The Films of Orson Welles (review)

Two decades after Welles's death, the writer whose remit is to survey once again the life and work—as opposed to concentrating on one of the several masterpieces—faces a delicate task. Not only have the materials been heavily worked over already, but the problem of selection is especially acute, given that the variation between ambition and achievement seems to be so huge, and the Welles story—undisputed genius, compromise and conflict, a late phase followed by a long silence—is so famously compelling. Robert Garis's strategy with the narrative of Welles's life is to start by looking at it backwards. We are reminded on the first page of his book of two terminal moments: Welles's death in 1985, but equally significantly the release of Chimes at Midnight in 1966, the point after which, in Garis's words, Welles produced "nothing—nothing, that is, that came to anything" (1–2). This is nonetheless where he starts, and paradoxically it is through looking at Welles's appearances on talk shows during these final years that Garis defines his particular perspective. Early on he makes a connection between Welles's frequent appearances before television audiences and the compulsive performing of dramatic readings of his work that marked the final phase of Dickens's art.

The comparison is not of course to do with the achievement in each case, but with the impulse. Garis sees Welles, following Dickens, as an artist for whom "performance of self was always the source, soul, and living center of his art" (3), and this means not simply the assertiveness of their presence for audiences, but a way of thinking about style as a matter of self-assertion, of calling attention to what the performance is doing. Garis's thinking about different forms of artistic self-assertion and self-effacement has its roots in his own The Dickens Theatre,¹ in which he defined the particular quality of Dickens's performance of self by placing it against readings of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James and then demonstrated its development in a selection of novels from the Dickens canon.

After a brief but efficient summary of Welles's career as a film maker, or at least the story up to Chimes at Midnight, he moves on to Citizen Kane. The concentration is on the meanings produced by some of the striking moments of visual transformation—the photograph of the staff of The Chronicle dissolving into that of the same men working for The Inquirer, the shot of the building number of Kane and Susan's love-nest dissolving into the representation of the photograph of the same number as the sex scandal breaks in a newspaper. The self-consciousness of these moments, and what Garis calls the doubling between Welles and Kane, is nicely observed, and one strength of the account is that Garis stresses that not only technique but achievement matters: "We like Welles's performances partly because they want so much to be liked, but that wouldn't be a virtue if they weren't so inventive and so accomplished" (37).

As well as these shows of technique there is a discussion of passages of Welles's performance as Kane, the dramatization of his relation to Susan during her operatic career and suicide attempt, and the detail of the later part of his relation to Leland. Here Garis both plots the nuances of performance and devotes space to underlining the attention that the film extends to annotating the characters of Leland and Susan. In all of this a recurrent note is the combination and extent of talent available, that there was "so much wit and invention on hand during the making of Citizen Kane" (57).

The same mood pervades the analysis of The Magnificent Ambersons, which Garis describes as "a great film, one of the keystones of Welles's oeuvre, a film by which one measures his worth as an artist and as a man, a worthy successor...