Make No Whine

The last 40 years have been both kind and unkind to Orson Welles. Citizen Kane is widely considered the greatest film of all time: The American Film Institute declared it the greatest American movie, and the British Film Institute’s poll of critics has named it tops every 10 years since 1952. A restoration of his noir classic, Touch of Evil, was completed to his original specifications in 1998, to near-universal acclaim. Welles conferences have taken place across the globe, from Munich to New Haven.

On the other hand, Welles’s life is often cast as that of the wasted genius. Most cruelly, he is compared to his famous creation, Charles Foster Kane. Consider the titles of two well-regarded biographies, both of which allude to Citizen Kane in their titles: Rosebud and Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. In Raising Kane, Pauline Kael’s groundbreaking account of the making of Citizen Kane, she wrote that Welles “has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. . . . all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compared to what his destiny was supposed to be.”

Welles’s reputation may be unfair, but it shouldn’t be surprising. For authors, it’s an easy story to tell: Welles, the child prodigy who has conquered stage and radio, heads to Hollywood and creates the greatest movie the world has ever seen. After stumbling in his attempts to follow up his masterpiece with another, Welles winds up becoming the image of his most famous character, physically and spiritually. Instead of fading gracefully from the scene, he cashes in, appearing in films of lesser worth like Transformers: The Movie and The Muppet Movie, and prostituting himself for “modestly priced” wine and fast food.

Joseph McBride, a Welles acolyte and confidant from the director’s later days, attempts here to cast his final years in a new light. In addition to providing a more detailed look at Welles’s frequently maligned (and more frequently ignored) final works than previous biographers, McBride also attempts to explain Welles’s first leave of absence from Hollywood in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

McBride is an accomplished chronicler of figures from the film industry, having written on directors as diverse as John Ford, Steven Spielberg, and Frank Capra. Annoyed with the way previous biographies have treated his mentor, McBride attacks their authors for having an incomplete knowledge of Welles’s later oeuvre and being preoccupied with his obesity. Instead of lamenting Welles’s “wasted genius,” McBride chooses “to celebrate all that he did do in Hollywood and elsewhere throughout his long and astonishingly fertile career.”

Before doing so, however, the author feels it necessary to explain why Welles went into a self-imposed exile from Hollywood during what should have been one of the most fertile periods of his career. In 1947, Welles fled America for Europe, and didn’t return until 1956. It has long been assumed that he did so for reasons related to work–he had acquired a reputation for wild overspending on his films, a reputation McBride succinctly dismantles–and “insurmountable” tax problems (which were substantial, though certainly not insurmountable). Instead, he suggests that Welles skipped the country because he feared being placed on a blacklist.

Here, McBride stumbles. While Welles was undoubtedly a leftist–McBride decries the fact that Citizen Kane is not recognized as one of the great anti-fascist films, and highlights Welles’s lifelong support for racial equality–he stridently denied that he was ever a member of the Communist party. And the only piece of evidence that McBride is able to furnish to prove Welles had reason to fear the blacklist is his inclusion in “the infamous ‘bible’ of the blacklist, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.”

While being named in Red Channels might have caused Welles some problems, it certainly wouldn’t have meant an automatic blacklisting. Furthermore, Welles publicly stated that he carried no water for the Stalin regime: “I’m sick of being called a Communist,” he told the right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in July 1947. “It’s true that I’ve worked for some of the things the Communist party has advocated. But that was merely coincidental. I’m opposed to any political dictatorship.” As McBride points out, “Short of testifying before [the House Committee on Un-American Activities], the most prominent public clearance ritual for a Hollywood figure was to give an interview to Hedda Hopper, one of the ringleaders of the blacklist.” McBride also takes note of “Welles’ claim that he begged to testify [to HUAC] in order to deny on the record that he was a Communist.” And in the FBI file on Welles (reproduced by McBride), it is explicitly noted that the director had “no record of Communist Party membership.” This doesn’t sound like a man who had reason to live in fear of the blacklist.

More important than this diversion into the world of the early Cold War, however, is McBride’s recounting of Welles’s later works. Here, he excels. Though his praise is excessive, that may only be expected from a man who dedicated years of his life to acting in Welles’s great, unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. Welles’s professional life was filled with more than a few great, unfinished works. Because of financing problems, he would often run out of money before shooting could be completed–and if shooting was completed, it was no sure thing that the footage would ever be edited into viewable form.

This is not to say that every piece languished incomplete. McBride extols the virtues of the freewheeling F for Fake, Welles’s documentary on forgeries, forgers, and the very nature of art, writing that “F for Fake is a particularly brilliant display of what can be achieved with the essay-film format. . . . Welles’ dazzlingly edited blend of found footage and newly shot material becomes a meditation on the art of the cinema and the meaning of authorship.”

Reviewers, however, savaged F for Fake; Stanley Kauffmann said the film “tries the eyes.” And while McBride dismisses the critical backlash (“most American reviewers simply didn’t get it”), his opinions of the films he writes about cannot be trusted: He was probably too close to his subject to objectively grade the quality of Welles’s work. The book is not intended as a critical study of Welles’s corpus; it’s better read as a picture-to-picture recounting of his waning years.

McBride’s greatest contribution here may be unintentional: What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? confirms the idea that the filmmaker became more and more like Charles Foster Kane as the years progressed. Consider Welles’s penchant for self-financing (and then failing to complete) films while reading this description of Kane from the final act of Welles’s masterpiece: “He never finished [construction on his mansion, Xanadu]–he never finished anything. . . . He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own–an absolute monarchy.” (Emphasis added.)

Welles also mirrored Kane’s propensity for monstrous behavior toward those closest to him: McBride’s many anecdotes reveal a man embittered at a world that had rejected him, and angry at the success granted those close to him, such as his protégé Peter Bogdanovich. In one particularly nasty scene, Welles tells visitors to Bogdanovich’s Bel-Air home–which the younger director had loaned Welles while he was in Europe shooting a film–that “Peter just sits around like an old man who can’t get it up anymore.”

McBride, too, was the target of Welles’s scorn. While planning a salute to John Huston, McBride asked Welles if they could get together to discuss what Welles would say at the ceremony. McBride didn’t want the speakers’ remarks to overlap, but Welles misunderstood, bristling at the suggestion he needed help writing a simple speech: “There’s nothing to talk about,” he declared, “because I’m going to write it.” McBride never had another conversation with Welles, and writes that “by not wanting to see him, I was guilty of a form of betrayal, like the betrayals of friendship in so many of his films.”

This book may be seen as McBride’s atonement, and he does a good job dispelling the myth that Orson Welles spent his last years indulging his own gluttonous impulses and doing little else with his time. As Pauline Kael said of Welles’s legacy, “In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.”

Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.