Orson Welles

Orson Welles news, related photos and videos, and reviews of Orson Welles performances. According to Wikipedia: George Orson Welles was an American theater and film producer and director, and a theater, radio and film actor. Welles first gained notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it panicked a large number of listeners. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War. In the mid-Thirties his New York theater adaptations of a voodoo Macbeth and a contemporary Julius Caesar became legendary. Welles was also a practiced magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years. During this period he became a serious political activist and commentator through journalism, radio and public appearances closely associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941, he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in Citizen Kane, most often chosen in polls of film critics as one of the greatest films ever made.

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'Touch of Evil': 50 Years Later

Written by bigpicture on

From: www.getthebigpicture.net

It has been 50 years since Touch of Evil made a small ripple as a seedy little crime movie, but since then, that ripple has become a tidal wave of appreciation for not just the film but also its director, Orson Welles.

Welles could never live up to Citizen Kane, his debut made as a 25-year-old maverick that would eventually be remembered by most critics as the greatest, most influential film of all time. It's doubtful that any director could match Kane, regardless of whether or not it was their first film. Welles had other obstacles, however.

He struggled both in and out of Hollywood for years trying to make one movie after another until 1957: First came the stolen ambition of his Kane follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, which was notoriously re-edited by RKO. Then came an uncredited stewardship of the forgettable Journey Into Fear and the mostly average spy caper, The Stranger. The Lady From Shanghai, a bizarre noir was his next film as a director, followed by a low-budget Macbeth. Before landing at Universal for Touch of Evil, Welles also made a film called Confidential Report, or Mr. Arkadin. Fans love it. Nobody else has ever seen it.

Welles recalled the unusual circumstances which lead to his involvement with Touch of Evil in an interview with director Peter Bogdanovich for the book, This is Orson Welles.

"I had just acted in the Jeff Chandler Western for Universal (Man in the Shadow), and they sent me another script -- a very bad one that took place in San Diego, with a crooked detective in it. And they said, 'Do you want to play it?' I said, 'maybe,' and I was still wondering whether I could afford not to make it when they called up Chuck Heston and said, 'Here’s a script -- we’d like you to read it. We have Welles.' And he misunderstood them and said, 'Well, any picture that Welles directs, I’ll make.' So they got back on the phone quick and said to me, “Do you want to direct it?' and I said, 'Yes, if I can rewrite it.' Well, they said they’d let me do that if I wouldn’t get paid as a director or a writer -- just my original salary as an actor. So I had about three and a half weeks to go before it began, and I locked myself up with four secretaries and wrote an entirely new story and script."

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