Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America (review)

reviews 159 myth of Welles—that he was a genius who could not work within the system, whose first film broke ground that he never adequately built upon in his career. Such an attitude on Carringer's part is unforgivable. Why justify the Hollywood myth of Welles at the expense of such inspired work as Lady From Shanghai and Touch ofEviti The opening tracking shot in Touch ofEvil has proven to be as important to motion picture history as any event since the use of depth of field in Citizen Kane, and that includes Godard's jump-cuts in Breathless. To deny Welles a career after 1942 to serve the purposes of a not particularly useful critical theory is a sad outcome indeed. As Robert Kolker observes in A Cinema of Loneliness: "The history of film is never simple.'" In Welles' case, given the tragical history of his at times desperate career, Kolker's wisdom is appropraite and relevant. In "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles," published the year before the release of Citizen Kane, F. Scott Fitzgerald foretold Welles' considerable and radical influence on cinema since 1941 . A key scene in the story involves Hobby (a shifty, callous scriptwriter) and a typical producer named Mr. Marcus. Hobby quips: "I wouldn't be surprised if Orson Welles turned out to be the biggest menace that's come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred-and-fifty grand a picture, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was so radical that you had to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.'" Welles' final American film, Touch ofEvil ends with him dead on a pile of junk as Marlene Dietrich (an impassive former paramour) offers the film's payoff—a line that could well have closed Citizen Kane: "What does it matter what you say about a man?" In response to Carringer's The Making ofCitizen Kane, I think it is time to stop buying the Hollywood story on Welles and start appreciating more fully his ability, despite the often incredible obstacles he faced, to produce films of landmark importance in the history of cinema. Bad enough that television and hard times turned him into a fat joke for a wine company and Merv Griffin. Academicians have no excuse for compounding the felony. JON LEWIS Notes 'Juan Cobos Miguel Rubio and Jose Antonio Pruneda, "Orson Welles," in Interviews With Film Directors, ed. by Andrew Sarris (NY: Avon, 1967), p. 552. 'Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema ofLoneliness (NY: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 21 . 'Fitzgerald as cited by Penelope Houston in "Orson Welles" in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary , ed. by Richard Roud (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1980), p. 1056. Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. XX + 364 pp. $17.95 (paper). If you asked its practitioners what the Workers' Theatre Movement was, they would probably answer, "A weapon in the class struggle." This would indicate that the movement had a purpose, but it would not point to the exciting techniques it initiated or borrowed and adapted from German and Russian people's theatre in the twenties and thirties. Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove place the Workers' Theatre Movement in historical context in Britain and the United States and produced a range of documents from autobiographical accounts, critiques, conference declarations to scripts and directions for putting on productions. The book thus allows the reader access to primary sources that are hard to find and offers a framework for understanding their place in the history of theater and labor movements. This is not a theoretical discussion of what great drama is; rather, the book accepts the Workers' Theatre assumption that all theatre is political and all rules are relative to purpose. 160 the minnesota review In his autobiographical essay,"A Propertyless Theatre for the Propertyless Class," Tom Thomas, a leader in the Workers' Theatre movement in Britain, begins by describing the experiences in his childhood that inspired him to want to change his society. He said, "When I sang in the church choir, 'He...