Judged by first—even second or third—impressions, Welles's films are a triumph of show over substance. His most memorable images seem like elephantine labors to bring forth mouse-size ideas. His films bulge with preposterously vast spaces: the echoing halls of Kane's Xanadu; the rambling castles of Macbeth, Othello, and Arkadin; the vertiginous offices of The Trial; the cathedral-like palace and tavern of Falstaff.

[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...

[Though] I expected The Trial to be bad, I went to it truly hoping for the best. And, in fact, though I expected it to be bad, bad as a mannerist painting can be bad, bad, for instance, as Welles's Othello is bad, I had not been expecting the worst; I had not expected that it might be boring. Orson Welles boring! And boring to stupefaction. (p. 162) It is possible, perhaps, to dismiss Citizen Kane as little more than a bag of tricks, good tricks but tricks nonetheless; yet, although much of that film...

It is clear that Welles's films are not moralistic in the sense that Howard Hawks's are, for example—as fables of exemplary behaviour; and just as clearly, they are not anarchistic and behaviouristic like Jean Renoir's. In a Welles film there is, for the most part, an extreme dissonance between the characters' actions and emotions and the underlying moral framework. Welles will be as chivalrous to his characters as Renoir, but he will not allow the characters' actio...

Welles' film audience is missing a revealing experience in not being able to see [his made-for-television film] The Fountain of Youth. Its mixture of bold theatrical stylisation, puckish humour and bardic intimacy draws on a side of Welles, the 'radio side', which seldom pokes through the intricate architectonics of his feature film work. The Immortal Story is told with a fabulist's simplicity, but it is still a story film conceived for the large screen, with all the pretence of ...

It's not very hard to find things wrong with The Immortal Story…. The sound, at least in the English-language version is rather bad. The lighting, sets, props and makeup have a decided air of cheapness and haste, reflecting the fact that this was, after all, only a television production. The continuity and editing tend toward a certain sloppiness, and the acting and mise-en-scène appear stolid, completely antithetical to the wild Welles we have known. Even more damning, perhaps, is the ...

Orson Welles casts such a gigantic shadow that it becomes difficult to realise that in fact only six films (five if one chooses to discount the equivocal Journey into Fear) stand between the dazzling pyrotechnics of Citizen Kane and the choked and spluttering deadwood bonfire that is Confidential Report…. Fuelled with reminiscences of Kane—the fascination with the mystery and the apparatus of power, the involved flashback structure—and stoked up with bits from [Carol Reed's] The ...

The most disconcerting thing about Orson Welles's screen version of The Trial is that in retrospect it doesn't seem to matter. At the moment, it is entertaining; at times its ingenuity and insight are admirable; it commits (except for a grotesquely inappropriate final shot) no factual offense against Kafka's novel. Yet a few days after I had seen it, it had slipped off my mind and left the book just as it was. The same thing, I find, can be said of the pictures Welles made of Macbeth an...

Well disposed as I am toward the Orson Welles Macbeth and Othello, I feel bound to call his Chimes at Midnight the most mature of his Shakespearean excursions, and to hope at the same time that my use of the word 'mature' will not be taken amiss. This film is not only cinematic but also profound…. [Chiefly] it is Welles as cinéaste, rather than just actor, that the film places in a true perspective. At the time of Citizen Kane I was sure, and then over the years I doubted slightl...