Reel Politique: Book Roundup on Orson Welles, Part One
Can you believe that we are still arguing over Orson Welles? By “we,” of course, I really mean “they,” the critics and the pundits who issue alternating books and essays first defaming and then defending the Pantheon auteur. “We” remain serene in the fact that Welles continues to be one of the greatest filmmakers, whose work rewards constant revisits.
Maybe that’s why academics and critics return to Welles, to have an excuse to write about him, even if often their remarks are misguided or derived from Welles’s earliest advocates, such as Charles Higham, who started that whole “fear of completion” tangent of Welles’s biography.
Now, at the New York Review of Books, Mr. Sanford Schwartz enters the fray
in the March 15, 2007, issue and one is immediately relieved to find that he is a Welles lover, who writes that Welles has created “as rich a storehouse of images and moments as any American artist.” The official purpose of Mr. Schwartz’s visitation is two new books on Welles, volume two of Simon Callow’s ongoing Caro-on-LBJ-length biography, and Joseph McBride’s new book on his idol. Into the mix Mr. Schwartz also tosses remarks in passing on books by David Thomson and James Naremore, among others. If Mr. Schwartz, in the end, rather overestimates the value of Thomson (for his “across-the-boards account of everything that was failed, fraudulent, and self-indulgent about him”), and undervalues, due to what he ascribes to a “lack of affinity” for his subject, the contributions of Callow (who in his second volume has highlighted the full extent of Welles’s political involvements and their subsequent effect on his career), he nevertheless manages to cull and then add some interesting observations about Welles.
Noting the “emporium-like quality” of Welles’s style, Mr. Schwartz traces the “disparity between the stories Welles wanted to tell and the way he filmed them,” which results in a highly realist content presented in surrealistic form. Mr. Schwartz insightfully likens Welles’s visual style to Giorgio de Chirico and tracks how surrealism was “an underlying issue for many artists coming of age in the 1930s and early 1940s whether they were tied to Surrealism or not,” though he notes that Welles maintained to Bogdanovich that he was really an anti-surrealist (which isn’t necessarily a contradiction). Yet the inner, psychological realism of Welles’s films was also a sort of breakthrough in national cinema. His films are death obsessed (”Charles Foster Kane is encountered the second before he dies”), and Welles was one of those peculiar young filmmakers more interested in the aged.
Welles emerges from these books as a larger than life personage with a grim impatience for anything less than adulation and an indifference to the quotidian. The saddest passage occurs when Mr. Schwartz writes that, “Even Joseph McBride, a writer long identified as one of the director’s champions, adds some sorry details to the picture. McBride was in and out of Welles’s orbit for the last fifteen years of the man’s life, and he writes warmly about the director’s later activities; but he is forthright and honest enough to say that on some crucial level the relationship never clicked. When McBride asserted himself, initially, as a budding writer and filmmaker, Welles, he feels, was threatened and put on permanent guard, with the result that the younger man tamped himself down, and ‘always felt somewhat uncomfortable around Welles.’ McBride realizes that the director never really saw him as an individual, either.” In this, as in so many other ways, Welles resembles Kubrick, and one thinks of that sad passage on the Clockwork Orange DVD when in an interview Malcolm McDowell expresses a small degree of hurt that, once shooting was over, the friendship that he thought he’d forged with the director failed to bear fruit.