This is to say that McGilligan’s book gives new dimensions to unsparing candor. You are tempted to say that with such an admirer, the subject has no need of detractors. Patrick McGilligan, a young film maker and film historian who lives in Wisconsin, is an unabashed Robert Altman admirer. But when the day of judgment comes and the executives and the moguls are placed in the balance against writers and directors, they will be found wanting.” In a late interview with William Scobie of London’s Observer, Welles said, “I’ve always pretended to love Hollywood. Sir John Gielgud located money for Welles to do “The Tempest” but Welles knew he was too old to play Caliban and too infirm to handle the project. There was talk of a “Lear,” which could have been Welles’ last, great triumph but was never done. The facts of Welles’ melancholy last years, when he held court at Ma Maison while film projects appeared and vanished like apparitions, are all too eloquent. From a standing start, when he compared film making to a boy’s joy in an electric train, Welles had become a meticulous and very well-informed craftsman. The author reproduces some of Welles’ cut-by-cut notes to his various editors.
The turmoil surrounding the completion of “The Magnificent Ambersons” is described in considerable depth, for example, and so is the furor that greeted “Kane” in and out of the Hearst press. Herman Mankiewicz dispute, Brady is firmly on Welles’ side as the film’s principal creator, although he also has no doubt that the shared script credit is fair and accurate.īrady’s accounts of the making of the various films are ample and knowing. In his researches, Brady found RKO time-sheets that indicated Welles had logged 111 hours working on the “Kane” script. Proceeding on a combination of bravado, physical size, a prematurely stentorian voice and uncommon intelligence and talent, Welles talked himself into a job with Michael MacLiammoir at the Gate Theatre in Dublin when he was only 16, occasionally playing old men. If it is not definitive, it is probably because Welles may not ultimately be definable.īrady’s detailing of Welles’ life is amazingly full, and it was an amazing life. His biography, which can fairly be called monumental, authoritative and exhaustive, has been since 1977 in the making. Altman is a film maker, neither pure nor simple, with excursions to stage and opera.įrank Brady, the author of “Citizen Welles,” is a tenured professor of film and writing at St. Welles had great and varied gifts as actor, writer and director for stage, screen and radio. But, aside from common geographical origins in the Midwest, Welles and Altman are otherwise as unlike, in style and density, as the biographies themselves.
0 kommentar(er)
