Thunder in the Mountains

J. Hoberman

  • BuyOrson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow
    Vintage, 507 pp, £8.99, May 2007, ISBN 978 0 09 946261 3
  • BuyWhat Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career by Joseph McBride
    Kentucky, 344 pp, $29.95, October 2006, ISBN 0 8131 2410 7

Like Dead Elvis and Dead Marilyn, Dead Orson is very much with us. He lives on, not only in the restored ‘director’s cuts’ of his re-released movies, the posthumously completed projects and newly adapted screenplays of never-made films, but as a character in other people’s novels, plays and movies. He haunts the murderous teenagers of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Welles appears, larger than life, in documentaries and dramatisations, of both his own story – or rather the story of his productions – and the stories of others he might never have met. (Tim Burton’s biopic of the ‘world’s worst film-maker’, Ed Wood, contrived to have the two misunderstood auteurs meet in a tawdry Tinseltown lounge.) In addition to all this, there is an apparently unending succession of books, of which Simon Callow’s ongoing biography is the most monumental, now two volumes in and not even arrived at The Third Man, the 1949 movie that made Welles a myth.

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[*] In It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (California, 416 pp., £14.95, March, 978 0 520 24248 7), Catherine Benamou reports that in 1945 Welles managed to buy the footage from RKO for $200,000 and had plans, never realised, to distribute the project as two separate movies.

[†] A 1948 report by the California legislature’s version of the House Un-American Activities Committee classifies Welles among the ‘faithfuls’, one of Hollywood’s ‘outstanding Communist Party liners and sympathisers’. By way of proof, he is listed with 14 subversive associations, including the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the American Committee for Yugoslav Relief, the American Student Union, the American Youth Congress, the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and the Hollywood Democratic Committee, which (on Welles’s suggestion) became the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Soon afterwards this last committee presented The American Caravan, a production – in which Welles appeared – in support of the United Nations Charter.