Orson Welles makes powerful men absorbing without asking us to excuse them. We recommend Citizen Kane without hesitation: its elaborate filmmaking serves an actor who can make the damage done by power feel personal.
Fi1m perspective
In Citizen Kane (1941), we can look past the person speaking without losing interest in the scene. Cinematographer Gregg Toland keeps foreground and background sharp, allowing the people elsewhere in the picture to matter too. Welles directs our attention without making every decision for us. We enjoy having that freedom, and the film gives us plenty to do with it.
Welles also plays Charles Foster Kane, the media magnate whose life is assembled from other people's recollections in the screenplay he wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz. His wit keeps the study of power from becoming solemn, and his performance makes the passing years felt. We were saddened by the older Kane because Welles lets us feel what power has cost the man without excusing him. Our reservation is that another shift in time sometimes arrives before we have spent enough time with the person speaking. The structure occasionally interrupts the human interest that his acting has created.
Kane was his feature debut, followed by the studio-edited The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Later came curtailed projects and films made while Welles worked frequently in Europe, including Othello (1952). Touch of Evil (1958) put his command of the long take to work on suspense, while Chimes at Midnight (1965) returned to Shakespeare. The disrupted career helps explain the unevenness, but the tendency towards over-elaborate staging was also his own.
Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) gives us Welles the actor within somebody else's film. As Harry Lime, he supplies the charisma that the story's concern with friendship requires. Joseph Cotten's quieter performance matters just as much, giving us someone worth caring about without matching Welles's showiness. We would not make this a one-man attraction: Reed's mystery needs both performances, and Cotten's restraint helps us appreciate what Welles brings. For anyone who finds Kane's changes of perspective a little distancing, this is an equally strong place to begin.
Biography
Orson Welles was an American director, actor, screenwriter and producer. He directed, produced, co-wrote and starred as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941). He played Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949).
Welles is also credited as director and co-writer on Touch of Evil (1958), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Chimes at Midnight (1965). He directed The Stranger (1946) and The Trial (1962).
