Orson Welles

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Orson Welles and the Big Experimental Film Cult

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Simply what he is and has been makes Welles the quintessential type of Big Experimental Cult hero—always achieving failure yet bringing it off brilliantly, decking it with eloquence and a certain magnificence; fusing in each film the vices and the virtues appropriate to them. Welles is the eternal Infant Prodigy, and as such wins the indulgence of adult critics and the fervid sympathy of the younger generation, which sees in him a mirror of its own budding aspirations and adventurous near-successes…. Welles does "big things" with fabulous ease and against manifest odds. Careful assessment of the actual results displays, along with the marred success, needless audacity and impertinent novelties. He puts on an intellectual circus even when engaged cinematically with Shakespeare. He proceeded to speak Macbeth with a Scottish brogue which ultimately was dropped; also, desiring to place the play in its "native" barbarous milieu, alien to the refined court verse, he put certain lines of Shakespeare's into a ridiculous light by timing them with lusty bits of staging…. [For Welles], the costume extravagance of the film, like the boisterous irony shed on its language, was a quality of arbitrary wit: a playfulness out of keeping with the solemn intentions of the original dramatic work….

Another Shakespeare play, Othello, offers an even better example of Welles at work. Here, chiefly by tracking and a dolly that seemed to be over-oiled, the action is considerably augmented and "cinematized," so that the tragic effects, especially at the end, are turned into giddy bravura. (p. 33)

All Welles's heroes are "big doers" who crumble; magnificos who are crushed by secret starvation of personal desires or a cancerous guilt. Fair, hale, noble, with a beard (as in Othello) or middle-aged, ignoble and ugly (as in the police chief in Touch of Evil), Welles as actor-director shows high human ambition in the grip of an obscure corrosion. The inquisitive reporter bent on searching out the magnate Kane's secret, the adventurer hired by Arkadin (another kingpin of wealth) to discover his own past, bear the same relation to the Wellesian type as Iago does to Othello: he is the chosen nemesis. The hero of Citizen Kane, despite all appearances, had been doomed to unhappiness; the reporter's quest simply reveals the technical origin of this unhappiness: a mechanism that has done its work. Welles's hireling hero is the other self, enlisted precisely to be the means of revelation to himself and the audience. (p. 34)

Welles, more than any one person in the world at this moment, is a cult incarnate—whether we approach his example from the side of the Little or the Big Experimentalists. He may never do a complete and untarnished work of film art, at once deep in theme and adequate in execution. Yet as a tireless infant Hercules, he has shaken the film firmament, and may (bearded or unbearded) do so again. (p. 35)

Parker Tyler, "Orson Welles and the Big Experimental Film Cult," in Film Culture (copyright 1963 by Film Culture), No. 29, Summer, 1963, pp. 30-5.

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