Sabotage

Gavin Millar

  • Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles by Frank Brady
    Hodder, 655 pp, £18.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 340 51389 6
  • If this was happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth by Barbara Leaming
    Weidenfeld, 312 pp, £14.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 297 79630 5
  • Norma Shearer by Gavin Lambert
    Hodder, 381 pp, £17.95, August 1990, ISBN 0 340 52947 4
  • Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner by Jane Ellen Wayne
    Robson, 268 pp, £14.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 86051 636 9
  • Goldwyn: A Biography by Scott Berg
    Hamish Hamilton, 579 pp, £16.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 241 12832 3
  • The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz
    Simon and Schuster, 514 pp, £16.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 671 69708 0

Extravagance and self-indulgence were among the kinder accusations levelled at Orson Welles by industry chiefs. For the most part the charges were unjust. Not only was Welles possibly the most distinguished film artist to be abused and all but broken by the system, and by leading individuals within it (including politicians, newspaper magnates, journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable. Even Brady, an admirer, in his exhaustive and occasionally exhausting coverage, fails from time to time to set the record straight aggressively enough, and falls victim to what we should regard as the received malice.

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