[Welles's] personality as an artist is on the scale of a Hugo, a Balzac: he is expansive, grand, capricious, sometimes gross in his style; maddeningly prone to dissipate his energies; baroque and Gothic by turns; romantic, journalistic, slapdash, and brilliant. Citizen Kane remains his masterpiece, as the world has said; but many who thought his a tragedy without a third act, a story of a genius burned out, have been proven wrong. In Chimes at Midnight—that tender elegy to the vanished past of England, echoing in its mood the lovely valedictory of The Magnificent Ambersons for the vanished past of America—and more recently in The Immortal Story—a reflection on the tragedy of old age—the most durable aspect of this prismatic artist was shown at its best: a contemplative aspect, a calm, autumnal quietness in contrast with the sounding brass of so much of Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil.
Welles's films often display a reckless sophomoric humor…. Humor of a gently destructive, playful, sometimes shoddy kind has flashed through film after film, like the sound of Welles himself laughing in great arched caves.
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