Google Books on Welles

[Terry]

I did a "full view only" search for Welles on Google Books here.

Looks like an amazing resource, with everything from 1940s ads in Billboard to a letter to an editor by Christopher in the 90s.

Should keep Larry French's pantry nicely stocked with front page items for a time.


Terry

[Alan Brody]

Cool. I've found and read several fascinating articles already. Thanks!

[NoFake]

Store Hadji wrote:
I did a "full view only" search for Welles on Google Books here.

Looks like an amazing resource, with everything from 1940s ads in Billboard to a letter to an editor by Christopher in the 90s.

Should keep Larry French's pantry nicely stocked with front page items for a time.

The Walter Kerr article currently posted on Wellesnet's front page is an interesting example of what may be one of those articles. While Kerr on the whole is indeed being honest in expressing his opinion and does not beschmirch Welles's reputation or his work with inaccuracies, or offer gratuitous smears, the highlighted sentence is particularly painful to read:

"His fourth career—that of international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been—has occupied him for the past five or six years, and threatens to become the only one by which he will be remembered and dismissed."

Those words would become almost a prophecy of Welles's later years and beyond, something that Wellesnet and all of us persistently work to remedy. But the fact that it was being said -- and written -- when he was still a young man is a sock in the gut.

[nextren]

After the release of Othello, Welles' reputation increased slightly from the sock-in-the-gut nadir of Kerr's article. Arkadin also got Welles some favorable mention in the NYT, I believe, and TOE was critically recognized as the work of a genius within a few years after release. It was only later that Welles was finally regarded as a clown in the USA (though nowhere else).

By the way, Welles did not use "a blasting recording of the Blue Danube Waltz" in the Harlem Macbeth's banquet scene, as Kerr mistakenly states. Virgil Thomson, musical director of the production, wrote that he provided Welles with "Lanner waltzes for the party [banquet] scene." (Callow, v. 1, p. 233.) Lanner did not write "The Blue Danube"; Johann Strauss II did. Kerr couldn't tell the difference, apparently.

[ToddBaesen]

-

Reading Walter Kerr's negative attack piece on Welles, I had to wonder what might have prompted such an outburst. It wasn't as if Welles had a new play on Broadway or film that was due out in September, 1951. In fact, the latest Welles project Kerr mentions is the movie version of MACBETH, which Republic released in it's shortened 86-minute form in 1950.

Welles next major project, as Nextren notes, was when OTHELLO won the grand prize at the Cannes film festival in May, 1952. OTHELLO could hardly be called the work of a man who Kerr calls a "has-been" and an "international joke."

Which points out something that Mr. Kerr shares with Pauline Kael and David Thomson. While they may be very "good" writers, ready with a clever phrase, or a witty aphorism, they seem quite willing to ignore the facts, whenever it suits their purpose, especially concerning the work of Orson Welles.

That Walter Kerr doesn't seem to know the difference between a Strauss waltz and one by Lanner is easily explained, though. He was writing an attack piece, and since he was a drama critic, and not a music critic, this minor factual fault should be overlooked!

What's truly lamentable, is how there could actually be a "Walter Kerr Theater" on Broadway, but no "Orson Welles Theater." Even among theatergoers, I doubt that most people could even tell you who Walter Kerr was, today.

Meanwhile, thanks to such bad movies as TRANSFORMERS and his TV commercials for Paul Masson Wine, most people who have never even seen a single Welles directed movie, certainly know who Orson Welles was!

[Glenn Anders]

Todd: While I agree heartily that Broadway should unveil "The Orson Welles Theater," your penchant for lavishing willy-nilly praise on both earlier and latter Wellesian work strikes me as ignoring the common standards of the time in America. Welles had been, in typical American fashion, lionized in the the Theater, hailed in the new medium of Radio, and then "discovered" by the Movies. He had squired some of the most beautiful women of the 1930's and 1940's, married Rita Hayworth, "The Love Goddess." He was, in his entertainment projects for "the boys in uniform," at least distantly comparable to Bob Hope. In other words, he was in many places "a household name" at the end of World War II. In 1945, he was slim (with a little help from speed and corsets), successful, and just thirty years old. Whatever his problems with the Studios, the fan magazines were full of him and his family. He had been a Hollywood star-maker, major studios still leant their resources to his productions, and even his most grudging critics had to admit that in CITIZEN KANE he had made one of the most remarkable films in movie history.

Then, he became involved in independent political commentary and polemics, fell into debt, got behind on his taxes, indulged himself in ways that his body could no longer throw off, and took on the causes which fifteen years later would be known as "Civil Rights" and "Racial Equality."

A dangerous mix.

In the following six years, nearly every work he managed to complete in Movies, Radio, or Theater, with the breakthrough British exception of THE THIRD MAN, would be regarded as either flawed, meretricious or outright laughable.

Orson Welles at age 36, whom Walter Kerr, and Time Magzine before him, had formerly regarded with awe as "The Boy Wonder," was in the popular media vision, "a has-been." Reduced to obviously knowing stunts, no longer in possession of Rita Hayworth, exiled to Europe, with only his syndicated British "penny dreadful" Harry Lime and Black Museum series left to represent him on American Radio (at obscure times, on a Sunday afternoon), Welles soon lost his popular power with the American public, and began his long descent toward the wine commercials, the "roasts," the magic acts, and the late night TV talk shows.

In 1951, Walter Kerr is writing like a war correspondent about the bellicose reputation of Orson Welles as a popular actor. Unlike Henry Luce, Kerr is arguing that Welles could retrieve his career in America by concentrating on writing, producing and directing productions, leaving the acting to others. Unfortunately, with the exception of "Moby Dick Rehearsed" and MR ARKADIN (which did not travel well across the Atlantic), Welles' very ideas were being rejected, and he was more valued as an actor by the Motion Picture Industry than he was as a director, certainly as a producer (given his extravagant flourishes -- at least in the press, if not the accounting books). Save for TOUCH OF EVIL, which depended for its Hollywood creation on barter and the kindness of reigning stars, he invested himself in brave European art productions which fewer American audiences cared to see. Thankfully, no "reality shows," celebrity rehab series, or tabloid TV exposes existed to follow him, or to tempt him further.

Todd, you continually refer to "facts" which were not in evidence at the time, even to his earliest and most loyal fans like David Thomson and myself.

We were there.

Even sorrow should require a clear eye.

Glenn

[nextren]

I don't believe it was necessarily Kerr's intention to smear Welles dishonestly. Certainly Welles caused a great deal of resentment at the time; but not all the resentment was of his good qualities or success. Some of it must have been (this is conjecture; I wasn't there) resentment of finding the ubiquitous ballyhoo about Orson Welles rammed down one's throat for ten years, then suddenly suspecting (however rightly or wrongly) that it was BS.

The system builds up a "personality," then it tears him down. This is widely known. So much praise and fawning had been lavished on Welles that he was due for comeuppance.

So, the minute he puts on a little weight, starts hectoring on the radio instead of entertaining, gets divorced, gets in trouble with the IRS, moves out of the country, and stars in some cheap movies - bang, the "Fall" section of "Rise and Fall" jumps on to the boards!

The contrast between the ballyhoo and the reality reveals the former genius and hero as human. There are two different general reactions to this revelation. 1. Resentment of the previous ballyhoo (=Kerr). Yet Kerr can't disown the ballyhoo, because he made some of it himself, he believed it, and believes it still, and much of it is/was true. 2. A malignant sense of betrayal and injustice, and a burning desire to grind in the mud one's former god or father figure, who is now revealed as a false god and false father (=some writers of books that I won't name).

Kerr strikes me as merely exasperated. Others strike me as stalker types. They love you until you do something "wrong" - then they try to kill you...

Welles was "the hope" of too many people. I myself get very uncomfortable when people remark to me: "We're relying on you," or "We're counting on you." Not my scene, as Welles might have said in later years, decisively lighting his cigar.

[Alan Brody]

The system builds up a "personality," then it tears him down.

That's seems to be an American tradition. I think in one of Callow's books he said something like 'putting someone up on a pedestal makes for a great story, but shooting him off that pedestal makes for an even better story'. I've seen bits of the Kerr article quoted in other Welles books, so it's a pretty significant article in the story of Welles. It will be interesting to see what Callow III has to say about it. This article was apparently written right after Welles's eccentric theatre show that he took across Europe - the one 'hooted off the stage' - where he exchanged bits of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, two short plays of his own and other stuff freely as he saw fit. It was a tour Welles said he needed to do, but I'm sure a lot of people in America, hearing reports about it, probably thought he had flipped his lid.

Kerr's plea to have Welles the director back without Welles the actor seems somewhat naive, but it also points up a basic problem that existed throughout Welles's career: the critics were simply not interested in, and were sometimes even hostile to, Welles the celebrity/actor, whereas the public was simply not interested in Welles the artist/director.