Reel Politique: Book Review, Orson Welles Studies, Part 3
Can Americans talk anymore? Can they speak clearly? Is it possible for them to utter a single sentence unburdened with qualifications and padding? I think not, on the evidence of the otherwise terrific Orson Welles Remembered: Interviews with His Actors, Editors, Cinematographers, and Magicians, compiled by Welles expert Peter Prescott Tonguette (McFarland, 206 pages, $35, ISBN 978 0 78642760 4). If the index were to include with all the proper names and film titles such filler phrases as “like”, “sort of”, “kind of”, and “pretty much”, it would be 20 times as long. It’s maddening to read an interview that could have been half as long if the subject didn’t continually qualify his statements with “kind of” and “sort of.” Jesus man, did you or didn’t you, was it or wasn’t it? No wonder America is in a political crisis. Half its citizens are mealy-mouth sentence-padders afraid to say what they mean, to state clearly and firmly that (to quote Michael in The Deer Hunter) “this is this.”
That being said, Orson Welles Remembered is an enjoyable read (especially when the interview subjects are oldies, whose lingo is free of padding) and a fine adjunct to the numerous new bios of Welles published recently. Tonguette gathers up chats with 30 people covering Welles’s career from Citizen Kane to The Other Side of the Wind and beyond. Tonguette interviews Norman Lloyd about the Mercury Theater and Robert Wise and Sonny Bupp, the kid who played Kane’s son and who died recently, about Kane, tracks down two Macbeth, one Lear and two Fountain of Youth contributors, and seven people who shared Welles’s interest in magic tricks. Personally I found the enthusiastic reports by relatively unknown people from his later years such as Jonathan Braun (Welles’s “last editor) much more fascinating than the well-trod tales of the early years by Robert Wise or the re-hatched anecdotes of Peter Bogdanovich. Braun tells a good illustrative tale on page 185, and fellow magician and historian and Jim Steinmeyer offers up a touching insight into Welles on page 172. Though there is the occasionally typo (page 167), the book is modestly but effectively illustrated with rare candid photos, and is a must-have for Welles aficionados. For the rest, it’s sort of, kind of informative.