Judged by first—even second or third—impressions, Welles's films are a triumph of show over substance. His most memorable images seem like elephantine labors to bring forth mouse-size ideas.

His films bulge with preposterously vast spaces: the echoing halls of Kane's Xanadu; the rambling castles of Macbeth, Othello, and Arkadin; the vertiginous offices of The Trial; the cathedral-like palace and tavern of Falstaff.

His camera moves with a swagger, craning down through the skylight of El Rancho in Kane and up over the bomb-carrying car in Touch of Evil. When the camera is still, the composition may cry out for attention with anything from multiple reflections … to a flurry of silhouettes…. (p. 13)

Of course, showmanship can be sublime, and even the harshest critics of Welles's films have some kind words for Citizen Kane…. Many of the stylistic effects that Welles used with such apparent ease in Kane have become common screen currency only during the last ten years—wide-angle perspective, unusually long takes, abrupt cuts, intricate leaps in time, terse vignettes, heightened natural sound, and so on. Though precedents can be found for each of these devices, Welles was the first director to develop them into a full-blown style. With the exception of some typical forties process shots, the whole of Kane looks and sounds almost as modern today as it did in 1941….

Moreover, Welles's protean style clearly reflects the character of Kane—himself a kind of Barnum who conceals his private self behind a dazzling set of public images. It's possible for a critic to see no deeper into Kane than this and still give the film high marks for matching style and content.

Judged by these standards, Welles's other films are inferior. Neither their stylistic inventiveness nor their matching of style and content stands out so obviously as Kane's. After a brilliant start, Welles's directing career seems to decline into potboilers …, distortions of literary originals … and a rehash of Kane—Arkadin—which demonstrates only too clearly the coarsening of his showmanship….

But it's difficult to maintain a balanced view of Welles's strengths and weaknesses. While his detractors see little but empty showiness, anyone who likes most of his work runs the risk of slipping to the opposite extreme. With a filmmaker as vigorous and idiosyncratic as Welles, it's temptingly easy to find some justification for nearly everything he does. Arkadin is based on an exciting and fruitful idea; some of the sequences in the film are excellent; many others are exciting or fascinating—and so I could go on, justifying the film piece by piece to the conclusion that it is all good. But here I'd be falling into the same trap as those who deny the originality of Kane because (for example) Renoir had previously used deep focus. It's the total effect that counts, and just as the total effect of Welles's deep focus is quite different from Renoir's, and much more far-reaching, so the total effect of Arkadin falls far short of its piecemeal felicities.

Similarly, Welles's films are showy, but this is only one side of them. The other, quieter side gives a far better clue to what his films are all about. (p. 14)

One of Welles's films—Magnificent Ambersons—is nearly all stillness, or only the most leisurely of movements. Its tempo is set by the horse and buggy typical of the age that is ending when the film's action takes place….

The elegiac mood of Ambersons sets it apart from the rest of Welles's films, but its theme recurs in all of them, sometimes burrowing deep beneath the surface, sometimes coming out into the open as in the Bernstein reminiscence. This theme can be summed up as loss of innocence. (p. 15)

Welles does not, of course, thrust a symbol at us and leave it at that. He has designed [Citizen Kane] so as to bring Kane's predicament to life before our eyes; and he does this largely by giving an almost tangible presence to the passing of time. This might be called a 3-D film, with time instead of spatial depth as the salient third dimension…. In the film's present tense, there is the reporter's vain search for the meaning of Rosebud, which mirrors the aged Kane's own yearning for his lost innocence. Concurrently, the flashbacks into Kane's past follow him step by step as he loses that innocence. These alternating images of past and present fuse together stereoscopically into a powerful, poignant vision of Kane's loss.

Welles's other films present variations of this basic theme. Whereas Kane states it comprehensively, spanning almost a lifetime of change, several of the other films focus on particular stages: on the initial innocence of Mike in Lady from Shanghai and of Joseph K in The Trial; on the moment of loss for Macbeth and Othello; on a time long after the loss for Arkadin and for Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. In the other three films the theme is not tied so closely to a single character: in The Stranger, Nazi-in-hiding Franz Kindler threatens the innocent coziness of a New England village; in Falstaff, as in Ambersons, the loss of innocence lies in the transition between two historical ages. (pp. 15-16)

In all of his films Welles uses [the] contrast between movement and stillness to embody the fragility of life, to compress the change of a lifetime or even of an age into a few vivid moments. Sometimes he reverses his usual method of injecting stillness into movement. The calm flow of events in Ambersons, for example, is broken by the lively sleigh-riding sequence, its liveliness sharpened by the brightness of the snow and the airy rapidity of Bernard Herrmann's music. The sudden release of movement gives a physical reality to the passing of time.

Falstaff is one gigantic contrast of this kind. Its opening and closing scenes form a reflective prologue and epilogue that stand apart from the main action. The epilogue is straightforward: it shows Falstaff's bulky coffin being trundled slowly off into the distance. The prologue is more unusual. To create it, Welles has sliced half a dozen lines out of the middle of the scene in which Shallow summons potential recruits for Falstaff…. In these few lines Falstaff and Shallow reminisce about their youth. "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow." "That we have, that we have…. Jesus, the days that we have seen!" Singled out in this way, the brief exchange carries a more powerful charge of nostalgia than in the scene as Shakespeare wrote it; and since the main action of the film is appended to the prologue like a huge flashback, this nostalgia affects everything that follows. (p. 16)

Welles's ability to bring out the unexpected in things usually taken for granted is at work throughout his best films. The most obvious example is found in the opposition between old and new in Ambersons. George, who stands for the innocent age that is dying, is the film's most objectionable character; Gene Morgan, who is helping create the age of noise and crowds and air pollution, is its most likable.

Characters like Kane and Quinlan gain depth from similar contradictions. Here, though, Welles avoids not only the obvious cliché of making them out-and-out monsters but the less obvious cliché of making them sympathetic monsters. They do not arouse any set pattern of responses. (p. 17)

Perhaps the most subtly unexpected relationships in any of Welles's films are found in Falstaff. As portrayed by Shakespeare, Falstaff is not only lazy, gluttonous, cowardly, lecherous, dishonest and the rest but also a great innocent. He is devoid of malice or calculation; no matter what is done to him, he remains open and trusting….

Welles magnifies this innocence both by uniting the Falstaff scenes from several plays and by establishing the strong mood of nostalgia discussed earlier. But—and this is the unexpected stroke—he does not do this at Hal's expense. Even in the two parts of Henry IV as Shakespeare wrote them—and as they are usually produced on stage—it is hard not to take a dislike to Hal for his callousness and calculation. But Welles makes it as difficult as he can for the audience to take sides between Hal and Falstaff—or rather, to take one side and stick to it throughout. (p. 18)

The struggle between tradition and progress, old and new, order and disorder is one of the most powerful forces behind Welles's work. It is reflected in his American background and his love of Europe, and in his film-making that embraces both Shakespeare and modern American thrillers….

The entire shaping of each film from Kane through Falstaff shows a desire to burst out of commonly accepted limitations. Welles is not content with a single viewpoint—in Kane there are at least seven different ones…. He is not content with the straightforward flow of time—four of his films (Kane, Othello, Arkadin, Falstaff) begin with the end of the action before leaping to the beginning, and Kane continues leaping throughout; Ambersons frequently skips across the years with the most laconic of vignettes. In Touch of Evil and The Trial the leaps are not so much in time as in space.

The same drive makes itself felt in almost every aspect of Welles's style. It is found not only in the contrast between successive scenes—from stillness to movement, as described earlier, or from silence to noise, darkness to light, and so on—but also within individual scenes, many of which contain visual extremes or discords that threaten to burst the frame….

Welles's persistent attempts to harness opposites and contradictions generate a tremendous potential energy in his films. Usually this energy is released little by little, like a controlled nuclear reaction, maintaining a steady urgency that compels attention. But even his most controlled films are often on the verge of exploding. The three Shakespeare films, for example, suffer in varying degrees from inconsistency of acting styles and accents….

The two biggest casualties of Welles's explosive pressure are Arkadin and The Trial. Arkadin is like a grenade that flies apart chiefly along its groovings: each episode holds together fairly well, but fails to connect with the others. The Trial is more like the nuclear explosion with which it ends: nearly everything in it disintegrates. (p. 19)

To explain the failure of The Trial it's easy to fall back on the accusation of size and showiness. It's easy to argue that Welles's style is too florid for Kafka, who relied on restraint to convey the bizarre misadventures of Joseph K. But these criticisms are irrelevant because they can be leveled at Welles's other film which do not fall to pieces.

Consider Othello, which has just as many reasons as The Trial for disintegrating. Much of the film leaps from place to place with no regard for topographical continuity: any attempt to visualize the interior layout of Othello's castle is quite pointless. As with The Trial, Welles in adapting the original shifts some scenes and alters others…. He breaks up the rhythms of Shakespeare's play, sometimes accelerating, sometimes almost halting the action. The settings and the cast are multinational. Most disruptive of all, his work on the film continued on and off for a period of three years.

Yet the film translates Shakespeare into screen terms with a superb coherence. (p. 20)

The binding force in Othello and in most of Welles's other films is his use of symbolism. Even the most explicit of Welles's symbols do not exist in isolation: they are rooted deep in the action of the film and share the same degree of reality.

Rosebud, for example, appears at first to be a pat and superficial symbol. As with all mysteries, its revelation is something of a letdown: the sled is "only" a symbol of Kane's childhood. But the symbolism is not confined to the object itself. In fact, the adult Kane is never seen looking at it—the word Rosebud is triggered by the sight of Susan's paperweight. But here again the symbolism goes beyond the object. The paperweight is not merely an artificial snow scene recalling a real one but a snow scene encapsulated and unattainable, like Kane's lost innocence. Moreover, when the paperweight appears in close-up Welles highlights it so that it takes on a glowing halation—very much like the glare of the stage lights when Susan makes her operatic debut. Kane drives Susan to her vocal disaster not just to show his power but because, his own desire being unattainable, he wants hers to come true. Susan fails—the ironic floodlight flickers out as her voice trails away—and she is able to come to terms with reality. But the glow of Kane's desire continues to the end: the paperweight falls and smashes only after his death….

It is the interlinking of symbols beneath the surface of Kane that accumulates the power of the final scenes.

This symbolism underlying conspicuous symbols can be found in nearly all of Welles's films. Anyone who's seen The Lady from Shanghai will remember the squid that pulses up and down in the aquarium as Mike and Elsa kiss. In isolation this might be an overemphatic comment on Elsa's predatory nature, but it works because Welles has imbued the whole film with visual and verbal imagery of the sea. The Lady herself comes from one seaport and has settled in another (San Francisco), and many scenes take place on or by the water. The squid is one of several images involving dangers that lurk beneath the surface, just as they lurk behind Elsa's alluring exterior: there are shots of a water snake and an alligator, and Mike relates a parable about sharks that destroy one another. Even the hall of mirrors connects with the pelagic imagery: the multiple reflections are like waves receding row after row, and when the mirrors are smashed Mike can finally step out onto terra firma, ignoring Elsa's last siren call. It is this cumulative imagery that helps place The Lady from Shanghai above other superior thrillers…. (p. 21)

Elsewhere the symbolism may be too rigid for the theme, or the theme too weak for the symbolism. Macbeth is conceived in terms of darkness, which is appropriate enough, but the darkness hardly varies: the film consists of one low-key scene after another. There is no vivid impression of Macbeth sinking from innocence into evil and despair as there is of Othello sinking from innocence into anguish. In The Stranger Welles does oppose darkness with light, as the film alternates between the shadowy belfry where Frank Kindler tinkers with the church clock and the whiteness of the New England colonial buildings. But here the situation is too static: the Nazi war criminal pretending to be a good small-town citizen is unchangingly evil all along.

Arkadin fails because its symbolism doesn't counteract but reinforces the centrifugal pressures. In order to suggest the multiple layers of Arkadin's personality, Welles locates the film in different elements—land, sea, air—and in different climates, from the sunny Mediterranean to wintry Germany. But the symbolism lacks a second layer of its own that would bind this geographic diversity together.

As to The Trial, it has no underlying symbolism whatsoever—all its symbolism is on the surface. The trouble is not so much that Welles departs from the book but that he does not depart far enough…. In adapting the book for the screen Welles had two choices: to tone down Kafka's incidents until they could plausibly fit the everyday settings of a real city, or to amplify Kafka's settings until they fitted the bizarre incidents. The latter choice, arguably the more faithful, was the one Welles made; and he amplifies the style along with the settings.

In making this choice, however, Welles cut himself off from a prime source of strength. The Trial is the only one of his films that is not rooted in reality. The best films are worlds of their own that touch common experience at enough points to be accepted as reflections of the real world. It is this basis of reality that sustains Welles's underlying symbolism, which is nearly always elemental in nature—images of air, water, snow, fire, light, darkness.

The Trial is not one world but a succession of different worlds. Many of the scenes are so dissimilar in location, tempo, and atmosphere that is is hardly possible to imagine them coexisting on any plane of reality. Weather, the progression of night and day, natural processes of all kinds are almost completely eliminated. There is nothing for any elemental symbolism to get a grip on.

It may be argued that The Trial is not meant to be coherent like Welles's other films for the simple reason that it is portraying an incoherent world—that by basing the style of this film on loose ends and nonsequiturs, Welles conveys the sharpest possible sense of the menacing absurdity of modern life…. Luckily Welles has provided his own standard of comparison in Touch of Evil, which portrays the incoherence of modern life with a remarkable coherence of style and symbolism.

This is a film of darkness. It begins and ends in the night, and there are many other nocturnal or twilit scenes in between. But it is not a monotonously dark film like Macbeth. The night is punctuated throughout with lights that make the darkness more menacing, from the glare of the exploding car to the pulsing of neon signs.

It is in this mechanical pulsing rather than in the light and darkness themselves that the underlying symbolism is to be found. Touch of Evil is geared to the automatic machinery of our time. (pp. 22-3)

Though Quinlan is the only character who has succumbed to the temptation of being a machine, nearly everyone in [Touch of Evil] is under pressure to do so. Action, dialogue, camera movement, and editing conspire to keep the film rolling onward with machine-like relentlessness. Characters are caught up in this tremendous momentum in much the same way that Joseph K is caught up in the legal labyrinth of The Trial: the important difference is that the momentum of Touch of Evil is not conveyed indirectly through fantasy but as a direct, tangible force….

I don't want to overpraise Touch of Evil. For all its richness it remains a thriller with a Hollywood hero. But it does succeed superbly where The Trial fails—in revealing a nightmare world behind everyday reality.

Moreover, in Touch of Evil Welles is once again several years ahead of his time. It is only in the sixties that film-makers have really assimilated the effects of post-World War II technological development on everyday life. Before then technology was usually featured either as mere decor or … as the antithesis to a quiet upper-income semi-rural existence. Welles makes it an integral part of life, and though he also uses it to symbolize the temptation of evil he certainly does not present it as the cause….

In every one of his films Welles has taken some kind of risk. He has always been willing to pit his recurring theme of lost innocence and his elemental symbolism against the explosive diversity of his other resources. His films depend for their success on a fine balance of all kinds of opposites—sophistication and simplicity, realism and expressionism, introversion and extroversion, clarity and confusion. And yet with each film, he has rejected the cautiousness and calculation that could assure him of balance at the expense of richness and resonance. He himself has never lost all of the innocence with which he first tackled Kane. (p. 24)

William Johnson, "Orson Welles: Of Time and Loss," in Film Quarterly (copyright 1967 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), Vol. XXI, No. 1, Fall, 1967, pp. 13-24.