Orson Welles One Man Band review for Sight & Sound January 2016
This review of One Man Band – the third volume of Simon Callow’s ongoing biography of Orson Welles – appeared in the January 2016 issue of Sight & Sound.
Magnificently out of proportion
Orson Welles: One Man Band
By Simon Callow, Jonathan Cape, 466pp, £25, ISBN 9780224079358
The great sad irony of Orson Welles’s later life is that, although he remained consistently inventive and industrious, each decade’s haul of successfully realised projects was smaller than the last. “Welles did it his way,” as Simon Callow observes in Orson Welles: One Man Band, the third volume in his ongoing biography, and that refusal to compromise arguably saved Welles as an artist while damning his career. There’s no falling off of fascinating subject matter, however, when it comes to an existence one collaborator nicely described as “magnificently out of proportion”. The life, Callow notes, is greater than the work – and the work is greater than the films.
One Man Band comes after The Road to Xanadu – which covered Welles’s prodigious early work in theatre and radio, and culminated in the production of Citizen Kane (1941) – and Hello Americans, which looked at the handful of subsequent years during which Welles blotted his Hollywood copybook and dabbled seriously in politics. Callow demonstrated in these volumes a deeply sympathetic yet critical appreciation of his fathomless subject, underpinned by exhaustive research and a heroic dedication to distinguishing fact from myth (the latter generally generated by Welles himself). One Man Band shows the same virtues as it examines the pivotal period from 1947-65, a time of promiscuous energy and fruitful chaos during which Welles, then in his 30s and 40s and largely based in Europe, created wonders and misfires, explored new avenues and burned old bridges, and set the course for his final decades.
This was the period during which Welles laboriously created an entirely independent film of Othello (1952) – a truly outlandish accomplishment – and made Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report, 1955), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), as well as delivering his finest role for another director in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and plenty of less distinguished performances for hire too. He also directed Othello and Chimes at Midnight on stage, as well as King Lear, an innovative take on Moby Dick (a high point of his career), the English premiere of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros starring Laurence Olivier (a calamity), an experimental ballet in Paris and a bravura cabaret in Las Vegas. It was also the period during which he fell in love with television, a part of his creative life often given short shrift but treated with thoughtful respect by Callow, who appreciates the grace with which Welles took to this most intimate and conversational medium – his astonishing telegeneity, his genius for being interviewed – though even Callow skirts over certain aspects here with unseemly haste.
If the forms were varied, Welles’s methods were consistent – often maddeningly so for his collaborators. He simply loved experimenting, with new forms of technology (such as portable cameras) and with the stories he was telling. In stark contrast to Hitchcock, say, for whom the planning was all and the execution a formality, Welles’s productions were created in the making. Plays were reworked up to and often beyond opening night, while films found their shape on set and in the edit. Chancing one night upon an ideal location for a scene in Touch of Evil, he demanded Joseph Calleia, who was playing the police sergeant, be dragged from his bed to film it immediately, roaring mischievously: “He’ll be better if he’s confused.” Provocation of others was a trusty tool and Welles was a maestro of “Do as I say not as I do”. He was, Callow shows, consistently neglectful of his own performances, generally to the detriment of the overall production and partly because of his surprising lifelong insecurity around his abilities as an actor. He was unaccountable, disastrous at keeping tabs on time and money, sometimes a bully. And he was brilliant, gregarious and beloved by most who worked under him.
This sense of a sui generis genius, infuriating yet inspirational, is perhaps crucial to our ongoing fascination with Welles, which seems only to be growing as his centenary year draws to a close. Callow is surely right to identify something uncannily childlike in Welles’s boundless imagination, petulant egocentricity and naive ambition, and is also shrewdly attentive to the resentful tone, perhaps not unconnected to this, that marks much contemporary coverage of his career. His productions provoked articles that were “not so much reviews as enquiries into the Welles problem”; in particular, “Welles had committed an unforgivable crime in American eyes: he had failed, but refused to give up. He was just irritatingly there.” And yet Welles kept attracting powerful patrons and, even as his stock fell in the US, Europe began to idolise him.
Another strange thing: this adult child was in many ways deeply nostalgic, especially for lost Edens and the figures who grieve for or chase them, such as King Lear, Don Quixote and, most of all, Sir John Falstaff. The book ends with a beautiful section on the making of Chimes at Midnight, arguably Welles’s finest picture – his elegy for Merrie England, more than three decades in the making, in which his Falstaff is the designated mourner for a lost age of expanded humanity. It’s an apt conclusion for a volume that rings with sad endings: One Man Band shows us Welles’s last theatre work as both actor and director, his last Hollywood movie as a director, his last feature produced with comprehensive outside backing. In many respects, his one-man-band status would only deepen during his two remaining decades.
The book also gives us glimpses of Pauline Kael and Oja Kodar, who will undoubtedly feature prominently in the final volume of Callow’s biography, as critical nemesis and creative collaborator respectively: the first brought Welles’s creative agency into question, the second gave it a new lease of life. Opinions about Welles continued to differ, then, but all agreed that, one way or another, those proportions remained magnificently out of whack.
