Customer Reviews

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life

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I thought this was a very interesting book on Welles. It is not a conventional biography. Peter Conrad covers Welles' career by looking at the various archetypes that Welles played/embodied/wrote about during his career: boy genius, Faust, Falstaff, etc.

It takes a while to get used to the book. Making a judgment after five minutes is a mistake. Once you get into Conrad's groove, leaping from Welles' radio work to stage, to movies in the space of a chapter makes sense. He shows how echoes of "Citizen Kane" recur in later Welles' projects, and how unrealized things like "Heart of Darkness" influenced the projects Welles was able to pull off.

The best thing about the book was that it covered all of Welles' career, instead of saying: "And after RKO took 'Magnificent Ambersons' away, Welles became a big fat loser." Conrad shows there was a consistency and throughlines in Welles' disrupted career.

Entertaining glimpse into a big man's many personalities. Conrad's schema is sweet: each chapter takes an established archetype and then shows the many ways in which Orson Welles seemed to try out each role and alter it as he saw fit.

Welles seems corny, as though he actually believed that he was bigger than life, but ultimately Conrad saves Welles from himself and his own delusions of grandeur.

One of the roles is "Everybody." There was a decidedly essentialist streak to Orson Welles, and when he directed Eartha Kitt as Helen in his version of Faustus, she was confounded when he told her his directorial rules, that she was required to play "every woman at every age in every historical time period." Sometimes Conrad plays the game a little too wellm he could cut himself he's so clever, as when he notices that the Mercury Shakespeare Welles edited was originally published as "Everybody's Shakespeare." But even as this example shows, it's telling all the same, and says something about Welles that I had never thought of before, and I don't expect any previous writer on Welles has either.

There's a chapter on "Mercury" (aha, thought of one already!), on "Prospero," on "Quixote," on "Peter Pan," "Kurtz," "Falstaff," and chapters on such vaguer archetypes as the "Lord of Misrule," the "Sacred Beasy," the "Renaissance Man," each chapter packed with dozens of insights and more than your ordinary share of whimsy.

If you're up for making the trip, this could be a valuable book. If not, you might find it too rich, like Jack Horner pulling plum after plum out an impossibly greasy pie.

PS, all the archetypes are very male, I wonder if Conrad considered any female archetypes for surely Welles tried these on too?

I'm a librarian, and I threw this book away after five minutes. Conrad is the kind of author who tries to find some significance in comparing (Welles' made-up term) "pan-focus" with aspects of the god Pan. The book was filled with this sort of unrelenting BS word-play and devoid of any real research or insights. "Despite the System" offers a far better return of time and money for the Welles fan.