[Though] I expected The Trial to be bad, I went to it truly hoping for the best. And, in fact, though I expected it to be bad, bad as a mannerist painting can be bad, bad, for instance, as Welles's Othello is bad, I had not been expecting the worst; I had not expected that it might be boring. Orson Welles boring! And boring to stupefaction. (p. 162)

It is possible, perhaps, to dismiss Citizen Kane as little more than a bag of tricks, good tricks but tricks nonetheless; yet, although much of that film's excitement does derive from the sheer exuberance and audacity—real audacity—of its exploration of the medium's techniques, to regard the work as only this is, I think, considerably to underestimate it. But one may concede the case of Citizen Kane, and still there is The Magnificent Ambersons, a less perfect work, perhaps; also, I think, a finer one. Beginning with its apparently random and casual collection of nostalgic images of bygone styles in clothes and motorcars, like so many snapshots from a family album, the film quietly deepens and extends itself into an almost achingly sorrowful picture of a vanished style of life, and of irrecoverable loss, and, in so doing, manages to achieve what Citizen Kane, in all its brilliant eclecticism, never does: a unified style of its own. And it is style as practiced by a film-maker capable of raising style to the level at which it becomes indistinguishable from genius.

But it is style—as, in Welles's work, it was never again to be—pressed wholly into the service of meaning. Nothing is gratuitous; from the sleigh ride through an impossibly soft and radiant snowscape—the snow as surreal as that which floats through Kane's crystal globe, the sleigh itself thereafter to give way to fuming, sputtering automobiles—to the "last of the great, long-remembered dances" at the Amberson mansion, all of the film's imagery is darkened and complicated by a sense, an almost tragic sense, of the impermanence of all that appears solid and substantial and of the evanescence of all that is beautiful. Like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is about a man's fall, but it is also about the fall of a house and a society. The film's narrative remains faithful to that of the Booth Tarkington novel from which it was adapted, but what Welles brings to that narrative, not in the novel, above all, is mystery. It is a quality that arises, in part, from the difference between the grayish naturalism of the novel and the rich chiaroscuro of the film. But the film's imagery itself seems, finally, to arise from the apprehension of some deeper kind of mystery: that mystery inherent in the way men come to be as they are and in the way all power declines and dies. (pp. 166-67)

If I appear to dwell on Welles's two earliest films, it is because, for all the attention that has been paid to them as works of technical brilliance yet remain insufficiently appreciated as works of art: that, and the fact that, among Welles's subsequent films, there is little else to dwell on. Citizen Kane is not a profound work, but, aside from that, it is almost everything else one might wish a first work to be: unmistakably individual, exploratory, exuberant, charged with an excitement undiminished after twenty years; and The Magnificent Ambersons is, I think, one of the most mysteriously beautiful films ever made. (pp. 168-69)

Journey into Fear, despite the fact that the credit for its direction is not given to Welles, is everywhere stamped with the mark of his individuality, as are the two other melodramas that sporadically succeeded it, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai. All are witty, exciting, above all enormously entertaining; and, if their brilliance seems to reside largely on their surface, where else should brilliance be? They are melodramas; only their enthusiasts have pretended they are more…. Then, in 1948, Welles made his first film of Shakespeare, Macbeth, with himself in the leading role. As a production of the play the film can be easily dismissed, with its drastic textual rearrangement and, but for Welles and Dan O'Herlihy, generally impoverished acting; it is also by far the most interesting film made of Shakespeare to pursue the idea that an adaptation of a play into film requires as radical and complete a transformation of the original materials as does the adaptation of a play into opera…. Welles's preoccupation in Macbeth is clearly with inventing a line of visual imagery raised to the level of the language, even if, in the accomplishment, what more often resulted was a reduction of the language to the level of the visual imagery; one would really have to be, at the least, a Verdi wholly to succeed in what Welles was attempting, and Welles is not this. Still, though the achievement of Welles's film is decidedly not that of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the film does manage to achieve a striking, genuinely barbaric splendor of its own. And, despite the film's many failures, if one considers the respectfully dull ways that Macbeth has been done badly on our stages, one might be less inclined to undervalue that achievement. (pp. 169-70)

[The] special badness of Welles's Othello, with all its fussy inflation of eye-catching details, is of a kind to make the freewheeling carelessness of his Macbeth seem positively invigorating by comparison. It is the details, in fact, that take over this Othello, crowding out character, crowding out action, almost, but not quite, crowding out everything that is the play. All is sacrificed to the mise en scène, but it is a mise en scène now become an orgy of tilted camera angles, intricate composition, and florid chiaroscuro. Concern is now exclusively for effects, and not effects directed toward the end of any total meaning but rather isolated effects, singular flashes of brilliance (and some, admittedly, brilliant), indulged in only for themselves. Each scene is invested with an impact out of all proportion to its meaning or its relevance to context; each scene played and shot as though it were climactic. Gone is the marvelous rhythmic continuity of Citizen Kane: given way to a monotonous fluidity (almost every transition is a quick dissolve) as discrete, supercharged images flow one into the other. There is a word for Welles's film of Othello. It suffers not from lack of talent: rather, from a conspicuous waste of it. All has grown overripe; the individual cells have developed at the expense of the organism as a whole. The word is decadent.

And it is that word which best characterizes all of Welles's films since. There is little to choose from between Mr. Arkadin … and Touch of Evil; of the two, I tend to prefer the former, which seems to me more willing to accept itself at its own level of preposterousness, rather than go rummaging about among half-baked profundities. But, whatever one's preference, such distinctions as may be drawn between the two are fine, and Touch of Evil is, I think, profoundly bad…. The film is melodrama again, as was Mr. Arkadin, but, whereas Welles was once able to use his camera ingeniously to enhance such material, here the camera, with few exceptions, just gets in the way, intruding on the action, complicating it unnecessarily, further cluttering a film already, in its narrative, prodigally cluttered, and generally providing graphic evidence of what kind of artistic disaster may occur when a medium whose propensity is to reveal is taken in the hands of a director whose proclivity is to obscure. Touch of Evil probably contains more irrelevant movement per frame than anything else yet committed to film, movement finally signifying nothing so much as Welles's radical failure as a director…. Among more zealous lovers of cinema, Touch of Evil has attained something of the status of Welles's masterpiece; and for those, not necessarily cinema enthusiasts, who just relish the spectacle of a prodigious talent recklessly exploring all possible ways to squander and parody itself, Touch of Evil is, indeed, highly recommended. I found it deeply depressing.

Still, bad as Othello and Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil are, they manage to remain enjoyable on some level, however disturbing in their implications: Othello is an exercise in the rococo; Mr. Arkadin as nonsense; Touch of Evil as camp…. Bad as they are, they aren't boring…. [If] the essential difference between Welles's Macbeth and his Othello is that of using the medium to serve the play and using the play to serve the medium, what we have in The Trial is a case of there being no play, only medium. Even Touch of Evil, largely, I would guess, thanks to what is left of the thriller from which it was derived, has its characters and plot, threadbare and tattered as they may respectively be. To some extent, simply because Othello is a play, because it exists in its language and its action (not to mention, that is, its greatness), there is enough inherent strength in what remains from the play in Welles's Othello to survive even so bad a production of it as his—and it would be difficult to imagine one worse. But take away Kafka's style and his tone, and what have you? Take away the logic and order of Joseph K.'s nightmare, and what is there left? What Welles gives us is a succession of disjointed grotesqueries, each exploited for its own grotesqueness to the end of being picturesque. (pp. 171-73)

The Trial, boredom and all, is, finally, not without meaning, though not so much one it contains as one that contains it. In an idiom that appears to be narrative or dramatic, Welles has actually given us an instance of pure mise en scène, mise en scène freed of all necessity, concerned solely with independent visual effects. Perhaps a director of greater genius than Welles could to this and make it continuously interesting; but I doubt it…. Were The Trial visually beautiful to see, there would be no boredom, but the fact is that, for all the attention lavished on the refinement of the film's surface, that surface is one of an almost unrelieved ugliness; to John Grierson's famous dictum—when a director dies, he becomes a photographer—one feels compelled, on such evidence as The Trial, to add the corollary that, when the photographer is a dead director, he will be a bad photographer…. For anyone familiar with Orson Welles's talents at their peak, even more shocking than how bad The Trial is, is how bad it looks: it looks like the dregs of Cinema 16. (pp. 173-74)