Volume 54, Number 4 · March 15, 2007
The Master Builder
By Sanford Schwartz
Orson Welles: Volume 2, Hello Americans
by Simon Callow
Viking, 507 pp., $32.95
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career
by Joseph McBride
University Press of Kentucky, 344 pp., $29.95
OTHER BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ARTICLE
Orson Welles: Volume 1, The Road to Xanadu
by Simon Callow
Penguin, 640 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles
by Frank Brady
Scribner, 655 pp. (1989; out of print)
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
by David Thomson
Vintage, 463 pp., $16.00 (paper)
This Is Orson Welles
by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, with a new introduction by Peter Bogdanovich
Da Capo Press, 549 pp., $24.00 (paper)
The Magic World of Orson Welles
by James Naremore
Southern Methodist University Press, 310 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Twenty-one years after his death, in 1985, at seventy, Orson Welles remains an artist whose achievement is open to question, and a figure people seem to feel they have to take sides about. He might have expected this unsettled situation since his most famous film, the 1941 Citizen Kane, is less the life story of an individual than the story of the impossibility of making a biography of him, and many of Welles's other movies are about persons who, met in the days or hours before their deaths—Charles Foster Kane is encountered the second before he dies—won't make easy subjects for their biographers, either. The two most recent books on him, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans, the second volume in what will be a monumentally scaled three-volume biography, and Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, a detailed look at his later years, both set out to clear away misconceptions and wind up presenting two quite different individuals.
Review, 5102 words
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