The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

The spoiled young heir to the decaying Amberson fortune comes between his widowed mother and the man she has always loved.

The Magnificent Ambersons plays like a nice classical music from a classic composer, it is a story about pride, richness, family, and the turn of the 20th Century. Welles put more that expected in this story and he even made it even subtler that his previous Citizen Kane. Orson Welles was a man of his time, but his heritage was from a father who took him to travel around the world. His education was from this 19th Century heritage that clashed with the new Century.

This Orson Welles film should have been the director's masterpiece and become even greater than his own Citizen Kane made only one year earlier. However, the studios were not happy with his final editing and asked editor Robert Wise to cut down and retell the story that was inspired by Booth Tarkington's novel, a friend of the Welles family. During the re-editing process, Welles was shooting in South America and he was preparing another film. However, the cataclysm that was Citizen Kane the year before had already cursed Welles for the rest of his career.

Even with his detachment from the final cut and the story that maligned The Magnificent Ambersons, it is still a cinephile's dream to discover one day Welles' vision restored. The bits and parts that came to us still demonstrate the mastery of Welles, cinematographer Gregg Toland's masterful compositions, and the huge legacy that the actors directed by Welles for their iconic roles have left to us. On many many lists, this period drama is ranked as a masterpiece. Put aside the drama of the making and the steal from the studios, this is still a remarkable film that Welles enthusiasts can't throw away without considering.

I however believe that it is always good for the legend and the fans that the greats of films have such stories. It reminds us how important and unique each film is. How it is important to take the time to actually enjoy every offering a director has created and how it takes so many elements to control to actually release to masterpieces in a row in so few time. If Welles hasn't been stopped at the time he actually could have directed many more films. But let's just say that he almost never made a film that was not a masterpiece or a near-masterpiece.

Recommended Reading : Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (David Thomson, 1997)

This biography of Orson Welles is an admirer’s look upon a career of failures, fakeries, lies, and some of the most important films in History. David Thomson is clearly a Welles enthusiast and even if his tone is sometimes forgiving of the tempered director he also likes to bring a little gossip on the table of the man-child enfant terrible. While spending numerous pages on the creation of Citizen Kane and its writing, structure, team he almost never mentions the context of creation of his other pictures. Even if Kane is the first film by Welles and his most important, a little more element on the other completed projects could have been a great import in the book.

After closing the book, I felt like I didn’t learned much more about the films and life of Orson Welles and I would rather much recommend the book he co-wrote with Peter Bogdanovich; This is Orson Welles instead. Still, it brings some light on a life that has been almost a myth to many cinephiles around the world.

F for Fake

F for Fake aka Vérités et mensonges (Orson Welles, 1973)

A documentary about fraud and fakery.

Throughout his career Orson Welles has been a director “maudit”. Just for his making of Othello and Falstaff for instance, he had to shoot during spans of months and years because of lack of financing for his personal projects. He managed to make his films like he wanted them to be and left a mark in the imagination of cinephiles for more than sixty year with the most celebrated film of all time: Citizen Kane. This is the story of a newspaper tycoon. Welles is tricking its audience on believing who was and who wasn’t Charles Foster Kane. As for its technical aspect, two thirds of it is cinematic trickery and lookalikes. It has had repercussions by creating a real typhoon in the business in the size that only Orson Welles could have provoked. Since then, and even before, Welles has been a master at magic tricks, fake, fraud, trickery, and most of all storytelling. This is why F for Fake might be one of Welles’ most personal projects.

Often categorized as a documentary, the movie that Welles directed isn’t just a simple film or just a documentary. It is a study on how as viewers we are eager to believe anything that we are told and how it is possible to forge great masterpieces of Art, History, mysterious persons, and even to trick an audience. F for Fake is the story of Elmyr de Hory the most successful Art forger of the 20^th Century and his biographer Clifford Irving. Both are frauders in their own spheres and they have succeeded when imitating and lying about their works. Welles brings us to reevaluate the experts in Art and everything we put a high price on just for the sake of its evaluation.

It was Pauline Kael who wrote that F for Fake was not a Wellesian picture because it doesn’t have the master’s signature. Welles responded by saying that he really cared not to put anything that reminded of his visual touch, this is why the editing is very precise and that there are no real long shots. Welles actually worked one year in three editing rooms seven days a week to complete this movie. It is easy to believe this obsession from the master because the trick plays very well and the film is entertaining, filled with material that will take you on another level and it stands out as one of the most important films of Welles career. Given the right means he could have reinvented himself just like a Jean-Luc Godard and develop his own non- genre. On a personal level, Welles was a mythomaniac and in interviews he often misled his past, his relationships, and his family. He forged an image of himself and even the people who were close to him knew that he liked to maintain this façade. F for Fake is then, a very autobiographical document that is not speaking directly of its subject but like any well gifted storyteller it broads around facts and present it in a riveting manner.

With time and thinking I would rank this film along Welles’ other masterpieces and not being as game changing as Citizen Kane, or stunning as The Magnificent Ambersons, F for Fake stands alone in its unique spot of great films.

Being the ultimate film by Orson Welles on the list of 1000 Greatest Films, I feel like this completion feels great but also I feel a little sad that I don’t have any more films from this great director. It is somewhat fulfilling to catch a director’s whole corpus and be able to put it in the perspective of its entire career. There are very few directors that I truly admire that I can say I have seen all the films. Just like Andrew Sarris, I think that Welles is a Pantheon Director and he deserves his place amongst the great gods of Cinema.

Top Films of Orson Welles by LMdC

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. The Trial (1963)
3. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
4. Othello (1952)
5. Touch of Evil (1958)
6. Lady From Shanghai (1948)

7. Chimes at Midnight (1966)
8. Macbeth (1948)
9. The Stranger (1946)
10. Mr. Arkadin (1955)
I still need to see: Don Quixote (1955) The Fountain of Youth (1956) The Immortal Story (1968) F for Fake (1973) Filming Othello (1978)

Citizen Kane

 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Since this is one of the films that has been analyzed and dissected the most in Cinema history, this review will try to be original, fresh, with a new look on this monument in filmmaking. Orson Welles’ first film, technically avant-gardist, with a structure in flash backs, telling the different aspects of the story of Charles Foster Kane and his different personas and the way the people around him perceived him. Well, Welles was not alone in this adventure, on the script he was working with Herman J. Mankiewicz who brought many of the ideas of the story. There was also cinematographer Gregg Toland who worked before with the great John Ford. Robert Wise soon to be the director of classics like West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Set-up and many more was the editor of Citizen Kane. Without forgiving the wonderful cast of Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Everett Sloane, and Orson Welles himself.

He was already a huge star in America with his legendary broadcast of War of the World. Also the director of many Theatre plays, Welles wasn’t a simple man put in the director’s chair.

The story opens with the death of Charles Foster Kane, head of a huge corporate media in the USA. The films opens with many shots of his vast domain, Xanadu, where decadence is just a simple word. On his dying bed his last word will be Rosebud. A journalist is charged to find what that word meant to discover the mystery of that intriguing man. The first meaning of the whole film is that we cannot resume someone’s life with a simple word. We have to take the many angles and how the man was perceived by his peers to be able to learn a little about him. Kane’s public life, from his adoption to his fall after his failed Presidential campaign was resumed by the News on the March following his death. This facet of the film is amazing when put back in context, because the news seem real and the paparazzi (this term was invented with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in 1961) feeling of them is unsettling, the shots with the greats of the time are particularly effective. A parallel with the life of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst has always been made with the life of Kane. The story was widely inspired by the Art collector misanthrope especially when you compare Xanadu with Hearst castle in San Simeon in California, which I had the luck to visit in May 2010. The decadence and saturation of luxury of the place demonstrate how fortunate and disconnected to the “proletarian” Hearst was.

However, the story of Charles Foster Kane isn’t only about Hearst’s empire, it’s also about Orson Welles himself and how to create a myth about a public figure. Welles was a man of myths and a man who told anecdotes and stories about his life that some may be true and some aren’t. The way Citizen Kane is constructed is a lot like when someone has to live with his own lies and work around them, every character has his own vision of Kane and how he really was. The perception of everyone is unique and Kane shows that.

Moreover, Citizen Kane is a critic of the American Dream, in the early 1940’s being financially successful, popular, powerful, and beautiful was and still is the main occupation of capitalists in America. Charlie Kane was those things and he represented the rise of a man starting as someone who would be a poor worker before being adopted by a successful man and starting from a simple newspaper he made it to become a respected wealthy magnate trying to get to the White House. Juxtaposed, you have his fall and his descent, the attempted suicide of his wife, and his recluse final days. Like Howard Hugues who stayed in his Hotel room for years afraid of everything and everyone. Citizen Kane demonstrate that in some ways wealth and popularity are vile values that can turn a man into his misery.

The technical aspects of Citizen Kane, often praised for the invention of the deep focus and the presence of ceilings in the frames but cinematographer Gregg Toland was indeed invented by Toland on The Long Voyage Home directed by John Ford. This director is one of the major influences of Welles along with Jean Renoir. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that every day during the preparation of Citizen Kane him and Toland were watching Ford’s Stagecoach and Welles was asking how to shoot this and that. They both dissected every frame and every scenes of the film because for Welles it was a strong film. Perhaps, even if Citizen Kane didn’t invented those technical effects, it shows a great mastery of them.

As stated in the first lines of this review, this is not an attempt to analyze and describe Citizen Kane in its whole but more something like my interpretations of its meanings and the understanding of the theories about it. It’s difficult to be negative about a classic that’s been sitting on the top of the world of filmmaking for so long, with few other films Citizen Kane is the kind of oeuvre that can’t be judged amongst men but amongst gods, if you permit the comparison...

Recomended readings - This Is Orson Welles

This Is Orson Welles

Of the many great directors of the History of Cinema few had the mythic persona that Orson Welles had. With a background in theater and radio, Welles came to the seventh art with all his innocence and pretentiousness. But like his Cinematographer on Citizen Kane, the great Gregg Toland, said "You can learn so much from working with someone new to the profession". Toland proposed himself to work totally for free on Kane!!!

The book, This Is Orson Welles, is the retranscription of the many conversations between Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles. With these interviews we discover a passionate and uncompromised a devoted man who always had to work hard for his art and to work even harder to direct his own projects. Moreover, this book reflects the great friendship of those two men who shared the same passion.

This Is Orson Welles is a great homage to one of the few true artists of this sold out business that is Cinema. An oeuvre that adds a little to the legend and how the man perceived his legendary work.

BOGDANOVICH, Peter & Orson WELLES, This Is Orson Welles.

#2 Orson Welles

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The Trial (1963)

The Trial (Orson Welles, 1963)


First of all, Orson Welles' films are so dense and deep that this simple review or text does not pretend to condense and analyze the oeuvre that is The Trial adapted from Kafka's novel. His entire career Orson Welles had to fight to get financing to make films, to get the final cut and preserve the integrity of his vision. The Trial is my personal favorite film from Welles' filmography; François Truffaut once wrote about it that it was The Trial he liked the least from Welles' because he wrote that K. is smaller than man and Orson Welles is bigger than men. I deeply respect François Truffaut but I must disagree with him here, I once read somewhere that Masterpieces are not perfect films and that the great films that have weakness should be loved for these weaknesses. I totally agree here on that. Perfect films are nice to watch and are excellent to learn about filmmaking and techniques, but who can claim that Battleship Potemkin, that I really respect as a perfect film, is an entertainment? I would watch my imperfect The Trial instead. But it's my opinion it's refutable too!

The Trial is the story of Josef K. being arrested for a crime he doesn't know about and instead of going to jail he stays free but everyone knows about his trial and he must deal with the shame and the justice himself. His lawyer, portrayed by Orson Welles doesn't help him at all and as long as the film goes the story seems more and more complicated and weird.

The Prologue of the film is a little tale that explains all the logic of The Trial: the logic of this story is the logic of a nightmare. Narrated by Welles himself this line says much about what the film really says. This is one of the films of the second half of the century that announces the modern post war world like in a complete other treatment Jacques Tati's oeuvre especially his masterpiece Playtime.

In the role of Josef K., Anthony Perkins, with his skeletic shape, portrays a nervous and sometimes cocky accused banker. I think he gives a very good interpretation, even if his best presence on a screen theater was as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho. There are many others well known actors with very good parts in The Trial - Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff, and Orson Welles- but I think that Perkins' performance was above them all. The dialogues are staggered; K. will ask a question to another character and without answering to K. this character will speak ten lines of something totally out of subject and then give the information or a fraction of it to K. So it needed great acting to react adequately to Perkins' character.

The landscape is a very important character, it gave to Welles some of the best images in the abandonned Gare d'Orsay of Paris. And Edmond Richard's cinematography is stylized and unforgettable. It may be considered as experimental cinematography for some but for the twisted story The Trial represents I think that the images must reflect a twisted reality. There are many tracking shots (a technical aspect of cinematography Orson Welles couldn't afford in his self financed pictures) that shows how some situations are awkward and uncomfortable even for the audience. The sets feel overloaded and the depth of tend to minimise the characters and crush them down.

Few directors transposed literature to the screen with that mastery of the original material as Orson Welles, even if he changed some of the elements of the plot, represents to me many thinks such as individualism versus society, governments, great cities, institutions, big enterprises, etc. I think it represents how society and the modern world tend to crush or pull down individuals with their laws, procedures, administrations, well a modern day Babel tower...


A Review by Michaël Parent

Merci YouTube!!! Part X

Chimes at Midnight de Orson Welles tourné en 1965. Probablement le meilleur film disponible sur YouTube! Introuvalbe en DVD!

Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight of 1965. Probably the best film available on YouTube that you can't find on a decent DVD edition!