Reel Politique: Book Review, Orson Welles Studies, Part 4
Joseph McBride is unusual among current Orson Welles scholars for having spent real time with the director. Only Peter Bogdanovich (when his critic’s hat is on) had socialized with Welles more, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of a book reviewed previously in this series, met Welles at least once. McBride, who played a part in The Other Side of the Wind, and wrote the scripts for various minor Welles events, has put his long term exposure to Welles to good use in the very unusual biography What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 344 pages, $29.95, ISBN 978 0 813 12410 0), which also happens to be about one-third autobiography.
McBride concentrates on the last 10 or so years of Welles’s life, with the goal of showing that Welles was highly productive indeed and that his filmmaking procedures were far outside the norms and expectations of commercial Hollywood, which looked down on him as a reckless failure. “The seemingly willful ignorance of much of the press toward his work, and his own secretiveness, meant that he operated largely invisibly,” McBride writes.
The book is divided into six chapters, the first of which positions Welles in relation to show biz, while the following five look at his politics, chart his years in exile (due to the political climate, McBride suggests), describe his first years back in Hollywood, chronicle the making of Wind, and survey his various post-F is for Fake projects, with Fake itself described as his retort to Pauline Kael, who famously undervalued Welles’s contributions to Citizen Kane in the New Yorker. McBride argues convincingly that Welles invented the now-common essay-documentary style seen in the films of Michael Moore and others, while some of Welles’s later unmade projects, such as a film about the mind control of Sirhan Sirhan, sound fascinating.
Ironies abounded at the end of Welles life: Paul Stewart, who played the butler who found Kane, later in real life found Welles’s body; Welles’s daughter Beatrice has became a real life Goneril; and Welles considered doing another Hearst movie, but on Patty Hearst. What’s most valuable about this finely written book is its personal voice and its frankness (though McBride does keep secret the name of the now-prominent director Welles derides within McBride’s hearing on page 154). McBride has no patience with the neutral voice of academic criticism and thrusts himself centrally onto the stage, where his ambivalence and confusion of feelings about Welles are fascinating to read about, and where his tentative questions about Welles’s sexuality prod a subject as taboo as Wittgenstein’s homosexuality once was, a closely guarded secret for decades after the philosopher’s death.
But the other voice one hears in the book is Welle’s own distinctive plaint. His lamentations over not being taken seriously while yet being one of the world’s most famous directors are heart-breaking, and he is highly quotable and insightful. “Happy endings,” he once said, “depend on stopping the story before it’s over.”