Word: higham
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...MYSTERY OF CITIZEN WELLES ORSON WELLES: A BIOGRAPHY by Barbara Leaming; Viking; 562 pages; $19.95 ORSON WELLES: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN GENIUS by Charles Higham; St. Martin's Press; 373 pages; $19.95 THE MAKING OF CITIZEN KANE by Robert L. Carringer University of California; 180 pages...
Leaming is acutely hostile to more critical predecessors, notably Charles Higham, who argued in The Films of Orson Welles (1970) that the director suffered a neurotic fear of finishing his movies. "A destructive book," says Leaming. Welles shares her animosity. In one of his expensively unfinished films, The Other Side of the Wind, which stars John Huston as an aging movie director attempting a comeback, Welles included a snotty critic called "Higgam." This role was played for a time by Director Peter Bogdanovich, who was also collaborating on a book, titled This Is Orson Welles, until Welles canceled the book...
...Higham has made a cottage industry out of Hollywood biographies (Kate, Marlene, Bette, etc.), and now, by expanding his field from an analysis of Welles' films to a full-scale biography, he balances his harsh criticism of his subject's eccentricities with an admiring portrait of the young Welles as a brilliant innovator on stage and radio. But, the author notes, even then there was "the megalomania that would soon consume him." And he holds to his view that when Welles flew off to Rio to film the carnival without finishing the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), when...
...doubtlessly yield from time to time to the theatrical temptation of make-believe. Yet the accumulated mountain of star lore certainly tells more than enough about what Hollywood stars are actually like. The Secret Life of Tyrone Power depicts that virile swashbuckler as bisexual. In The Untold Story, Charles Higham tries to make a case that Errol Flynn was also sexually ambivalent-and argues, not quite convincingly, that Flynn was a Nazi agent of some sort. In This Life, Sidney Poitier confesses to catching an adolescent case of gonorrhea, and in Please Don't Shoot My Dog, Jackie Cooper...
...Bette: The Life of Bette Davis, Higham...