Discovering Orson Welles

Former "Chicago Reader" chief film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has dedicated much of his career to an exploration of the work of America's greatest - and most misunderstood - filmmaker, editing the book of interviews "This is Orson Welles", contributing to the most recent re-edit of TOUCH OF EVIL, transalting an Andre Bazin book on Welles into English, etc. He had the fortune to meet the director once himself, as a young critic, in Paris in the early 1970s, and that brief meeting has repercussions and echoes that appear throughout this, his first collection of essays devoted entirely to Welles.

Most of the material gathered here is previously published, though much of it is heavily re-edited and re-worked to form something of a chronological history of Rosenbaum's own relationship to Welles, his work, and other Welles writers and scholars. The earliest piece is a rebuttal to Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane", from 1971; the most recent, an edited transcript of a lecture from 2005. Rosenbaum concentrates, rightly in my mind, on lesser-known and mostly later portions of Welles' career, from unfinished works like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, DON QUIXOTE and THE DEEP to completed but obscure major creations such as FILMING 'OTHELLO' and THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. He's at his best in his lengthy explorations of such minutiae as the many different version of MR. ARKADIN; and he's not at his best when being occasionally petty in slamming other critics or writers. Then again, the conventional wisdom on Welles as argued over the years by people like Kael and Robert Carringer is that he was a one-hit wonder and a profligate who wasted his talent; if people like Jonathan Rosenbaum occasionally feel the need to get their dander up in indignantly arguing the obvious - that this was a filmmaker of prodigious talent who managed, against all odds, to keep doing great work under the most difficult of circumstance, should we blame them?

Very little of the book is spent on Welles' acting or radio careers - Rosenbaum's focus is on the director, not on his other endeavors (or his personal life for that matter). A reasonably thorough and up-to-date (2007) appendix on the state of Welles' films and their availability closes out this terrific book, essential to the serious Wellesian.

Having just finished Peter Tonguette's book on the later days of Welles, I was really re-inspired to read more about my favorite film director. I knew Jonathan Rosenbaum to be a dedicated Welles scholar and I was excited to see this book. It's simply a fantastic book featuring Rosenbaum's articles over the years on Welles.

If you're a Welles fan, you need to get this book!

I have always been a fan of Orson Welles on radio and television. Having collected a ton of radio broadcasts on CD and audio cassette and having watched most of his movies, I appreciate the genius of his work. I picked up a copy of this book recently and am amazed at the amount of research put into it. An aspect of Welles rarely discussed is his magic career. At the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention this September in Aberdeen, Maryland, I plan to attend the presentation about Orson Welles and his magic career so I can watch rare footage and films with Welles, and get an even deeper insight to his trickery. Book comes recommended.