Orson Welles

Welles’ aura of genius manifested itself as a child. The future filmmaker born in Kenosha (Wisconsin) in 1915 was the subject of an article in a local newspaper entitled “Cartoonist, actor, poet, he is only ten years old.” A child prodigy, he inherited his technical and business skills from his father, while his mother, a pianist, left him a love of art. This led him to the theater, first at school, then at the Gate Theater in Dublin, and finally at the Federal Theater in New York. Passionate about Shakespeare, he created his own company, the Mercury Theatre, where he assembled a stupendous group of performers: his debut was Julius Caesar . The group would accompany him on his radio shows for CBS and in his first films.

On October 29, 1938, Orson’s life changed. The radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds”, an adaptation of the work by HG Wells , caused chaos among the American population. Dramatized as if it were a newsreel, with interventions by correspondents and calls for calm from the authorities, the public believed that the Martians were really invading the Earth. Such was the impact of the program that Hollywood set its eyes on Welles. Georges Schaeffer, president of RKO, offered him a contract with unbeatable conditions. After some fumbling with the idea of ​​adapting “Heart of Darkness,” Welles plunged into an open grave with Citizen Kane .

The portrait of a newspaper mogul made William Randolph Hearst nervous, an obvious model for the film’s protagonist. What meant a war without quarter, to prevent the film from seeing the light. Useless task, because the film was shot and revolutionized the cinema. A Welles who watched John Ford ‘s Stagecoach forty times gave new energy to cinematographic language with the use of wide angles and low-angle shots, or the conception of his elegant sequence shots.

Above his criticism of Hearst, or the structure of crossed flashbacks (several characters remember Kane, who has just passed away), the film offered a meditation on power and demonstrated, almost following the words of the gospel to the letter , that “it is useless for man to gain the whole world if he loses his childhood.” Childhood that hides behind the mysterious word “Rosebud”, the name of the sled with which Kane played as a child.

Then came an invaluable filmography, although carried out in fits and starts, where the magnificent The Fourth Commandment , the film noir The Lady from Shanghai and Thirst for Evil , and the Shakespearean Othello and Chimes at Midnight , the latter shot with Spanish capital, would stand out.

As an actor, Welles would be immortally identified as Harry Lime in The Third Man , despite only appearing for 10 minutes on screen. André Bazin perfectly defined his memorable character: “Fascinating bandit, personification of the runaway romanticism of the time, archangel of the sewers, smuggler of the frontier of good and evil, monster worthy of being loved, Harry Lime-Welles was this time more than a character, a myth.”