Word: orsones
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...Randolph Hearst. Yet so controversial was Kane before its release in 1941, and so overwhelming its pressure on Welles' reputation, that it can be seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, on PBS's The American Experience next Monday. These solidly researched works revive a thrilling era in American theater and film--a five-year...
Kane's beguiling arrogance and neediness come straight from its creator. As Callow meticulously shows, George Orson Welles knew acclaim and misuse from early childhood. Declared a genius at three, staging Shakespeare in a toy playhouse at five, walking on water in his wading pool--the legend goes something like that--he was adrift in a strained family. His opera-loving mother died when he was nine, his suavely alcoholic father three years later. Welles would memorialize his mother in Kane and find father-sponsors in his prep-school principal, Broadway's John Houseman, RKO's George Schaefer. He would...
...brazenness, Kane is an inspiration to all who see it, especially filmmakers. Here, it says, is what you can do with youth, a blank check and a little genius. A big genius, that is. The first words on the screen herald him with astounding bravado: "A Mercury production by Orson Welles...
...year later, Welles arrived in Hollywood with a fussy, je-suis-l'artiste beard and an RKO contract giving him total control over his films. To an industry in robust middle age, Welles was a pampered brat. They called him Little Orson Annie, the Christ Child. One local wit said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes...
...That Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier both donned blackface in famous film versions doesn't mean no one else should try. Parker had the radical idea to cast a black man as Othello, and Laurence Fishburne brings an outsider's dignity to the role of Shakespeare's noblest chump. Irene Jacob is a lovely, sallow Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh--looking bloated and rheumy, slithering snakelike on rooftops, whispering his venomous gossip as if it's his last confession--makes a fine Iago, a demi-devil working his cool wit to destroy those he might have loved...