It is clear that Welles's films are not moralistic in the sense that Howard Hawks's are, for example—as fables of exemplary behaviour; and just as clearly, they are not anarchistic and behaviouristic like Jean Renoir's. In a Welles film there is, for the most part, an extreme dissonance between the characters' actions and emotions and the underlying moral framework.

Welles will be as chivalrous to his characters as Renoir, but he will not allow the characters' actions to determine the form of the film. Instead, he will go so far as to construct a geometrical pattern of counterpoints and visual ironies, in Kane, to bind his hero into a system which makes him seem, from our contemplative vantage point, almost powerless. Or, in The Magnificent Ambersons and most of his later films, he will use a godlike narrator to detach us from the struggles of the hero; in most of his films he distorts chronological structure, beginning the film with scenes which depict or imply the hero's destruction, thus placing his subsequent actions in an ironic parenthesis. His opening scenes often contain a poetic or literal 'synopsis' of the story which is to follow. Kane has its newsreel, The Ambersons its quasi-documentary on the town, Macbeth the witches' convocation, Othello its funeral procession and caging of Iago, The Trial its parable of the law, Chimes at Midnight the conversation between the two old men, Falstaff and Shallow, recounting their lives. These overviews serve a function similar in some ways to that of the chorus in a Greek tragedy: acquainting us with the broad outlines of the myth so that we will be aware of the consequences inherent in the hero's actions as he carries them out, and placing us in an exalted moral position which enables us to maintain a concurrent emotional sympathy and ideological detachment.

We should not suppose, however, that Welles is a determinist…. Welles is a deeply rhetorical artist, but an ironist, not a propagandist. In The Trial, for example, he seems to be making the best possible case for the worst character he can imagine as still capable of heroism. Kane is most charming at his most morally odious moments—starting a war, harassing innocent citizens with captivating arrogance—and most pathetic in his moments of tenderness. We can see that power, intellect, and charm come so easily to Welles himself that he tends to view them less as virtues than as moral temptations, but there is an even more sinister cast to this duplicity. Beyond masking an inability to lead a simple, stable emotional life, power and its attendant anxieties tend to plague the Welles hero past the point of futile compensation into the realm of gratuitous brutality. And with this comes a horrible sense of guilt—not the sentimental regret for being less than perfect, but the knowledge that emotional vulnerability has been the excuse for endlessly enlarging malignity, an obsession which thrusts its cause deeper and deeper into the subconscious and necessitates a greater and greater hypocrisy.

The creation of myth is not only a means by which the Welles hero conceals his moral weakness from himself and others; it is also the creation of a more easily manageable rationale for his actions…. The same pattern is repeated, with an increasingly melancholic self-awareness, for all of Welles's heroes, until in Chimes at Midnight the mask of deception becomes painfully candid. Falstaff is not only the hero of the tragedy; he seems to incorporate within himself the soul of the tragedian as well. He is a liar who expects no one to believe his lies, and so exaggerates them to the point of absurdity. The lies are no longer lies but a desperate confession.

And if The Immortal Story seems both the most intimately personal and the most theatrical work of Welles's career, the paradox is inevitable. Welles is the most theatrical of film directors, even more so than Cukor, Ophüls, or Bergman. His dual presence as both author and hero is all but essential to his work. The Trial suffers because of an excessive and stifling distance between Welles and his hero; Welles appears in the film as the hero's nemesis, and the moral rhetoric involved almost swamps any possibility of sympathy with the hero. In The Magnificent Ambersons, his only feature film in which he does not appear, the hero closely resembles Welles, and the metamorphosis is immeasurably smoother. (pp. 9-12)

Throughout his films, the moral presence of Welles makes itself felt through the eye of the camera. In a Welles film the camera is a character…. In Kane the camera shadows the reporter, whose face we never see. The intricate camera movements and 'long takes' characteristic of Welles help to immerse us in the maze-like ironies of his scenes. The camera is the audience, and the longer it moves without the distancing device of a cut, the more we are made aware of its (our) shifting relationship to the characters. Welles comments: 'I believe, thinking about my films, that they are based not so much on pursuit as on a search. If we are looking for something, the labyrinth is the most favourable location for the search. I do not know why, but my films are all for the most part a physical search.' Perhaps because they are also a moral search, an inquiry by the audience into the truth about the legendary hero. (p. 12)

Welles tends to prolong the tension among the characters and camera as long as possible, to approximate the intimacy of a theatrical experience. The long take, like the deep-focus photography of which Welles is fond, helps persuade us of the dramatic reality of the scene—a necessary counterpoint to the moral distancing—and in respecting the integrity of time and space, it asserts the moral unity of what is shown. Though the event, for example the long uninterrupted snow scene in Kane or the tortuous interogation scenes in Touch of Evil, may be highly dialectical in emotions and ideas, the integrality of the mise-en-scène functions as a metaphor for the inevitability of the actions' coincidence. The camera creates a moral labyrinth in which the characters must struggle, ironically unaware of the depth of their dilemma. An excellent example is the long dolly shot in The Ambersons moving along with George and Lucy as they argue in their carriage. We see the characters' feelings ('identify' with them), but the ceaseless variation of the distance between the camera and the carriage also distances us from them. This distortion, a contrapuntal actor-camera movement, a montage within the shot, helps to explain the mixture of compassion and irony omnipresent in Welles's films. If Welles is to be defined at all …, it will have to be in terms of his contradictions…. From Citizen Kane, an examination into legend which finds the possibility of definition illusory, to Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, which turn the idea of legend into a monstrous, melancholy jeu d'esprit, Welles has been enchanting us with the spectacle of a magnificent being exalting and deriding himself in a single stroke. In a world from which dinosaurs and emperors have vanished, a world for ever growing smaller, Orson Welles survives to share with us his boundless delight in being himself. (pp. 12-13)

Welles' film audience is missing a revealing experience in not being able to see [his made-for-television film] The Fountain of Youth. Its mixture of bold theatrical stylisation, puckish humour and bardic intimacy draws on a side of Welles, the 'radio side', which seldom pokes through the intricate architectonics of his feature film work. The Immortal Story is told with a fabulist's simplicity, but it is still a story film conceived for the large screen, with all the pretence of showing real people involved in a real drama. The Fountain of Youth is more a chamber play than a drama. (p. 40)

But in The Fountain of Youth form follows function, for the theme of the piece is narcissism…. None of [Welles'] films has ever made such extensive use of mirrors, for instance, and the sheer physical data of the characters' faces and bodies … speak volumes. In fact, it is problematic who should be considered the protagonist of the tale: Caroline, who has Humphrey in her spell, or Welles himself, who has both of them in his spell. (pp. 40-1)

The early sequences are suffused with that off-handed indulgence toward human weakness which Welles often uses to implicate the audience in the characters' dilemma. The prologue of The Magnificent Ambersons, for instance, presents the family's snobbery as charming and captivating…. The nostalgia Welles shares with his characters is a melancholic glance back at a time of moral innocence. He lets us indulge in the pleasures of irresponsibility before we have to face its consequences. In The Fountain of Youth, as in Ambersons, he dwells on the romantic quaintness of vanished artifacts and customs to keep us aware of their evanescence….

Befitting the medieval (or is it futuristic?) nature of Humphrey's experiments, his laboratory is an eerily unreal chamber with outsize jars and bottles looming behind him like the odd shapes moving behind Welles in the studio/laboratory he inhabits. To clinch the connection, the director has placed one incongruous object in the laboratory—a bulky old-fashioned radio with a giant shell for a speaker. Like other Wellesian Faust figures (Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai, Arkadin, Quinlan in Touch of Evil, Clay in The Immortal Story), Humphrey tests his powers by constructing a fable with living characters. Removed, by his romanticism, from the world of ordinary people, he tries to twist reality to fit the shape of his own ego. The irony in The Fountain of Youth is that the man who pulls the strings is also attached to an invisible set of strings….

Caroline is the reductio ad absurdum of romance, all surface and show. Humphrey doesn't want her for herself, but for what she represents. She is a token of everything missing in his life, beginning with sex, which is nothing if not a struggle to escape into a timeless state of perfect irresponsibility. The rub is, of course, that the moment of happiness disappears as soon as consciousness returns to savour it. In Welles' fundamentally romantic viewpoint, women stand for everything a man strives after but cannot possess. Since women symbolise everything which is greater than man, they are also the source of his destruction. They are beyond reason, beyond morality, beyond responsibility.

The last section of The Fountain of Youth is given over to a series of expressionistically lit, ballet-like gestures in which the two youths act out the consequences of Humphrey's narcissism while he, with scientific detachment, disappears from view. Welles fades in on the vial shining unnaturally out of the darkness, harsh electronic sounds hovering in the air. A hand comes out of the void to put the vial on a mantel, and the light rises to reveal both Caroline and Alan gazing into a mirror—the lens of the camera. The effect is profoundly disturbing, for we are watching them but they are watching us. (p. 41)