Welles did not invent any new cinematic processes: he fused the experience of three decades into one gigantic work that proclaimed with tremendous power just how effective a medium the cinema could be. He assimilated the styles and subtleties the cinema had evolved, often unwittingly, since Griffith. For practically every technical device in Citizen Kane there is a precedent; but there is no precedent for Citizen Kane, the film. (pp. 18-19)

Welles's vision is expressed not so much in Fordian terms as in the style of the German directors of the Twenties. The relaxed bonhomie of Ford's world eludes him, except in parts of The Stranger and Chimes at Midnight. But Welles uses architecture with much [strength]…. The castle wreathed with clouds at the start of Citizen Kane and Macbeth is remote, haunting, and Wagnerian in its suggestion of power. Arkadin's turreted headquarters in Spain, the clock tower that looms over The Stranger, or the Gothic mass of Henry IV's Windsor in Chimes at Midnight, are metaphors for vaulting oppression, all viewed from low camera set-ups to emphasise their physical weight. (p. 19)

One either loves or hates [Welles's] characters. At best they are like the figures of Dostoievsky, demented and impelled by some hidden Protean force; at worst they are like many Dickensian characters, thrust in briefly, overdrawn to the point of farce, pathetic in their contortions and glib statements. Yet all of them are eminently human. Nearly all of them are endowed with humorous qualities that lighten for an instant their brooding, menacing surroundings. Welles's world is divided into predators and victims or, to use Arkadin's metaphor, into scorpions and frogs…. None of [his] characters obeys a moral code. They are not … confounded by any deep-rooted ethic. They hammer out among themselves a rough code of justice: he that resorts to violence shall perish violently. They all regard themselves as above the law…. They are wanderers … in search of their own identity and are obsessed by this task even if, as in the case of Kane, it is done for them by someone else.

The leading figures in Welles's films are brought to their knees by a single fatal flaw, as in classical or Shakespearian tragedy; they are nearly all Manichean, unscrupulous, and damned; yet they are all capable of arousing one's sympathies. (pp. 20-1)

[Throughout] Welles's oeuvre, there is a marked absence of colourless figures. He is never one for half measures…. Equally, no action is left incomplete, no spring of tragedy unwound. Power is established only to be destroyed; the more massive the power, the more reverberating its fall. The poignancy of the situation is heightened because these characters always realise their plight in a moment of agonising and unexpected truth in the film—when Quinlan talks finally to Tanya, when Major Amberson speaks after Isabel's death, when Arkadin bellows in impotent rage for a seat on the plane that is bearing Van Stratten away to his beloved daughter. The act of destruction is repeatedly symbolised in an image of the Fall—the fall of Elsa and Arthur Bannister among the mirrors, the fall of Arkadin's plane, the fall of Quinlan into the filthy river, the fall of Franz Kindler from the clock tower, the fall of the shell from Clay's lifeless fingers. Death is everywhere in Welles's films, sometimes at the outset (the death-throes of Kane, the suicide of Arkadin, the funeral rites of Othello, the successful assassination of Linnekar on the Mexican border) and sometimes at the end, "all passion spent" (Macbeth, Quinlan, Joseph K, the Bannisters, Falstaff, Clay). (pp. 21-2)

The heroes of Welles's world are human in several respects, as one has seen, but one of the principles that seems to underlie these films is that material ambition will always override human relationships…. Perhaps the most embittered ending to a love affair in Welles's work is when Elsa, in The Lady from Shanghai, is abandoned by Michael O'Hara and sobs out after him, "Give my love to the sunrise!" This sentence is as revealing a comment as any on the blighted aims and lives of so many Wellesian protagonists. (p. 22)