Word: welleses
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Callow's book, which ends in 1942, the year after Kane, follows half a dozen earlier Welles biographies and precedes by a few months yet another, David Thomson's eagerly awaited Rosebud. Callow, a crafty English actor (he played the ebullient, doomed gay man in Four Weddings and a Funeral...
The book expertly evokes Welles' wildly inventive productions of the mid-'30s: a "voodoo" Macbeth with the Negro Unit of the WPA's Federal Theater; a Julius Caesar set in Fascist Italy; a violent farce, Horse Eats Hat, with 74 actors; Marc Blitzstein's folk opera The Cradle Will Rock...
Callow draws telling word pictures of Welles' early years. But to evoke a film, it helps to have moving pictures, and The Battle over Citizen Kane, which runs the lives of Welles and Hearst on parallel tracks until they collide in 1941, is a two-hour tornado of a documentary...
Welles got it. For five years he symbolized America's worship and suspicion of the Artist. He was famous in New York for the Mercury Theater (which he and Houseman started after leaving the WPA) and to the rest of the nation from radio--as the voice of the Shadow...
A year later, Welles arrived in Hollywood with a fussy, je-suis-l'artiste beard and an RKO contract giving him total control over his films. To an industry in robust middle age, Welles was a pampered brat. They called him Little Orson Annie, the Christ Child. One local wit...