Orson Wells as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight, Peppercorn-Wormser Film Enterprises, Wikimedia Commons

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Orson Welles, the Big Enigma

by Norman B. Schwartz

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To lovers of classic film, Orson Welles has always been an enigma, the BIG ENIGMA. Has there ever been anyone larger than life, not only in talent but in girth? Before he died, his weight increased to 350 pounds (25 stone). His friends could push him into a limousine’s backseat but not out of it. On one occasion, a welder had to be called to remove the back door. Those who need a Freudian explanation for adiposity can find enough Rosebuds in Welles’s life to fill a barn full of sleds.

His admirers are legion, his detractors just as numerous. He has been called a genius, capital G, and a fraud with a curlicued F or F for Fake, the title he gave one of his last films. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker accused him unfairly of taking credit when total credit was not due for the screenplay of Citizen Kane, only to be corrected and defended zealously by young directors Pete Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom, whom he encouraged and mentored. 

In his book My Lunches with Orson (2013), Jaglom extols his companion as a man possessed of boundless charm and wisdom; not only could he sing for his supper, but if a wealthy admirer wish-ing to invest in one of his movies were to take him to lunch, he was also capable of  captivating his audience with an afternoon’s recital of anecdotal arias, one more insightful and amusing than the next. 

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Jaglom reminds those who have forgotten that long before Welles achieved his deserved notoriety in radio and film, he had revolutionized and scandalized the New York theater. By his early twenties, he had staged what critics called The Voodoo Macbeth set in l9th Century Haiti and performed in Harlem by an all-black-cast; his allegory, a Blackshirt Julius Caesar, Shakespeare translocated to Mussolini’s Italy; and The Cradle Will Rock, a Brechtian drama in defense of unionization, famously padlocked out of his theater by federal authorities who objected to his criticism of unrestrained capitalism.

Only 24 years old, in August 1939, after a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds had terrified the nation, he signed to direct his first motion picture for RKO in Hollywood. The contract clearly granted him, the then unheard-of right of absolute artistic control—what is called today, Final Cut. No one could re-edit or release his film without his permission. He also insisted on bringing with him to California members of his New York company, the Mercury Theater: unknown radio and stage actors Joe Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane, and Bernard “Benny” Hermann, the acerbic composer, who had written the music for many of Orson’s radio shows.

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Before his arrival in 1940, Welles sent ahead his friend and producer, John Houseman, with the task of finding local talent with filmmaking experience. Houseman approached the dean of screenwriters, the legendary wit and legendary drunk Herman J. Mankiewicz, to help Orson write a screenplay, a form unfamiliar to the wunderkind. As Orson’s fabled luck would have it, Gregg Toland, Sam Goldwyn’s inspired cameraman, reputedly the highest-paid D.P. (Director of Photography) in Hollywood, didn’t have to be asked to join the company. Toland showed up at the Welles’s office one day and volunteered to teach the novice director all he needed to know about cameras and lenses.

Orson was so impressed by what Toland had taught him one weekend that he instantly hired Toland as his cinematographer and offered to share his screen credit. Orson also discovered that RKO had assigned two of their most talented young film cutters on the lot, Robert Wise, then 26 years old, and his assistant, Mark Robson, soon to become directors, to the project.

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As everyone knows, this unique combination—the best and brightest of New York joining forces with the most talented and knowledgeable in Hollywood—produced a result still considered by many to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. 

After Citizen Kane, as the world also knows, Orson’s career took a downhill slide. When the head of RKO, who had hired him, was removed from power, somehow Orson agreed to give up his contractual right to final cut before going to South America to make a propaganda film designed to improve America’s Good Neighbor Policy. While he was away, the new management previewed Welles’s second project, a two-hour eleven-minute cut of The Magnificent Ambersons to an unsympathetic audience in Pomona, 30 miles east of Los Angeles, who had come to see a musical comedy.

RKO’s management seized control of  the work print and ordered new scenes to be shot without Welles’s approval. Despite his loyalty to his director, studio employee Robert Wise had no recourse other than to do as he was told, not without imploring Welles to return to Hollywood to fight the fight no film editor could ever win alone.

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Despite his bluster and arrogance, Welles hated confrontation and opted instead to distance himself from the rest of post-production, sending back from South America mountains of paperwork specifying how the film should be re-cut, most of which the new management told Wise to ignore. The film, when released, recorded a loss of $620,000. Welles’s days of unprecedented power in Hollywood were over, never to return.

In the years to come, many spent in self-exile in Europe, Welles continued trying to find financing to make films on his own terms. Working as an actor in American and European-made films, he used the money he earned to write and direct several independent films outside the studio system. If we examine them now, as many scholars have, the obvious conclusion is that for all his acknowledged mastery of camera angles, the use of sound, music, his superb direction of actors and choreography of set pieces, Orson was, at best, only a decent writer.

The common misconception is that he created The Third Man, the best post-Hollywood film linked to him. In fact, Graham Greene, wrote the screenplay and Carol Reed directed it. Orson, however, always claimed that he wrote or improvised most of his own dialogue. Famously the speech delivered in a Ferris Wheel: “You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”

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Orson had another unexpected talent, essential to making films in Europe on a low budget: his ability to charm movie stars—Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, Tony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau and others—into working for little or no salary.

Why then was he never able  to assemble the same caliber of writers and technicians he’d started with in Hollywood? Was it only because he did not have enough money to pay their salaries? Surely, many of the world’s best cinematographers and editors would have readily collaborated for union minimum or for spec as did his actors.

Upon his arrival at the RKO studio in 1940, Orson once said that Hollywood was “the best electric train set any boy ever had.” In his grey exile years, either out of necessity or vanity, Welles taught himself to operate handheld cameras and to physically cut film on the American Moviola.  As his ego grew large as his girth, Welles no longer chose to share his “set” with anyone more skilled or talented than he was.

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Orson once said that Hollywood was “the best electric train set any boy ever had.”

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There is an apocryphal story that on the first day Welles came onto a set in Hollywood, one member of Greg Toland’s camera crew came up to his boss and pointed out that Orson was telling the electrical crew how to light the set. “Doesn’t he know that’s your job?” the member asked. Knowing that he could easily fix any technical mistakes Welles was making, Toland instructed his crew to do exactly what their director wanted. Toland, gifted as he was, knew he could never match Welles’s visual genius in using light dramatically. The spectacular theatrical effects in Kane result from that fortuitous collaboration.

In the years to come, many of the technicians whose credits appear on his later films were competent craftsmen, hardly on the level of his first studio associates. These men owned their equipment; their services as cinematographer and camera operator came as part of the rental package. As one of them, Gary Graver, has readily admitted, his director would begin each day standing with camera in hand in the exact position he wanted the shot. He did not collaborate as he had with Toland. He enforced the same command structure in the editing room following the photography. Those rarely to be heard of again assistants who aided Orson in assembling his later pictures and whose names appear on his films did so obediently, always following his instructions.

If one examines the technical work on many of these last films, finished and unfinished, the lighting, the editing, and the music scoring are rarely inspired. We can’t blame his crew entirely. The fault lies with their director. Instead of being the inspired conductor of an orchestra of brilliant collaborators, as he was at the beginning of his Hollywood career, Orson ended up a one-man band.

He began principal photography on his last film, The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 and completed it in 1976, but the film remained unedited and unreleased in cinemas for 40 years. Finally appearing in 2017, many years after Orson’s death, the American film editor Bob Murawski was the final artisan assigned the monumental task of examining and assembling a finished film from the thousands and thousands of feet of film Orson shot over the many years it took to complete.

Unlike Welles’s earlier projects, carefully scripted before production, Orson had, out of necessity, conceit or inspiration, decided to improvise much of the footage. Respectfully, dutifully, but finally misguidedly, Murawski studied what Orson’s previous assistants had done in their first cut, imitating the frenetic, more MTV than MTV style of their cuts—an editorial cliché in the 1970s, and even more formulaic decades later.

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Lenny Bruce once said that there was nothing more pathetic than a middle-aged hippy. With Orson’s last film, that hippy was Welles himself—an old man at his Moviola, dressing himself up foolishly in the fashionable tricks and conceits of an “in” generation—forty years later unfashionably  “out.”

As every film student is told, filmmaking is a collaborative art. At the end of his career, Orson Welles, for all his acknowledged theatrical and cinematic bravura, was no longer anyone’s collaborator. Had there been someone on set or in the cutting room to control his superhuman talent, as there had been in his RKO days, his film might have achieved his vision. Uncontained, it merely imploded and scattered.

As Orson’s contemporary, Oscar Levant, once said: “There is a fine line between genius and insanity, I have erased this line.”

In Touch of Evil, the last film Orson directed in Hollywood, an uncredited actress in a wig, Marlene Dietrich, plays a bordello Madame. There is a moment in the story, when the character Dietrich plays, Tanya,  sees her old friend, the now gargantuan Irish American detective Quinlan, Welles. She remarks, “You’re a mess, honey.”  Sadly, the same might also be said about a very great man and his work.

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of the magazine with a view to Centre House Press publishing the entire collection of essays in book form in spring 2026