Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band by Simon Callow
| Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band by Simon Callow | |
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| Category: Biography | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: Actor, director and producer Orson Welles had an inestimable impact on the world of stage and screen during his lifetime. The third of a four-volume biography, this covers the years 1947 to 1965. Callow conveys the personality of his admirable if hardly likeable subject very vividly and in great detail, and any reader interested in post-World War Two theatre and film will enjoy this. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 496 | Date: October 2016 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780099502838 | |
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Orson Welles, the noted actor, director and producer, was one of those larger than life characters whose impact on the world of stage and screen during his lifetime was inestimable. Simon Callow has found the task of condensing his story into a single volume is impossible, and this is the third of three solid instalments.
Covering the years 1947 to 1965, it examines the period of his career that begins with his departure from an America which had become increasingly inhospitable. Like Charlie Chaplin, that other towering presence of the cinema world, he was under sustained attack in the post-war nation which was making it increasingly difficult for any high profile figures with suspected communist sympathies to work.
Having gradually realised that his future lay as an independent maker of films, answerable to nobody, once in Europe Welles proceeded to involve himself in every medium available to him – not just films and theatre, but also radio, television (then in its infancy) and even briefly ballet. Like Chaplin, he was clearly a perfectionist and as such an extremely difficult person to work with. To Callow, he was an idol with feet of clay. At one point, we are told that from the beginning of this period onwards (almost forty years), ‘Welles behaved more or less badly on virtually every film he did not direct.’ Being fully in charge, his word was law. He had a notoriously short temper, overran budgets without a second thought yet did not pay his film crews, tended to disappear off set without warning, and generally made himself impossible to everybody else. At various times he was a pathological liar, a ‘monstrous baby’, and – strong stuff, this - almost as bad as the notorious Roman Emperors Caligula and Nero. One day, during a rehearsal, he was irritated by a child playing noisily outside the window. He looked out, gave the lad a filthy look – whereupon the boy fell ill and was never seen again. Personally, I think the story sounds a little far-fetched. (Never seen again by anybody? Did the earth really open and swallow said infant up, or what?)
Whatever the truth or lack of it in this episode, we read enough to realise that Welles got away with it all. He was one of those mavericks that, love him or loathe him, never forfeited respect and always got the results he wanted in the end. He might have been a flawed character, but it is safe to assume that if he really had been a monster without redeeming features, Callow might have thought twice about persevering with his epic four-volume project as far as this.
The two decades or so (give or take a year) under the microscope on this volume cover several Welles ventures, including ‘Othello’, ‘Mr Arkadin’, and ‘Chimes at Midnight’, generally regarded as a masterpiece to rank alongside his earlier film ‘’Citizen Kane’'. It must be significant that he gave the performance of his life, according to some, as Harry Lime in ‘The Third Man’, a picture in which he starred yet was unable to take over by directing or rewriting, as he had met his match in the personality of director Carol Reed, a man who did not suffer prima donnas gladly. They also include his divorce from actress Rita Hayworth after a brief marriage, and remarriage to Paola Mori, a union which ended in separation but stopped short of divorce. At the end of the last chapter, he stood on the threshold of so much more in which he was still ‘experimenting, exploring, pointing a way forward’. Readers will have to wait a few years before they can read a similar account of what happened during the final twenty years.
Callow’s research and grasp of sheer detail is very impressive. He conveys the personality of his admirable if less than likeable subject very vividly, leaving no stone unturned. As one-quarter of the full work, it will not be for the casual reader, but anybody with a passion for the world of theatre and film in the two decades after the Second World War will relish this.
If you enjoy this, another life of a similarly towering yet flawed presence in the theatrical world is the subject of Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor by Simon Callow, while our man is also the subject of an intriguing novel, Me and Orson Welles by Robert Kaplow .
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You can read more book reviews or buy Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band by Simon Callow at Amazon.com.
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