the Soviet regime, he notes, “did not at all signify an endorsement of revolutionary change in the United States. Far from it. Rather, many liberal intellectuals were inclined to view an alliance with the USSR as a means of strengthening their own limited agenda for social reform in the United States, as well as keeping fascism at bay in Europe.”

In 1938, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed in Art and Politics in Our Epoch, “A whole generation of ‘leftist’ intelligentsia has turned its eyes for the last ten or fifteen years to the East [the USSR] and has bound its lot, in varying degrees, to a victorious revolution, if not to a revolutionary proletariat. Now, this is by no means one and the same thing.” In the victorious revolution, Trotsky pointed out, there was not only the revolution, but the new privileged social layer, the Stalinist bureaucracy, that had raised itself on the shoulders of the revolution. “In reality, the ‘leftist’ intelligentsia has tried to change masters. What has it gained?”

In the US, the Stalinists aggressively courted liberal and radical intellectuals in the late 1930s and, as North writes, “in many respects the day-to-day politics of the Communist Party assumed an increasingly liberal coloration, most notably in the American CP’s virtual endorsement of Roosevelt and the New Deal.” For many left intellectuals, “their personal identification with the Soviet Union seemed, at least in their own eyes, to make up for the fact that they lacked any independent program for radical action in the United States.” CP members and supporters in Hollywood presented themselves, and probably thought of themselves in many cases, as merely the most fervent and politically far-reaching of Roosevelt’s supporters.

When it came to considering events like the Moscow Trials—at which the leaders of the October Revolution were denounced as counter-revolutionaries and agents of fascism and condemned to death—and the entire genocidal campaign against socialists and revolutionaries carried out in the USSR by the Stalinist regime in the late 1930s, the left intellectual milieu in the US made its evaluations on the basis of its own narrow social interests and generally petty concerns.

Composer Marc Blitzstein

It is certainly a stain on the reputation of major artists such as Charlie Chaplin, Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, and on that of lesser figures too—Marc Blitzstein, Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel West, Henry Roth, Ring Lardner Jr., Rockwell Kent, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, John Garfield, Morris Carnovsky, etc.—that they publicly endorsed the slanders made in the Moscow Trials against Trotsky and the other Bolshevik revolutionaries.

One of these wretched public statements, endorsed by a number of actors, writers and “educators” and published in the Daily Worker in April 1938, defended supposed Soviet efforts to “eliminate insidious internal dangers,” attacked the “Trotskyite-Bukharinite Traitors” and supported the CPUSA position that the trials and executions prevented “the fascists from strangling the rights of the people.”

Welles’ name does not appear anywhere, although Blitzstein, an enthusiastic Stalinist and Welles’ collaborator at the time, apparently signed every slanderous statement that came his way.

Whether Welles kept himself aloof from the pro-Moscow Trials campaign or was not yet a sufficiently prominent name to be actively pursued by the Stalinists is unclear. In any case, these were the circles in which Welles traveled. And this had short-term and long-term consequences.

As we argued previously, in a review of Reynold Humphries’ Hollywood’s Blacklists, the subsequent devastation of the Hollywood left—and Welles’ fate is part of that general fate—is inextricably bound up with its disastrous misreading of political and social conditions in the US, the character of the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party, the world war and the prospects in the postwar period.

We noted, “While millions went into combat motivated by the desire to defeat Hitler and fascism, World War II, in its social and economic essence, remained an imperialist war, a struggle between great power blocs for the division and re-division of the world. The US, with its vast industrial strength and reserves, could afford Roosevelt’s reformist experiments in the 1930s, but that did not make the war aims of the American ruling elite or its plans for the postwar world any less predatory or criminal.”

The Communist Party and its periphery closed their eyes to the incredible brutality of the Allied forces, including the firebombing of German and Japanese cities. They cheered the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in August 1945, which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians, as Welles shamefully did too, in a radio broadcast.

The Hollywood left was terribly unprepared for what was coming. The CP had promised a rebirth of democracy, a New Deal on a grander and more socialistic scale. It had recruited on the basis of support for the war and for “Americanism.” Now that the wartime alliance with the USSR was at an end and the Stalinists had served their purpose of marshaling popular support for the war, “the mask came off and the grisly visage of American imperialism, now the dominant capitalist power, appeared.”

In his short-lived 1945 column in the New York Post, then a liberal daily newspaper, Welles’ chief themes, according to James Naremore, “were the need to perpetuate New Deal social legislation, and the necessity of translating the Allied victory over Germany into a world democracy. He argued for a fair working relationship between labor and capital, but believed government price regulations should continue after the war; he inveighed against a ‘certain sort of businessman’ who ‘openly favors a certain percentage of postwar unemployment,’ saying that such types ‘don’t want any percentage of government control over their affairs. They want to be free as buccaneers, free to encourage a little convenient joblessness.’ He supported the basic structure of American government and encouraged the two-party structure, but at the time he hoped aloud that Henry Wallace [Roosevelt’s vice president during his third term, 1941-45, and Progressive Party candidate for president, supported by the Stalinists, in 1948] would be the next president.”

“Welles could sense a growing propaganda effort against the Russians,” writes Naremore. The Post column commented, “We are still building our Bulwarks against Bolshevism. The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism.”

Welles, like many of his radical and liberal counterparts, was operating on the basis of a utopian and false perspective, that the “progressive” elements of the American ruling elite, represented by the Democratic Party, could be pressured into opposing the “little Wall St. camarilla” and its supposedly exclusive political agency, the Republican right wing, and into acting in the interests of broad layers of the population.