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“... and films almost since he was born in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920. Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, José Ferrer, Tony Randall and many others have brought him to some sort of audio or audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of these figures ...”

“... films are famous for their empty corridors and low angles – the shots look like quotations from Orson Welles deprived of all their drama – and characters often appear as almost incidental figures in these decors, ghosts in their own lives. But An Autumn Afternoon, while faithful to this tone and style, fills them out with colour and a little more ...”

“... hardly got past the bristling columns at the main entrance before thinking of Kafka: this is where Orson Welles hoped to film his adaptation of The Trial. W.G. Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz goes wandering in the depths of the Palais looking for Masonic symbols, and finds corridors piled high with ancient office furniture, chairs and lecterns and roll-top ...”

“... think is an astonishingly demanding intellectual task – that is, thinking about copies. Where is Orson Welles when you need him? The village is also full of couples getting married, a sort of atmospheric stimulus to the plot, which finally gets underway. Binoche and Shimell stop for coffee in a small restaurant, and the owner mistakes them for husband ...”

“... his far more famous son, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, who designed sets for Wagner and costumes for Orson Welles, and whose classic Delphos gown, Proust wrote, had the ability to detach the wearer ‘from the current of everyday life like a scene in a novel’. The Moorish arches and Arabs in djellabas of Fortuny senior were outdated by the turn of the ...”

“... Cocteau, Antonioni, Straub. But how does Lubitsch qualify? Or Sternberg, Hitchcock, Hawks and Orson Welles? Their inclusion seems to me like bracketing Conrad with Edna Ferber or Dashiell Hammett – worthy enough artificers, but not engaged in mature art of the kind which deepens our lives. Uneasiness grows when Roud admits to his ‘blind ...”

“... far as the screen can see. It’s the sort of Bergman frame that might also have been devised by Orson Welles. And when the cleverness and the desolation work together the results are magnificent. Cotard goes to Germany to see his daughter, who left England with her mother for a couple of weeks when she was four, and is now in her thirties and ...”

“... of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). In the great scene on the Big Wheel in Vienna, where Orson Welles as Harry Lime clearly contemplates killing his old schoolfriend and says as much, the small movements of Welles’s face tell a very complicated story. Smiling, charming, easy, he makes cynicism sound like ...”

“... character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect ...”

“... sections of the book to his American heroes – including not only Lubitsch, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but also Robert, Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray. Characteristically, his best remarks about them home in on technique. ‘Hitchcock’s mastery of the are grows greater with each film and he constantly needs to invent new ...”

“... successful, charming and faintly melancholy’. Michael Korda remains pledged to the spell, like Orson Welles believing in the mystery of Charles Foster Kane, or Fitzgerald cherishing ...”

“... When Orson Welles said the movies were the greatest train set in the world he probably wasn’t thinking about the toy crashes he could arrange. Quentin Tarantino obviously sees the movies as all kinds of fun, but his screenplays and films are full of accidents, scarcely imaginable without them. It’s not the bloodshed or the blowing away that’s so unusual – that’s just Peckinpah in the city, with a certain lingering on the leaking or blasted body ...”

“... history by compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American ...”

“... your brow goes up ... is this something from The Philadelphia Story?’ In her biography of Orson Welles, Barbara Leaming quotes his phrase ‘in life’ (‘Rita [Hayworth] in life’), and states that what she wants to show is Welles ‘in life’. This would seem to be what she wants to show of Katharine ...”

“... the Dick Cavett Show where she argues with Milton Berle, an ancient comic. They’re talking about Orson Welles, with whom Weld had just worked – A Safe Place (1971), one of her duds. In his inflatable way, Berle says that surely Welles must love acting. But Weld won’t have it: ‘I think he doesn’t even like ...”