Who wrote this?

[Tony]

Though made in a frantic hurry, with rented costumes and mysterious sets flung up out of paper-mache, "Macbeth" works. No film since "Kane" had had so profoundly organized or expressive a photographic style. The black and white is very theatrical but beautifully harnessed to a world made of fog-laden noon and dank castles. The whites are as bright as bone, the blacks like holes of iniquity. Depth and height are consistently evocative as forms of moral hierarchy, and as measures of remoteness and intimacy in the psyche... Welles is very good as an actor in Macbeth. As the triumphant warrior he is quite lean, with a slit of black mustache like a scar and dark curls beneath helmets that are part Visigoth, part Tartar ( no matter how cheap, the costuming is excellent)...The playing is heartfelt, and liberated, as if Welles had found energy in the decision to be the black, roaring rogue... So often sheepish or overdone as an actor, Welles now cries out unfettered and free, a man of such power as to be unfit for company...As for Lady Macbeth, [Welles] had Jeanette Nolan, who was twenty-six then...and making her movie debut. Over the years Ms. Nolan has been criticized for her playing...but the complaints are unjust. Together, she and Welles make the most passionate and tortured couple in all of Welles work. They make Arthur and Elsa Bannister seem like an actor's sketch- yet they know that more modern, reptilian embrace, somewhere between devouring and destroying, like the lovemaking of scorpions. For in "Macbeth", Welles made a disturbing portrait of marriage (or greedy sexual rapture) in which the having of children is replaced by the murderous grasping of power...The inner secret to Welles's Macbeth is that murder is their child, their true offspring.


Pretty great writing , eh? Can you guess who wrote it?

[maxrael]

Pretty great writing , eh? Can you guess who wrote it?

go on then... who?

[Harvey Chartrand]

Jean Cocteau?

[Tony]

Here's a second, shorter quote, and a clue: every Wellesian probably knows this writer by name, and believe me, you will be shocked when you find out who it is:

"Very few Americans as yet recognized that his trio of works in the sixties- "The Trial', 'Chimes at Midnight', and 'The Immortal Story'- far surpassed the things he had done from "The Stranger" to 'Touch of Evil'. The three literary adaptations, whatever their limits, are challenging, mature and heartfelt. It seems perverse now that so few saw their worth: if they had been first films, every one would have been seen as a masterpiece."

[Harvey Chartrand]

Pauline Kael!

[Harvey Chartrand]

And who wrote this?

Clue —
It's from a review of P.J. Posner's The Next Big Thing:

"The genre of stories about the aping of masterpieces is itself graced with masterpieces. Orson Welles's F for Fake turns the true tale of a charming Modigliani mimic into a fluent meditation on the futility and necessity of art and on his own trompe-le-monde tendencies, pulling rabbits from his capacious conjurer's hat until one of them bites, if tenderly, the audience's ass."

[Tony]

Harvey: You're still wrong; I'll leave it one more day, and give one more clue:

Probably everyone who is a Wellesnet member has a book by this author, and that's the surprise.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Charles Higham!

[Tony]

Harvey:

Excellent guess, but still wrong; I'm 99% sure you have this book. It has some of the best writing on Welles ever, and also....

As for your quote (re The next big thing), I've googled it to death and you've stumped me; is it by an author of a Welles book?

[Jeff Wilson]

Tony's quote is from everyone's favorite, David Thomson's Rosebud. Harvey's is by Ed Park of the Village Voice...

[Tony]

Congratulations, Jeff, you win the grand prize: your own Welles web-site!!!

um....


Good try, Harvey!

[Tony]

My surprise, of course, was that Thompson is a great writer (sometimes) and has great insights on Welles (occasionally); the trouble is, he has some moral problems with OW, but I think we should still read him, if only to challenge our own assumptions...though I know Welles would just chuckle and call him a "dime-store psychologizing pseudo-biographer".

IMO, anyways

[Jeff Wilson]

Thomson provides fodder for discussion, no question. I would encourage anyone interested in Thomson to check out last month's Film Comment (I think), which has an excellent article discussing Thomson and his Bio Dictionary of Film, looking at Thomson's motivations and techniques. Great stuff.