Piled high with talent – Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.
With my teenage years advancing into the mid-1970s and in recognition of leaving childhood farther behind, on top of being allowed to stay up and see ‘Match of the Day’ on a Saturday night my parents added the concession of being allowed to watch ‘Parkinson’ – the interview programme hosted by Michael Parkinson that throughout the year often followed the football highlights.
Inheriting a fascination with films from my parents, for which (among many other things) I will be forever grateful, by the age of 15 I had developed a deep interest in several categories of cinema, most notably, Ealing Comedies, British films about World War Two and here the influence of my Dad is most apparent, the gangster films of James Cagney. By talking to my Mum and Dad however and through time spent watching ‘Parkinson’ I was becoming aware of the wider aspects of Hollywood, from musicals to film noir, as many of the stars interviewed on the show were not only alive and well – Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, James Stewart – but whose careers had blossomed in what came to be regarded as the golden age of cinema.
In discussing their films they would be joined in a line-up of ‘Parkinson’ guests that usually included a British comedian and sporting or television personality of the day but for one programme in 1974, Michael Parkinson took the unusual step of interviewing just one guest, which at the time would have no doubt left me confused – particularly as the interviewee was renowned as a director rather than actor and worse still, someone I had never heard of.
Still, if nothing else it was an opportunity to stay up late, although fifty minutes later I would not be saying nothing had happened – as what I understood of cinema up to that point had been turned completely on its head, that time having been spent listening to the mesmeric Orson Welles, who in every sense turned out to be the true giant of cinema. This I mention as last week, quite be chance, I once more came across the BBC programme ‘Talking Pictures,’ a show comprising of interview clips of actors discussing their work. The subject of this edition was Orson Welles and just as I had discovered with his Parkinson interview all those years ago, nobody else and that means absolutely nobody else, could talk pictures like Orson Welles. In fact nobody else could flit so effortlessly from subject to subject with such perception, wit and authority – he really was a raconteur without equal and when Michael Parkinson was asked to reflect on his career as an interviewer had no hesitation in describing Welles as ‘the most fascinating man I ever talked to.’
There is neither time nor the space on these pages to fully bestow on Welles the acclaim he rightly deserves as a writer, director and let us not forget, an actor – his biographers have had those advantages (British actor Simon Callow was written an excellent three-part appraisal of Welles’ life), but it is film critic Kenneth Tynan who has come up with the most sharply concise description of the man, describing him as: ‘A fair bravura actor, a good bravura director, but an incomparable bravura personality.’
In offering the briefest background details to the life of Orson Welles (who died at the age of 70 in 1985) the following are worth repeating. He was reading at three and could deliver every word of ‘King Lear’ by the age of seven (Callow describes him as an ‘infant prodigy’). By his early twenties Welles was an acclaimed Broadway theatre director and had not yet reached twenty five when in 1938 he directed and narrated a radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel ‘The War of the Worlds’, a production so atmospheric and layered in realism, there were listeners who thought extra-terrestrial beings were actually landing on the eastern seaboard of North America. Given freedom by RKO film studios to direct any film he wanted, in 1941 Welles wrote, produced, directed and starred in ‘Citizen Kane’, still widely regarded by film-makers as the greatest film ever made, the story of American newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane made in a distinctive directorial style and enhanced by cinematography, lighting and sound recording techniques that were strikingly innovative. Winning an Oscar for the screenplay, he followed ‘Kane’ with ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942) another critically acclaimed work but one which brought Welles into conflict with the studio over ‘artistic control’ of the piece, an issue that would go on to blight much of his career, to the extent he would direct less than a dozen films in the next 43 years, during which time countless projects, many of them wildly ambitious, would be abandoned or simply never see the light of day.
Despite his maverick, single-minded approach putting the major studios on their guard, Welles was still able to make such fine films as ‘Touch Of Evil’ (1958) and ‘Chimes at Midnight,’ (1965) and best of all the brilliant ‘The Lady from Shanghai’ (1947) in which he co-starred with then-wife Rita Hayworth, their marriage not surviving the shoot as depicted in the closing dialogue after the famous hall of mirrors gun-fight, lines that would stand as the best Welles ever wrote, had it not been for the famous speech delivered by Harry Lime – his character in ‘The Third Man’ (1949), an adaptation by Carol Reed of the Graham Greene novella, a thriller set in immediate post-war Vienna. According to Callow it is the only time when Welles did not attempt taking over a film he was not directing (it is hard to see how even Welles could have improved on what Reed did) but still came up with a brilliant passage of dialogue for Lime (not in the novella) – the oft-repeated ‘cuckoo clock’ passage delivered on the Ferris wheel in Prater Amusement Park.
By the time of his 1974 Parkinson appearance Welles was entering his late-fifties, had put on a considerable amount of weight and at first glimpse no doubt left me thinking, ‘who is this over-weight old man?’ But a new wave of film-makers (De Palma, Coppola, Bogdanavitch, Schrader, Lucas, Scorsese) were already extolling Welles as the great director of the century (a title the BFI would bestow on him in 2002), Parkinson quickly making reference to the fact ‘Citizen Kane’ had yet again been declared the best film ever made by critics in a recent poll. This I am sure would have stirred within me the culture snob I was fast-becoming and after watching ‘Citizen Kane’ when it was broadcast on television shortly afterward, the life and work of Orson Welles, joined The Beatles and The Kinks, as one of my young man obsessions. Strangely for a man whose reputed ego was only matched by his gargantuan latter-day size, Welles bats away the title genius that others are so readily bestowing on him and although his conversation with Parkinson covers an astonishing range of topics (Parkinson tells the story that when they first met backstage Welles asked what he had written on his clipboard. ‘My questions,’ Michael replied. ‘You won’t need that,’ said Orson, ‘we’ll just talk.’), the one subject he shows any reluctance in discussing is his own work, something that when it was done he showed little interest in.
After watching ‘Talking Pictures’ – and at the risk of sounding obvious – I felt duly compelled to watch the Parkinson interview for the umpteenth time and once again marvelled at the sheer verbosity of a man who not only talked the talk but created the great. In deciding to watch ‘Citizen Kane’ for the first time in ages I happened to notice on the back of the DVD case a statement that says: ‘If you like ‘Citizen Kane’ you’ll love ‘Spartacus’. On what level I thought, could these films, as excellent as they both are, be linked?
While trying to work out the tenuous connection between them, from that great film set in the sky I swear I heard a deep, ironic laugh.
NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of MONTY’S DOUBLE – an outstanding new thriller now available as an Amazon Kindle Book.
Great article. Must check out that interview. Thanks. 🙂
Hi Daryl – Thank you for your approval and kind words. Much appreciated. The Michael Parkinson interview catches Orson at his most witty and endearing. Well worth a watch. Best wishes Neil