tvqc.com

Cet article est une traduction intégrale d’un texte publié sur le site Scientific American

Quand le VIH est passé des chimpanzés aux humains quelque part au début des années 1900, il a traversé un gouffre de plusieurs millions d’années d’évolution. Cependant, les scientifiques ont annoncé récemment que le virus des taches en anneaux du tabac a fait un saut invraisemblable. Il a traversé un gouffre béant d’une largeur de 1,6 milliards d’années.

C’est probablement une mauvaise nouvelle pour son hôte, l’abeille, le cupidon des cultures et porteur de miel. Ce sont deux services envers lesquels les humains sont éternellement reconnaissants et sûrement incapables de se passer dans le cas de ce dernier. Les abeilles pollinisent la majorité de nos cultures de fruits et de noix ainsi que plusieurs légumes – environ 90 d’entre eux – sans lesquels l’humanité serait nutritionnellement appauvrie. Néanmoins, des pénuries sont possibles dans ces circonstances, comme les populations d’abeilles en Amérique sont en déclin depuis les dernières années pour des raisons multiples et insaisissables. Le syndrome d’effondrement des colonies d’abeilles, comme on l’appelle, a été signalé pour la première fois en 2006 et s’est propagé à travers le monde. Plusieurs virus, parasites, et pesticides ont été impliqués, mais aucune fumée indiquant réellement la cause n’est encore apparue.

Pendant que les scientifiques étudiaient le rôle possible du pollen dans la diffusion des virus d’abeilles connus, une équipe de scientifiques des États-Unis et de la Chine a commencé à examiner des abeilles et le pollen pour identifier des virus de toutes les sortes. À leur grande surprise, comme ils l’ont annoncé le 21 janvier dans le journal mBio, ils ont découvert un phytovirus commun – le virus des taches en anneaux du tabac – ayant manifestement infecté les abeilles. Était-ce un simple visiteur transitoire? Ou alors, y avait-il bâti son foyer à un endroit inconcevable comparativement à ses hôtes habituels?

Leur premier indice fut le génome du virus. Le virus des taches en anneaux du tabac est un virus ribonucléique (ARN). Bien que l’ADN agisse comme entrepôt stable d’instructions pour assembler des protéines, l’ARN est la manière dont cette information est transmise à la partie de la cellule qui les fabrique. Il est transitoire de nature, et recyclé après un court moment. L’ARN polymérase, l’enzyme fabriquant l’ARN en copiant l’ADN, n’est pas aussi prudent que l’ADN polymérase, l’enzyme qui la réplique. Il lui manque un important mécanisme de relecture que l’ADN polymérase possède (correction de 3`->5`), donc il est plus porté à faire des erreurs qu’on appelle des mutations. Chez les humains, ce n’est pas un problème car la vie d’une souche d’ARN unique est brève et les erreurs se terminent avec sa destruction.

Cependant, pour les virus ARN, leur information héréditaire est l’ARN, et le taux extrêmement élevé de mutation des virus ARN est un moteur puissant d’évolution. Il génère la diversité sur laquelle la sélection naturelle peut se faire. Les erreurs peuvent rapidement conduire à des virions déformés ou dysfonctionnels (très normal pour les virus) tout comme à la conquête de nouveaux hôtes (très anormal pour les virus). Les virus ARN ont généré plusieurs «célébrités»; le VIH est un virus ARN, tout comme le SRAS et la grippe. Les virus ARN sont la source la plus probable de virus sautant d’un hôte à l’autre ou d’infections augmentant soudainement leur virulence, selon les auteurs de l’étude.

Néanmoins, sauter d’un règne à un autre n’est pas un évènement courant. La plupart des phytovirus ne dépendent pas des insectes mangeurs de plantes pour changer d’hôte. Toutefois, peu d’entre eux infectent vraiment ces insectes. L’exception est la famille des Rhabdoviridae, la famille des virus dont fait partie la rage. Certains virus de cette famille sont connus pour infecter autant la plante que l’animal hôte.

Malgré son nom, le virus des taches en anneaux de tabac infecte plusieurs plantes autre que celle du tabac, plus de 35 familles, dont les tomates, les concombres, les fèves, et les plantes ligneuses. C’est un virus qui adore les plantes, même si celles-ci ne les aiment pas assurément en retour. Il peut rabougrir ou tuer la plante, et possiblement en décolorer les feuilles d’un motif caractéristique de taches en anneaux dans le processus.

Le virus des taches en anneaux du tabac se propage entre les plantes n’importe comment – il n’est pas difficile. Il peut être transmis directement à la nouvelle génération via une graine infectée. Il peut être aussi transmis d’une plante à l’autre par un nématode dague, un ver de terre minuscule ayant une aiguille perçante pour saper les fluides des plantes. Tout autre insecte suceur de plantes ou mangeur de feuilles peut aussi faire le travail : les pucerons, les thrips, les sauterelles ou les altises, peut-être. Même les abeilles. Les abeilles peuvent propager le virus à une nouvelle plante via du pollen infecté.

Cela qui nous ramène au mystère du phytovirus apparu dans l’abeille, comment il est arrivé là, et ce qu’il fait. Les abeilles gèrent le pollen de manière assez intime. Leur corps est chargé électriquement d’une manière où le pollen se colle à elles, mais elles ont aussi des paniers sur leur pattes postérieures où elles enfouissent des masses de leur produit. Puis, de retour à la ruche, elles transforment le pollen en «pain d’abeille» le combinant avec du miel et leurs propres sécrétions glandulaires, qu’elles pourraient manger plus tard. En gros, les abeilles se vautrent dans le pollen comme des porcs dans la boue, ce qui permet à n’importe quel virus entreprenant venu du pollen d’avoir les moyens et le motif pour changer d’hôte. Que le virus ait établi sa résidence à long terme dans le nouvel hôte restait à voir, cependant.

Les scientifiques ont pris des échantillons des tissus de partout sur le corps des abeilles afin de voir si il était concentré dans leur intestin et leurs glandes salivaires, les endroits où il se retrouverait le plus s’il ne faisait que passer. Ils ont trouvé quelque chose de très différent. Le virus n’a pas semblé se répliquer du tout dans leur intestin et leur glandes salivaires, et très peu de particules de virus ont été trouvées là. Le virus s’est plutôt propagé partout sur le corps des abeilles et s’est répliqué particulièrement bien dans leurs ailes, dans leurs nerfs, dans leurs antennes, dans leurs trachées, et dans leur sang (techniquement, leur hémolymphe). De manière inquiétante, il semblait favoriser les tissus nerveux. Loin d’être un intrus poli et non-envahissant, on dirait dit que le virus avait défoncé la serrure de la porte d’entrée, dévalisé le frigo et la cave à vin, et appelé pour installer le câble.

Toutefois, la situation des abeilles s’est empirée. Lorsque les scientifiques ont regardé les mites Varroa destructor, qui ont été impliquées dans le syndrome de l’effondrement des colonies d’abeilles et qui se comportent comme des tiques parasitiques des abeilles (si les tiques avaient la taille d’assiettes), leur intestin était rempli du virus des taches en anneaux du tabac. Comme pour les tiques, les mites Varroa sapent l’énergie de leur hôte et peuvent répandre des maladies. Toutefois, contrairement aux abeilles, les infections des taches en anneaux du tabac des mites se limitaient à leur intestin, réduisant grandement la possibilité que les virus se nourrissaient des parasites d’abeilles et des abeilles.

Pour voir ce que les virus peuvent révéler sur les évènements, les scientifiques ont comparé les gènes des taches en anneaux de tabac des plantes à deux des abeilles et des mites. Les virus des abeilles et des mites étaient très similaires, ce qui signifie que les mites ont attrapé le virus des abeilles, et ils ont obtenu leur virus via un ancêtre commun – une seule rencontre malchanceuse entre une certaine abeille et un certain grain de pollen, peut-être. De plus, le pollen des abeilles caché dans la ruche, le «pain d’abeille» mentionné plus tôt, a été contaminé par la même souche.

Toutefois, la seule présence du virus dans le corps d’abeilles ne révèle pas si le virus est menaçant. Par conséquent, les scientifiques ont obtenu les échantillons de six ruches fortes et quatre ruches faibles sur l’étendue d’un an pour voir si les tâches d’anneaux du tabac avaient des effets nuisibles sur leur nouvel hôte mobile. Ils ont recherché le virus et une variété d’autres impliqués dans le syndrome de l’effondrement des colonies d’abeilles, dont le virus des ailes déformées (DWV), le virus de la cellule noire de reine (BQCV), le virus israélien de la paralysie aiguë (IAPV). En effet, de plus grandes concentrations du virus des tâches d’anneaux du tabac et de ces autres virus semblaient présager l’effondrement de la colonie.

Il reste encore plusieurs inconnus. L’équipe ne sait pas si le virus peut survivre chez les abeilles sans une nouvelle introduction par le biais du pollen. Ils ne savent pas non plus si les abeilles peuvent donner le virus à des plantes non-infectées. Bien sûr, il reste difficile à dire si ces virus suspects tous ensemble sont la cause de l’effondrement, un symptôme d’une maladie sous-jacente (les abeilles affaiblies pourraient être plus facilement infectées par un virus), ou les deux. L’histoire du syndrome de l’effondrement des colonies d’abeilles demeure incomplète.

Il serait bon de se pencher sur la raison pour laquelle cette invasion virale en particulier est si remarquable. Un virus désirant envahir un nouvel hôte – encore plus dans le cas d’un nouvel hôte séparé de l’hôte actuel par plus d’un milliard d’années d’évolution – doit surmonter plusieurs obstacles d’importance. Il doit rencontrer le nouvel hôte. Les protéines de sa capside doivent évoluer pour lui permettre d’accéder aux cellules de l’hôte, bien qu’un changement porté à une ou à quelques sous-unités de protéines appelées acides aminés soit peut-être assez pour y arriver. Ensuite, le génome du virus doit évoluer pour lui permettre d’envahir le système immunitaire de son nouvel hôte et détourner sa machinerie réplicative. Finalement, le virus doit trouver un moyen de se répandre d’un hôte à l’autre. C’est un défi de taille, il semble extraordinaire que le virus des tâches en anneaux du tabac aient pu l’accomplir.

Selon les auteurs de cette recherche, c’est la preuve que les abeilles peuvent être infectées par du pollen contaminé par des phytovirus, mais ce n’est peut-être pas la toute première ou dernière manifestation. Environ 5% des phytovirus proviennent du pollen. Quel est le matériel génétique de la plupart d’entre eux? L’ARN (acide ribonucléique).

Référence : Li J.L., Cornman R.S., Evans J.D., Pettis J.S., Zhao Y., Murphy C., Peng W.J., Wu J., Hamilton M. & Boncristiani H.F. & (2013). Systemic Spread and Propagation of a Plant-Pathogenic Virus in European Honeybees, Apis mellifera, mBio, 5 (1) e00898-13-e00898-13. DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00898-13

Source : Jennifer Frazer for Scientific American

 

Seronet.info

Québec : évaluation du niveau de risque de transmission du VIH

Le 19 juin 2014, l’Institut national de santé publique du Québec, appuyé par un avis du Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux, a publié “Consensus d’experts : charge virale et risque de transmission du VIH”. Ce consensus stipule qu’à charge virale indétectable et sous certaines conditions, le risque de transmission du VIH au sein des couples sérodifférents, qu’ils soient de même sexe ou non, est réduit à un niveau qualifié de “négligeable ou très faible” pour des activités qui étaient précédemment considérées à risque élevé. Les activités visées par ce consensus sont les relations orales et les relations anales ou vaginales sans condom. Pour s’assurer que le niveau de risque soit “négligeable ou très faible”, six conditions doivent être respectées :

1 – Partenaires stables et exclusifs
Le couple doit être formé depuis au moins trois mois. La stabilité et l’exclusivité servent à éliminer l’incertitude d’exposition à d’autres ITSS (infections sexuellement transmissibles) qui, selon les données scientifiques actuelles, augmentent le risque d’infection au VIH. Pour l’instant, le risque de transmission du VIH chez les personnes séropositives qui ne sont pas en couple n’est pas pris en compte, car il n’existe aucune donnée scientifique sur le sujet.

2 – Aucune autre infection transmise sexuellement ou par le sang (ITSS)
Les irritations et lésions offrant des portes d’entrée au virus, la présence d’une ITSS peut avoir un impact sur la charge virale et sur les possibilités de transmettre ou de contracter le VIH. Il est donc clair que l’absence d’ITSS offre la certitude d’un risque négligeable ou très faible de transmission du VIH.

3 – Le partenaire séropositif a une charge virale indétectable sur au moins deux mesures consécutives sur une période de six mois
L’exigence de tests consécutifs sur une période définie sert à s’assurer que la charge virale reste toujours indétectable. S’il y a une virémie intermittente (ou “blip” dans le jargon médical), on remet le compteur des mois d’indétectabilité à zéro à partir de la prochaine mesure indétectable. Entre temps, le port du condom sera probablement recommandé au couple.

4 – Le partenaire séropositif a un taux d’adhérence aux médicaments de 95 % ou plus
95 % est le taux d’adhérence requis pour que le virus ne développe pas de mutations qui entrainent une résistance d’une ou plusieurs molécules du traitement anti-VIH. Cette résistance à une ou plusieurs molécules entraine une augmentation de la charge virale et donc du risque de transmission du VIH. Ce qui veut dire qu’une personne ayant un traitement à une dose par jour ne peut oublier de prendre plus d’une dose par mois ou encore de ne pas la prendre à la même heure chaque jour.

5 – Les deux partenaires ont un suivi médical régulieravec dépistage d’ITSS, mesure de charge virale pour le partenaire séropositif et dépistage du VIH pour le partenaire séronégatif
Cette exigence assure un suivi médical efficace en permettant de détecter très tôt toute ITSS, variation de la charge virale ou transmission du VIH au partenaire séronégatif. Par ailleurs, cette condition permet de responsabiliser chacun des partenaires sur l’importance de préserver son état santé.

6 – Les deux partenaires ont un counseling approprié et régulier qui touche les conditions énumérées précédemment, la réduction des risques, le port du condom et, pour le partenaire séropositif, les aspects légaux et les conséquences possibles de la non-divulgation du statut sérologique à son partenaire
Le counseling sert à offrir aux partenaires des opportunités de s’informer et de valider leur compréhension des éléments nommés dans cette condition. À long terme, ces suivis permettront aussi de communiquer les nouveaux développements scientifiques qui peuvent affecter leur évaluation du risque lors de leurs activités sexuelles. Notons que dans le cas d’un couple qui respecte l’ensemble de ces conditions, il ne peut pas être question de non dévoilement étant donné que la personne séronégative connaît le statut de son partenaire.

Si une seule de ces six conditions n’est pas respectée, il n’est pas possible alors d’assurer que le risque de transmission du VIH reste “négligeable ou très faible”. Par ailleurs, ce consensus ne remet pas en question la sécurité du condom, ce dernier étant toujours un outil de prévention très efficace. Cependant, il permet, ce qui est une très grande avancée, aux couples sérodifférents de mettre en place des stratégies de prévention qui conviennent à leur situation, que celles-ci incluent ou non le condom.

Qu’est-ce qu’un risque de transmission “négligeable ou très faible” ?
Selon ce consensus, les activités sexuelles concernées présentent toujours un potentiel de transmission du VIH. Le risque de transmission étant associé à l’échange de liquide organique (sperme, liquide prééjaculatoire, sécrétions vaginales, sang ou lait maternel), la faible quantité de ces liquides ou de virus dans ces liquides ainsi que le médium d’échange semblent permettre de limiter grandement le risque de transmission.

Informationhospitaliere.com

La biotech lyonnaise Valneva se rapproche de l’américaine GeoVax pour développer des vaccins anti-VIH sur sa lignée cellulaire EB66® et ainsi entamer dans les prochains mois des essais cliniques.

Le 6 août 2014, Valneva a annoncé avoir signé un nouvel accord de licence avec la société américaine GeoVax Labs pour le développement
clinique de vaccins MVA recombinants sur sa lignée cellulaire EB66®.
Ce nouvel accord vient renforcer la collaboration entre les deux sociétés qui travaillent depuis 2008 à la création d’un processus visant à produire le composant MVA (Modified Vaccinia Ankara) du vaccin combiné VIH/SIDA de GeoVax en utilisant la lignée cellulaire EB66® de Valneva.
L’accord va ainsi permettre à GeoVax d’entamer des essais cliniques avec un vaccin candidat dérivé de cellules EB66® et permettre le transfert de la lignée cellulaire à un fabricant tiers produisant selon les normes de Bonnes pratiques de fabrication (BPF).
« L’équipe de recherche et développement de Valneva a été déterminante dans l’adaptation de la lignée cellulaire EB66® pour la production de vaccins MVA recombinants destinés aux pays en voie de développement où le coût des vaccins représente un problème majeur. La EB66® a le potentiel de répondre à une demande de millions de doses à un prix raisonnable », a indiqué Robert McNally, président et CEO de GeoVax.
« Nous sommes ravis de poursuivre notre relation de long terme avec GeoVax, une des sociétés les plus avancées dans le monde dans le développement de vaccins contre le VIH. Le VIH/Sida est une menace très importante pour la santé mondiale et il est très important pour Valneva de prendre part au développement de mesures préventives efficaces au travers de la mise à disposition de notre lignée cellulaire
EB66® qui aujourd’hui commence à devenir un standard dans la production de vaccins », ont ajouté Thomas Lingelbach, président et CEO, et Franck Grimaud, président et CBO de Valneva.
Les termes financiers de l’accord n’ont pas été communiqués mais incluent un paiement initial ainsi que des paiements annuels. Ces candidats vaccins …

Seronet.info

Lemonde.fr

L’industrie du film pornographique à Los Angeles a brièvement cessé ses activités, jeudi et vendredi 29 août, après une fausse alerte au VIH. « L’annonce du test positif au VIH d’un acteur était un test erroné. L’acteur n’est pas séropositif. (…) La production peut reprendre dans l’industrie du film pour adultes », a expliqué la Free Speech Coalition, la principale association du secteur pornographique. L’organisation avait lancé le moratoire sur les tournages de film X la veille « par précaution ».

Ces annonces surviennent alors que la majeure partie de l’industrie du film X s’oppose au port obligatoire du préservatif, voté à Los Angeles fin 2012. Depuis l’adoption de cette loi, la production de films pornographiques est en chute libre dans la ville, et se déplace vers les Etats voisins et le Canada.

Le Los Angeles Times évoque une diminution de 90 % des permis délivrés pour tourner des films classés X entre 2012 et 2013 dans la ville. Selon le quotidien américain, l’industrie du film X de Los Angeles représentait dans les années 2000 entre 10 et 20 000 emplois, pour des revenus estimés à 4 milliards de dollars par an.

Selon la Free Speech Coalition, qui tente de freiner la délocalisation des tournages, aucun acteur de porno n’a été contaminé à Los Angeles au cours des neuf dernières années, alors que les acteurs sont testés tous les quinze jours pour toute une série de maladies sexuellement transmissibles en plus du VIH. En 2013, après le vote de la loi les obligeant à porter un préservatif pendant un tournage, deux acteurs de films X avaient tout de même été testés séropositifs, déclenchant un important moratoire. Les représentants du secteur avaient ensuite affirmé que ces personnes avaient été contaminées hors des plateaux.

le360.ma

Kiosque360. L’avenue de la Victoire à Rabat est devenue le terrain d’action d’une bande de malfaiteurs qui se travestissent pour piéger des automobilistes intéressés par des relations homosexuelles.

Journal de Montréal

Britney Spears a écrit une lettre touchante à un fan homosexuel qui l’avait remercié de lui avoir donné le courage de révéler son homosexualité.

David LeCours avait rencontré l’interprète de Womanizer avant son concert à Las Vegas la semaine dernière et lui avait remis une lettre pour la remercier de l’avoir aidé à accepter sa sexualité et de lui avoir donné le courage de révéler son homosexualité à ses proches.

Mardi dernier, David LeCours a reçu une réponse réconfortante de la part de la chanteuse.

Britney Spears a écrit: «J’ai été heureuse de recevoir votre lettre. J’ai été ravie d’apprendre combien vous avez été courageux de révéler votre homosexualité. On m’a toujours dit que ce qui importait le plus c’était de savoir ce que l’on a dans le coeur…»

«J’essaie de suivre mon coeur et mes rêves chaque jour de ma vie et je pense que c’est cela qui m’a permis d’en être où j’en suis aujourd’hui. Je suis très reconnaissante d’avoir un fan comme vous qui a pris le temps de m’écrire une lettre aussi touchante. Votre lettre est à la fois touchante et sincère. Je vous souhaite le meilleur pour l’avenir et j’espère que vous garderez le sourire. Ayez toujours le sourire, Britney Spears.»

David LeCours a ajouté sur Instagram.com: «Honnêtement je suis sans voix. Je veux simplement vous remercier d’avoir pris le temps de me répondre et d’être une telle source d’inspiration pour moi. Vous êtes tout pour moi et votre réponse m’a fait chaud au coeur. Merci beaucoup, je vous aime.»

Jeuneafrique.com

Le rappeur ougandais Bobi Wine s’est vu refuser un visa pour le Royaume-Uni en raison de déclarations homophobes, que des citoyens britanniques ont dénoncées dans une pétition signée par plus de 600 personnes.

Goodbye Buckingham Palace, Big Ben et l’abbaye de Westminster. Le célèbre rappeur ougandais Bobi Wine n’aura pas l’occasion de visiter les lieux emblématiques de la capitale anglaise où il devait se produire en concert. Les autorités britanniques lui ont refusé le visa à cause de ses propos homophobes.

Lors de la diffusion d’un épisode de télé-réalité dont il est le protagoniste, Bobi Wine a déclamé les paroles de sa nouvelle chanson dans laquelle il ne mâche pas ses mots : “Brûlez toutes les folles. Les Ougandais, tous derrière moi pour combattre les folles.” Le terme “folles” faisant référence – vous l’aurez compris – aux homosexuels. Ces déclarations ont provoqué une levée de bouclier des défenseurs de la cause homosexuelle qui ont lancé une pétition en ligne pour interdire les concerts du rappeur au Royaume-Uni, signée par plus de 600 internautes.

Au Royaume Uni, la loi sur la justice pénale et l’immigration de 2008 interdit toute incitation à la haine en raison de l’orientation sexuelle. La position intolérante du “président du ghetto”, tel qu’il se décrit sur son compte Instagram, aura donc finalement eu raison de son séjour londonien.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que Bobi Wine, Robert Kyagulanyi de son vrai nom, s’en prend aux minorités sexuelles. Le 30 juillet, il avait déjà fermement critiqué les homosexuels au nom de sa “liberté d’expression” dans une interview au journal ougandais The Daily Monitor. “Je ne suis pas d’accord avec eux [comme] 99% des Ougandais”, avait-il déclaré.

Plusieurs de ses chansons interdites

L’homosexualité fait débat en Ouganda où une loi répressive avait provoqué l’ire de la communauté internationale et la crainte des minorités sexuelles du pays en février. Le président Yoweri Museveni avait alors signé un texte de loi qui prévoyait la dénonciation obligatoire des homosexuels et la prison à vie pour les récidivistes. Annulée par la Cour constitutionnelle le 1er août, cette loi devrait être soumise à un nouveau vote des députés dès la reprise de la session parlementaire. Pour l’heure, l’homosexualité reste illégale dans le pays, selon une législation mise en place par l’ancien colon anglais

Le rappeur Bobi Wine s’est déjà illustré par ses prises de position “choc” qui lui ont valu l’interdiction de certaines de ses chansons par le gouvernement. Très apprécié des Ougandais, il avait notamment provoqué les autorités de Kampala en réclamant la prise en considération des besoins des plus nécessiteux. “Ses déclarations vont-elles faire baisser sa côte de popularité ?”, s’interroge le site This is Africa qui relaie l’information. Pas si sûr… Elles pourraient peut-être même lui faire gagner des soutiens dans la société ougandaise.

Seronet.info

Plusieurs organisations non gouvernementales libanaises ont condamné l’arrestation (mi août) par la police de vingt-sept hommes soupçonnés d’actes homosexuels et d'”outrage public à la pudeur” dans un hammam à Beyrouth (Liban). Dans un communiqué, ces organisations affirment que les 27 hommes sont détenus depuis le 9 août, après avoir été arrêtés dans un bain turc et interrogés sur leurs orientations sexuelles. Parmi eux figurent le propriétaire du bain, ses employés et des clients, selon les signataires, dont Helem, une organisation non gouvernementale libanaise de défense des droits LGBT, une structure unique dans le monde arabe. “La perquisition est survenue après l’arrestation d’un individu qui a révélé que le Agha Hammam était un lieu de rencontres à caractère sexuel pour hommes”, précise le communiqué. Le procureur général a informé les ONG que les personnes arrêtées pouvaient être inculpées pour “actes indécents en public”, mais qu’il n’avait pas l’intention de les poursuivre en vertu du controversé article 534 du code pénal qui interdit les relations “contre nature”, passibles d’une peine de prison allant jusqu’à un an, indique l’AFP. De son côté, la police a précisé aux organisations que “les enquêteurs ont pu obtenir sans usage de la force la confirmation de la part de certains suspects de leur orientation sexuelle”. Les organisations ont demandé au procureur et à la police de respecter la dignité des personnes arrêtées, les mettant en garde contre l’usage “du test anal”, souvent utilisé par la police au Liban pour déterminer l’homosexualité d’un homme et régulièrement qualifié “de test de la honte”. Le Liban est considéré comme le pays le plus libéral du monde arabe concernant les droits des homosexuels, mais les lois demeurent conservatrices et la police mène régulièrement des descentes dans les boîtes de nuit et autres lieux fréquentés par les homosexuels.

By Roger-Luc Chayer (Translation by Google)

STUNNING !!!
Steeve Biron sentenced to 6 years in prison …
Amazement at the court of Quebec on ​​August 29, that the case Steeve Biron was more than surprising denouement, 6 years in prison for a user to Gay411 who solicited sexual encounters.

Small reminder of the case … Steve Biron is a young man from Quebec who, like many gays, solicited sexual encounters mainly through the famous Gay411 site. Biron essentially sought relationships “bareback,” his followers knowing that barebacking is a form of Russian roulette that is having unprotected sex and risky, with individuals who may potentially be carriers of HIV or other sexually transmitted. The kick to his followers is to get greater enjoyment because of the voltage generated by the risk-taking. Knowing HIV, Biron did not mention his status to his acquaintances and like most followers of barebacking, “playing the game” until an ex-fuck decides to violate his privacy and to consult his record hospital, that person being a nurse.

The victim nick is then presented to the police to lodge a complaint, the police started looking for other fucks bareback Biron and 15 people have come forward. Following the filing of charges of sexual assault, Gay Globe investigated and managed to get under a false identity via Gay411, multiple appointments with most pseudo-victims, clearly indicating that it was for bareback without condom use THESE SAME PEOPLE WERE SAYING THEY SIGNED COMPLAINTS HAD NEVER GRANTED tO THIS TYPE oF SEX.

The case was in the bag for our survey at least, but now counsel Biron decided initially not to submit our dossier of thousands of pages in evidence at the original trial, and worse, he decided not to mention during argument, saying while the court did not take into account. But now, in the judgment of Judge Marie-Claude Gilbert, it specifically mentions that the informed consent of the victims did not and they were betrayed. FALSE since our record proved otherwise.

Steeve Biron sees therefore sentenced to six years in prison, he will have to serve in a federal prison. The order banning publication remaining, we can not mention the names of victims. The worst part of this whole thing is that from now on, anyone who knows he is infected with HIV can be arrested and sentenced to prison if she fails to mention her status to relationships.

Quebec back 20 years back in campaigning for HIV!
Because of the refusal on the part of counsel for Steeve Biron produce a journalistic record showing that some victims solicited by knowingly bareback relationships even after filing their complaints, contradicting their claims on informed consent and which can Steeve Biron benefit of reasonable doubt required for acquittal, that the people may benefit from HIV testing to quickly process could now refuse these tests since discovering their new status, they become potentially criminal if they do not comply with certain obligations disclosure to all partners BEFORE having only one sex. Go now to convince young people to get tested! Between ignorance and prison, freedom is worth more !!!

Par Roger-Luc Chayer

STUPÉFACTION!!!
Steeve Biron condamné à 6 ans de prison…
Stupéfaction au palais de justice de Québec le 29 août dernier, voilà que l’Affaire Steeve Biron trouvait un dénouement plus que surprenant, 6 ans de prison pour un utilisateur de Gay411 qui sollicitait des rencontres sexuelles.

Petit rappel de l’affaire… Steeve Biron est un jeune homme de Québec qui, comme de nombreux gais, sollicitait des rencontres sexuelles principalement via le site très connu Gay411. Biron sollicitait essentiellement des relations «bareback», ses adeptes sachant très bien que le barebacking est une forme de roulette russe qui consiste à avoir des relations non protégées et risquées, avec des individus qui peuvent potentiellement être porteurs du VIH ou d’autres maladies sexuellement transmises. Le kick pour ses adeptes est d’obtenir une plus grande jouissance à cause de la tension générée par le prise de risque. Se sachant séropositif, Biron ne mentionnait pas son statut à ses rencontres et comme pour la plupart des adeptes du barebacking, «jouait la game», jusqu’à ce qu’une ex-baise décide de violer sa vie privée et de consulter son dossier hospitalier, cette personne étant infirmier.

La pseudo victime s’est ensuite présentée à la police pour porter plainte, les policiers se sont mis à la recherche des autres baises bareback de Biron et 15 personnes se sont manifestées. Suite au dépôt d’accusations d’agression sexuelle, Gay Globe a fait enquête et a réussi à obtenir, sous une fausse identité via Gay411, des rendez-vous multiples avec la plupart des pseudo-victimes, en mentionnant clairement que c’était pour du bareback, sans l’usage de condom, CES MÊMES PERSONNES ÉTAIENT SIGNATAIRES DE PLAINTES DISANT QU’ELLES N’AVAIENT JAMAIS CONSENTIES À CE TYPE DE SEXE.

L’affaire était dans le sac, pour notre enquête du moins, mais voilà que l’avocat de Biron a décidé d’abord de ne pas présenter notre dossier de milliers de pages en preuve lors du procès initial et, pire, il a décidé de ne pas en faire mention lors des plaidoiries, affirmant alors que le tribunal n’en tiendrait pas compte. Or, voilà que dans le jugement de la Juge  Marie-Claude Gilbert, elle mentionne spécifiquement que le consentement éclairé des victimes ne s’est pas fait et qu’elles ont été trahies. FAUX puisque notre dossier prouvait le contraire.

Steeve Biron se voit donc condamné à 6 ans de prison, qu’il devra purger dans une prison fédérale. L’ordonnance de non-publication subsistant, nous ne pouvons pas mentionner le nom des victimes. Le pire dans toute cette affaire est que dorénavant, toute personne qui se sait infectée par le VIH peut être arrêtée et condamnée à la prison si elle omet de mentionner son statut à ses relations.

Le Québec retourne 20 ans en arrière en matière de campagnes de dépistage du VIH!
À cause du refus de la part de l’avocat de Steeve Biron de produire un dossier journalistique prouvant que certaines victimes sollicitaient en toute connaissance de cause des relations bareback même après le dépôt de leurs plaintes, contredisant leurs affirmations sur le consentement éclairé et pouvant faire bénéficier Steeve Biron du doute raisonnable nécessaire à son acquittement, voilà que les personnes susceptibles de bénéficier de dépistages du VIH pour se traiter rapidement pourraient dorénavant refuser ces tests car en découvrant leur nouveau statut, elle deviennent potentiellement criminelles si elles ne respectent pas certaines obligations de divulgation à tous leurs partenaires, AVANT d’avoir une seule relation sexuelle. Allez convaincre maintenant les jeunes de se faire dépister! Entre l’ignorance et la prison, la liberté vaut plus cher!!!

Wikipédia

George Orson Welles (/ˈwɛlz/; May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media: in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaptation of Julius Caesar; in radio, the debut of the Mercury Theatre, whose The War of the Worlds (1938), is one of the most famous broadcasts in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.

After directing a number of high-profile stage productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells‘ novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although some contemporary sources claim these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated,^[2] they rocketed Welles to notoriety.

His first film was Citizen Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in as Charles Foster Kane. Welles was an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career. Because of this, he struggled for creative control from the major film studios, and his films were either heavily edited or remained unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as “the ultimate auteur.”^[3]:6 Welles followed up Citizen Kane with critically acclaimed films including The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942 and Touch of Evil in 1958.

In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two British Film Institute polls among directors and critics,^[4][5] and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time.^[6] Well known for his baritone voice,^[7] Welles was a well-regarded actor in radio and film, a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor, and an accomplished magician noted for presenting troop variety shows in the war years.

Early life

George Orson Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (b. 1873, Missouri, d. December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice (née Ives; b. 1882 or 1883, Springfield, Illinois, d. May 10, 1924, Chicago).^[8] He was named after his paternal great-grandfather, influential Kenosha attorney Orson S. Head, and his brother George Head,^[9]:37 and was raised Roman Catholic.^[10]

Despite the Head family’s affluence, Welles encountered hardship in childhood. His parents separated and moved to Chicago in 1919. His father, who made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp,^[11] became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles’s mother, a concert pianist, played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the Chicago Art Institute to support her son and herself; the oldest Welles boy, “Dickie”, was institutionalized at an early age because he had learning difficulties. Beatrice died of hepatitis in a Chicago hospital^[12]:3–5 May 10, 1924, at the age of 43, just after Welles’s ninth birthday.^[13]:326

After his mother’s death Welles ceased pursuing music. It was decided that he would spend the summer with the Watson family at a private art colony in Wyoming, New York, established by Lydia Avery Coonley Ward.^[1]:8 There he played and became friends with the children of the Aga Khan, including the 12-year-old Prince Aly Khan. Then, in what Welles later described as “a hectic period” in his life, he lived in a Chicago apartment with both his father and Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician who had been a close friend of both his parents. Welles briefly attended public school^[14]:133 before his alcoholic father left business altogether and took him along on his travels to Jamaica and the Far East. When they returned they settled in a hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois, that was owned by his father. When the hotel burned down Welles and his father took to the road again.^[1]:9

“During the three years that Orson lived with his father, some observers wondered who took care of whom”, wrote biographer Frank Brady.^[1]:9

“In some ways, he was never really a young boy, you know,” said Roger Hill, who became Welles’s teacher and lifelong friend.^[15]:24

Welles briefly attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin, enrolled in the fourth grade.^[1]:9 On September 15, 1926, he entered the Todd School for Boys,^[14]:3 an expensive independent school in Woodstock, Illinois, that his older brother had attended for ten years until he was expelled for misbehavior.^[1]:10 At Todd School Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who was later Todd’s headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing Welles to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged theatrical experiments and productions there.

“Todd provided Welles with many valuable experiences”, wrote critic Richard France. “He was able to explore and experiment in an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement. In addition to a theater the school’s own radio station was at his disposal.”^[16]:27 Welles’s first radio performance was on the Todd station, an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes that he also wrote.^[12]:7

On December 28, 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died at the age of 58, alone in a hotel in Chicago. His will left it to Orson to name his guardian. When Roger Hill declined, Welles chose Maurice Bernstein.^[17]:71–72

Following graduation from Todd in May 1931,^[14]:3 Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University. Rather than enrolling, he chose travel. Later, he studied for a time at the Art Institute of Chicago.^[18] He returned a number of times to Woodstock to direct his alma mater’s student productions.

Early career (1931–1935)

After his father’s death, Welles traveled to Europe using a small inheritance. Welles said that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of Gate, Hilton Edwards, later said he had not believed him but was impressed by his brashness and an impassioned quality in his audition.^[19]:134 Welles made his stage debut at the Gate Theatre on October 13, 1931, appearing in Ashley Dukes‘s adaptation of Jew Suss as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. He performed small supporting roles in subsequent Gate productions, and he produced and designed productions of his own in Dublin. In March 1932 Welles performed in W. Somerset Maugham‘s The Circle at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and travelled to London to find additional work in the theatre. Unable to obtain a work permit, he returned to the U.S.^{[13]:327–330}

Welles found his fame ephemeral and turned to a writing project at Todd School that would become the immensely successful, first entitled Everybody’s Shakespeare and subsequently, The Mercury Shakespeare. Welles traveled to North Africa while working on thousands of illustrations for the Everybody’s Shakespeare series of educational books, a series that remained in print for decades.

In 1933, Roger and Hortense Hill invited Welles along to a party in Chicago, where Welles met Thornton Wilder. Wilder arranged for Welles to meet Alexander Woollcott in New York, in order that he be introduced to Katharine Cornell, who was assembling a repertory theatre company. Cornell’s husband, director Guthrie McClintic, immediately put Welles under contract and cast him in three plays.^[1]:46–49 The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Candida toured in repertory for 36 weeks beginning in November 1933, with the first of more than 200 performances taking place in Buffalo, New York.^{[13]:330–331}

In 1934, Welles got his first job on radio — on The American School of the Air — through actor-director Paul Stewart, who introduced him to director Knowles Entrikin.^[13]:331 That summer Welles staged a drama festival with the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, inviting Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards from Dublin’s Gate Theatre to appear along with New York stage luminaries in productions including Trilby, Hamlet, The Drunkard and Tsar Paul. At the old firehouse in Woodstock he also shot his first film, an eight-minute short titled The Hearts of Age.^{[13]:330–331}

Katharine Cornell’s company began a 36-week tour of Romeo and Juliet in the fall of 1934, with Welles playing Mercutio. Opening December 20 at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York,^{[13]:331–332[20]} the Broadway production brought the 19-year-old Welles (now playing Tybalt) to the notice of John Houseman, a theatrical producer who was casting the lead role in the debut production of Archibald MacLeish‘s verse play, Panic.^{[21]:144–158}

On November 14, 1934, Welles married Chicago socialite and actress Virginia Nicolson^[13]:332 (often misspelled “Nicholson”)^[22] in a civil ceremony in New York. To appease the Nicolsons, who were furious at the couple’s elopement, a formal ceremony took place December 23, 1934, at the New Jersey mansion of the bride’s godmother. Welles wore a cutaway borrowed from his friend George Macready.^[17]:182

By 1935 Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theater as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many actors who would later form the core of his Mercury Theatre on programs including America’s Hour, Cavalcade of America, Columbia Workshop and The March of Time.^{[13]:331–332} “Within a year of his debut Welles could claim membership in that elite band of radio actors who commanded salaries second only to the highest paid movie stars,” wrote critic Richard France.^[16]:172

Theatre (1936–1938)

Federal Theatre Project

Macbeth

In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt‘s Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theater performers and employees to work. Welles was hired by John Houseman and assigned to direct a play for the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Theater Unit. He offered Macbeth.^[23] The production became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set it in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters. Jack Carter played Macbeth. Canada Lee, who two years before had rescued Welles from a potentially dangerous scrape with an armed theater-goer, played Banquo.^[24] The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play opened April 14, 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously. It later toured the nation. When the lead actor, Maurice Ellis, fell ill on tour, Welles quickly boarded an airplane to fly to the location and stepped in to the part, playing in blackface.^[25] At 20, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. A few minutes of the Welles production of Macbeth was recorded on film in a 1937 documentary called We Work Again.^[26]

Horse Eats Hat

After the success of Macbeth, Welles mounted the farce Horse Eats Hat, an adaptation by Welles and Edwin Denby of Eugène Labiche‘s play, Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie.^[15]:114 The play was presented September 26 – December 5, 1936, at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, New York.^[13]:334 Joseph Cotten was featured in his first starring role.^[27]

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Welles consolidated his “White Hope” reputation with Dr. Faustus, which used light as a prime unifying scenic element in a nearly black stage. Faustus was presented January 8 – May 9, 1937, at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, New York.^[13]:335

The Second Hurricane

In 1937 American composer Aaron Copland chose Welles to direct The Second Hurricane, an operetta with a libretto by Edwin Denby, and one of Copland’s least known works. Presented at the Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York for the benefit of high school students, the production opened April 21, 1937, and ran its scheduled three performances.^[13]:337 Among the few adult performers in the production was actor Joseph Cotten, Welles’s longtime friend and collaborator, who was paid $10 for his performance.^[28]

The Cradle Will Rock

In 1937, Welles rehearsed Marc Blitzstein‘s political operetta, The Cradle Will Rock. It was originally scheduled to open June 16, 1937, in its first public preview. Because of severe federal cutbacks in the Works Progress projects, the show’s premiere at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked and guarded to prevent any government-purchased materials from being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move, Welles announced to waiting ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to the Venice, 20 blocks away. Some cast, and some crew and audience, walked the distance on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors’ union stated that the production belonged to the Federal Theater Project and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking the participation of the union members, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment on stage with some cast members performing from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received by its audience. It afterward played at the Venice for two weeks in the same informal way.

Mercury Theatre

Breaking with the Federal Theatre Project in 1937, Welles and Houseman founded their own repertory company, which they called the Mercury Theatre. The name was inspired by the title of the iconoclastic magazine, The American Mercury.^{[1]:119–120} Welles became executive producer and the repertory company eventually included actors such as Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Río, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford and Everett Sloane, all of whom worked for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was a melodramatic edited version of William Shakespeare‘s tragedy Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary frame of fascist Italy. Cinna, the Poet dies at the hands not of a mob but of a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna the Poet, “it stopped the show.” The applause lasted more than ten minutes and the production was widely acclaimed.

Caesar opened November 11, 1937, followed by The Shoemaker’s Holiday (January 11, 1938), Heartbreak House (April 29, 1938) and Danton’s Death (November 5, 1938).^[29]:344

Radio (1936–1940)

Simultaneously with his work in the theatre, Welles worked extensively in radio as an actor, writer, director and producer, often without credit.^[29]:77 Between 1935 and 1937 he was earning as much as $2,000 a week, shuttling between radio studios at such a pace that he would arrive barely in time for a quick scan of his lines before he was on the air. While he was directing the Voodoo Macbeth Welles was dashing between Harlem and midtown Manhattan three times a day to meet his radio commitments.^[16]:172

“What didn’t I do on the radio?” Welles reflected in February 1983:

Radio is what I love most of all. The wonderful excitement of what could happen in live radio, when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I was making a couple of thousand a week, scampering in ambulances from studio to studio, and committing much of what I made to support the Mercury. I wouldn’t want to return to those frenetic 20-hour working day years, but I miss them because they are so irredeemably gone.^[14]:53

In addition to continuing as a repertory player on The March of Time, in the fall of 1936 Welles adapted and performed Hamlet in an early two-part episode of CBS Radio‘s Columbia Workshop. His performance as the announcer in the series’ April 1937 presentation of Archibald MacLeish‘s verse drama The Fall of the City was an important development in his radio career^[29]:78 and made the 21-year-old Welles an overnight star.^[30]

In July 1937, the Mutual Network gave Welles a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables, which he did with great success. Welles developed the idea of telling stories with first-person narration on the series, which was his first job as a writer-director for radio.^[13]:338 Les Misérables was one of Welles’s earliest and finest achievements on radio,^[31]:160 and marked the radio debut of the Mercury Theatre.

That September, Mutual chose Welles to play Lamont Cranston, also known as The Shadow. He performed the role anonymously through mid-September 1938.^[29]:83[32]

The Mercury Theatre on the Air

After the theatrical successes of the Mercury Theatre, CBS Radio invited Orson Welles to create a summer show for 13 weeks. The series began July 11, 1938, initially titled First Person Singular, with the formula that Welles would play the lead in each show. Some months later the show was called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.^[33] The weekly hour-long show presented radio plays based on classic literary works, with original music composed and conducted by Bernard Herrmann.

The War of the Worlds broadcast

The Mercury Theatre’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells October 30, 1938, brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners was later reported to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has come into question.^{[2][34][35][36]} Panic was reportedly spread among listeners who believed the fictional news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech some months later.^[37]

Welles’s growing fame drew Hollywood offers, lures that the independent-minded Welles resisted at first. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which had been a sustaining show (without sponsorship) was picked up by Campbell Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.^[38]

The Campbell Playhouse

As a direct result of the front-page headlines Orson Welles generated with his 1938 Halloween production The War of the Worlds, Campbell’s Soup signed on as sponsor. The Mercury Theatre on the Air made its last broadcast December 4, 1938, and The Campbell Playhouse began December 9, 1938.

Welles began commuting from Hollywood to New York for the two Sunday broadcasts of The Campbell Playhouse after signing a film contract with RKO Pictures in August 1939. In November 1939, production of the show moved from New York to Los Angeles.^[13]:353

After 20 shows, Campbell began to exercise more creative control and had complete control over story selection. As his contract with Campbell came to an end, Welles chose not to sign on for another season. After the broadcast of March 31, 1940, Welles and Campbell parted amicably.^{[1]:221–226}

Hollywood (1939–1948)

RKO Radio Pictures president George Schaefer eventually offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract offered to an untried director: complete artistic control.

After signing a summary agreement with RKO on July 22, Welles signed a full-length 63-page contract August 21, 1939.^[13]:353

RKO signed Welles in a two-picture deal; including script, cast, crew and most importantly, final cut, although Welles had a budget limit for his projects. With this contract in hand, Welles (and nearly the whole Mercury Theatre troupe) moved to Hollywood. He commuted weekly to New York to maintain his commitment to The Campbell Playhouse.

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO Radio Pictures, settling on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, which he worked on in detail. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera (a technique later used in the Robert Montgomery film Lady in the Lake). When a budget was drawn up, RKO’s enthusiasm cooled because it was greater than the agreed limit. RKO also declined to approve another Welles project, The Smiler With the Knife, based on the Cecil Day-Lewis novel, ostensibly because RKO executives lacked faith in Lucille Ball‘s ability to carry the film as the leading lady.

Welles’s first experience on a Hollywood film was narrator for RKO’s 1940 production of Swiss Family Robinson.^[39]

Citizen Kane

Production

RKO, having rejected Welles’s first two movie proposals, agreed on the third offer, Citizen Kane, which Welles co-wrote, produced and directed, also performing the lead role.^[40]

Welles found a suitable film project in an idea he conceived with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, (then writing radio plays for The Campbell Playhouse^[41]). Initially titled The American, it eventually became Welles’s first feature film (his most famous and honored role), Citizen Kane (1941).

Mankiewicz based the original outline on an exposé of the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially and came to hate, having once been great friends with Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. Banished from her company because of his perpetual drunkenness, Mankiewicz, a notorious gossip, exacted revenge with his unflattering depiction of Davies in Citizen Kane for which Welles bore most of the criticisms.

Kane’s megalomania was modeled loosely on Robert McCormick, Howard Hughes and Joseph Pulitzer as Welles wanted to create a broad, complex character, intending to show him in the same scenes from several points of view. The use of multiple narrative perspectives in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness influenced the treatment.

Supplying Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes, Welles urged him to write the first draft screenplay under John Houseman, who was posted to ensure Mankiewicz stayed sober. On Welles’s instruction, Houseman wrote the opening narration as a pastiche of The March of Time newsreels. Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich about the writers working separately by saying, “I left him on his own finally, because we’d started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on storyline and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine.”^[13]:54 Taking these drafts, Welles drastically condensed and rearranged them, then added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz’s contribution to the script, but Welles countered the attacks by saying, “At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all—who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.”^[13]:54

Charles Foster Kane is based loosely on areas of Hearst’s life. Nonetheless, autobiographical allusions to Welles were worked in, most noticeably in the treatment of Kane’s childhood and particularly, regarding his guardianship. Welles added features from other famous American lives to create a general and mysterious personality, rather than the narrow journalistic portrait drawn by Mankiewicz, whose first drafts included scandalous claims about the death of film director Thomas Ince.

Once the script was complete, Welles attracted some of Hollywood’s best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, who walked into Welles’s office and announced he wanted to work on the picture. Welles described Toland as “the fastest cameraman who ever lived.”^[40] For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre. He invited suggestions from everyone but only if they were directed through him. Filming Citizen Kane took ten weeks.^[40]

Reaction

Mankiewicz handed a copy of the shooting script to his friend, Charles Lederer, husband of Welles’s ex-wife, Virginia Nicolson, and the nephew of Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a small ad in a newspaper for a preview screening of Citizen Kane and went. Hopper realized immediately that the film was based on features of Hearst’s life. Thus began a struggle, the attempted suppression of Citizen Kane.

Hearst’s media outlets boycotted the film. They exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community by threatening to expose fifteen years of suppressed scandals and the fact that most studio bosses were Jewish. At one point, heads of the major studios jointly offered RKO the cost of the film in exchange for the negative and existing prints, fully intending to burn them. RKO declined, and the film was given a limited release. Hearst intimidated theater chains by threatening to ban advertising for their other films in his papers if they showed Citizen Kane.

The film was well-received critically, with Bosley Crowther, film critic for the New York Times calling it “close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood”.^[42] By the time it reached the general public, the publicity had waned. It garnered nine Academy Award nominations (Orson nominated as a producer, director, writer and actor), but won only for Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Although it was largely ignored at the Academy Awards, Citizen Kane is now hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Andrew Sarris called it “the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation.”^[40]

The delay in its release and uneven distribution contributed to mediocre results at the box office; it earned back its budget and marketing, but RKO lost any chance of a major profit. The fact that Citizen Kane ignored many Hollywood conventions meant that the film confused and angered the 1940s cinema public. Exhibitor response was scathing; most theater owners complained bitterly about the adverse audience reaction and the many walkouts. Only a few saw fit to acknowledge Welles’s artistic technique. RKO shelved the film and did not re-release it until 1956.

During the 1950s, the film came to be seen by young French film critics such as François Truffaut as exemplifying the “auteur theory“, in which the director is the “author” of a film. Truffaut, Godard and others inspired by Welles’s example made their own films, giving birth to the Nouvelle Vague. In the 1960s Citizen Kane became popular on college campuses as a film-study exercise and as an entertainment subject. Its revivals on television, home video and DVD have enhanced its “classic” status and ultimately recouped costs. The film is considered by most film critics and historians to be one of, if not the, greatest motion pictures in cinema history.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles’s second film for RKO was The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington. George Schaefer hoped to make money with this film, since he lost money with Citizen Kane. Ambersons had been adapted for The Campbell Playhouse by Welles, for radio, and Welles then wrote the screen adaptation. Toland was not available, so Stanley Cortez was named cinematographer. The meticulous Cortez worked slowly and the film lagged behind schedule and over budget. Prior to production, Welles’s contract was renegotiated, revoking his right to control the final cut.

Journey into Fear

At RKO’s request, Welles worked on an adaptation of Eric Ambler‘s spy thriller, Journey into Fear, co-written with Joseph Cotten. In addition to acting in the film, Welles was the producer. Direction was credited to Norman Foster. Welles later said that they were in such a rush that the director of each scene was determined by whoever was closest to the camera.

CBS then offered Welles a radio series called the Orson Welles Show. It was a half-hour variety show of short stories, comedy skits, poetry and musical numbers. Joining the original Mercury Theatre cast was Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket, “on loan from Walt Disney“. The variety format was unpopular with listeners and Welles soon was forced to limit the content of the show to telling one half-hour story for each episode.

War work

It’s All True

To complicate matters during the production of Ambersons and Journey into Fear, Welles was approached by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney to produce a documentary film about South America. This was at the behest of the federal government’s Good Neighbor policy, a wartime propaganda effort designed to prevent Latin America from allying with the Axis powers. Welles saw his involvement as a national service, since his physical condition excused him from military service.

Expected to film the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Welles rushed to finish the editing on Ambersons and his acting scenes in Journey into Fear. Ending his CBS radio show, he lashed together a rough cut of Ambersons with Robert Wise, who edited Citizen Kane, and left for Brazil. Wise was to join him in Rio to complete the film, but never arrived. A provisional final cut arranged via phone call, telegram and shortwave radio was previewed without Welles’s approval in Pomona, in a double bill, to a mostly negative audience response, particularly to the character of Aunt Fanny played by Agnes Moorehead. Whereas Schaefer argued that Welles be allowed to complete his version of the film, and that an archival copy be kept with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, RKO disagreed. With Welles in South America, there was no practical means of his editing the film.

As a result of difficult financial circumstances at RKO in 1940–42, major changes occurred at the studio in 1942^[43] Floyd Odlum took control of RKO and began changing its direction. Rockefeller, the most significant backer of the Brazil project, left the RKO board of directors. Around that time, the principal sponsor of Welles at RKO, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. The changes throughout RKO caused reevaluations of projects. RKO took control of Ambersons, formed a committee, which was ordered to edit the film into what the studio considered a commercial format. They removed fifty minutes of Welles’s footage, re-shot sequences, rearranged the scene order, and added a happy ending. Koerner released the shortened film on the bottom of a double-bill with the Lupe Vélez comedy, Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. Ambersons was an expensive flop for RKO, although it received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Agnes Moorehead.

Welles’s South American documentary, entitled It’s All True, budgeted at one million dollars with half of its budget coming from the U.S. Government upon completion, grew in ambition and budget while Welles was in South America. While the film originally was to be a documentary on Carnaval, Welles added a new story, which recreated the journey of the jangadeiros, four poor fishermen who made a 1,500-mile (2,400 km) journey on their open raft to petition Brazilian President Vargas about their working conditions. The four had become national folk heroes; Welles first read of their journey in TIME. Their leader, Jacare, died in a filming mishap. RKO, in limited contact with Welles, attempted to rein in the production. Most of the crew and budget were withdrawn from the film. In addition, the Mercury staff was removed from the studio in the U.S.

Welles requested resources to finish the film. He was given a limited amount of black-and-white film stock and a silent camera. He completed the sequence, but RKO refused to support further production on the film. Surviving footage was released in 1993, including a rough reconstruction of the “Four Men on a Raft” segment. Meanwhile, RKO asserted in public that Welles had gone to Brazil without a screenplay and had squandered a million dollars. Their official company slogan for the next year was, “Showmanship in place of Genius” – which was taken as a slight against Welles.

On returning to Hollywood, Welles next worked on radio. CBS offered him two weekly series, Hello Americans, based on the research he had done in Brazil, and Ceiling Unlimited, sponsored by Lockheed, a wartime salute to advances in aviation. Both featured several members of his original Mercury Theatre troupe. Within months, Hello Americans was canceled and Welles was replaced as host of Ceiling Unlimited by Joseph Cotten. Welles guest-starred on a variety of shows, notably guest-hosting Jack Benny shows for a month in 1943. He took an increasingly active role in American and international politics and used journalism to communicate his forceful ideas widely.

In 1943, Welles married Rita Hayworth. They had one child, Rebecca Welles, and divorced five years later in 1948. In between, Welles found work as an actor in other films. He starred in the 1944 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, trading credit as associate producer for top billing over Joan Fontaine.

He had a cameo in the 1944 wartime salute Follow the Boys, in which he performed his Mercury Wonder Show magic act and “sawed” Marlene Dietrich in half after Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn refused to allow Hayworth to perform.

In 1944, Welles was offered a new radio show, broadcast on the Columbia Pacific Network, The Orson Welles Almanac. It was a half-hour variety show, with Mobil Oil as sponsor. After the success of his stand-in hosting on The Jack Benny Show, the focus was primarily on comedy. His hosting on the Jack Benny show included self-deprecating jokes and story lines about his being a “genius” and overriding ideas advanced by other cast members. The trade papers were not eager to accept Welles as a comedian, and Welles complained on-air about the poor quality of the scripts. When Welles started his Mercury Wonder Show a few months later, traveling to armed forces camps and performing magic tricks and comedy, the radio show was broadcast live from the camps and the material took on a decidedly wartime flavor.

While he found no studio willing to hire him as a director, Welles’s popularity as an actor continued. Cresta Blanca Wines gave Welles its radio series This Is My Best to direct, but after a month he was fired for creative differences. He started writing a political column for the New York Post, called Orson Welles’s Almanac. While the paper wanted Welles to write about Hollywood gossip, Welles explored serious political issues. His activism for world peace took considerable amounts of his time. The Post column eventually failed in syndication because of contradictory expectations and was dropped by the Post.

Post-war work

The Stranger

In 1946, International Pictures released Welles’s film The Stranger, starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles. Sam Spiegel produced the film, which follows the hunt for a Nazi war criminal living under an alias in the United States. While Anthony Veiller was credited with the screenplay, it was rewritten by Welles and John Huston. Disputes occurred during editing between Spiegel and Welles. The film was a box office success and it helped his standing with the studios.

Around the World

In the summer of 1946, Welles directed Around the World, a musical stage adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days with the book by Welles and music by Cole Porter. Producer Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful 1956 film adaptation, pulled out from the lavish and expensive Broadway production, leaving Welles to support the finances. When Welles ran out of money he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send enough money to continue the show, and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, direct and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. The stage show soon failed due to poor box-office, with Welles unable to claim the losses on his taxes. The complex financial arrangements — concerning the show, its losses, and Welles’s arrangement with Cohn — resulted in a tax dispute between Welles and the IRS.

Radio series

In 1946, Welles began two new radio series — The Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air for CBS, and Orson Welles Commentaries for ABC. While Mercury Summer Theatre featured half-hour adaptations of some classic Mercury radio shows from the 1930s, the first episode was a condensation of his Around the World stage play, and is the only record of Cole Porter’s music for the project. Several original Mercury actors returned for the series, as well as Bernard Herrmann. It was only scheduled for the summer months, and Welles invested his earnings into his failing stage play. Commentaries was a political vehicle for him, continuing the themes from his New York Post column. Again, Welles lacked a clear focus, until the NAACP brought to his attention the case of Isaac Woodard. Welles brought significant attention to Woodard’s cause. Soon Welles was hanged in effigy in the South and theaters refused to show The Stranger in several southern states.

The Lady from Shanghai

The film that Welles was obliged to make in exchange for Harry Cohn’s help in financing the stage production Around the World was The Lady from Shanghai, filmed in 1947 for Columbia Pictures. Intended as a modest thriller, the budget skyrocketed after Cohn suggested that Welles’s then-estranged second wife Rita Hayworth co-star.

Cohn disliked Welles’s rough-cut, particularly the confusing plot and lack of close-ups, and was not in sympathy with Welles’s Brechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. Cohn ordered extensive editing and re-shoots. After heavy editing by the studio, approximately one hour of Welles’s first cut was removed, including much of a climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse. While expressing displeasure at the cuts, Welles was appalled particularly with the musical score. The film was considered a disaster in America at the time of release, though the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become a touchstone of film noir. Not long after release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce.

Although The Lady From Shanghai was acclaimed in Europe, it was not embraced in the U.S. until decades later. Influential modern critics including David Kehr declared it a masterpiece, with Kehr calling it “the weirdest great movie ever made.” A similar difference in reception on opposite sides of the Atlantic followed by greater American acceptance befell the Welles-inspired Chaplin film Monsieur Verdoux, originally to be directed by Welles starring Chaplin, then directed by Chaplin with the idea credited to Welles.

Macbeth

Prior to 1948, Welles convinced Republic Pictures to let him direct a low-budget version of Macbeth, which featured highly stylized sets and costumes, and a cast of actors lip-syncing to a pre-recorded soundtrack, one of many innovative cost-cutting techniques Welles deployed in an attempt to make an epic film from B-movie resources. The script, adapted by Welles, is a violent reworking of Shakespeare’s original, freely cutting and pasting lines into new contexts via a collage technique and recasting Macbeth as a clash of pagan and proto-Christian ideologies. Some voodoo trappings of the famous Welles/Houseman Negro Theatre stage adaptation are visible, especially in the film’s characterization of the Weird Sisters, who create an effigy of Macbeth as a charm to enchant him. Of all Welles’s post-Kane Hollywood productions, Macbeth is stylistically closest to Citizen Kane in its long takes and deep focus photography. Shots of the increasingly isolated Scottish king looming in the foreground while characters address him from deep in the background overtly reference Kane.

Republic initially trumpeted the film as an important work but decided it did not care for the Scottish accents and held up general release for almost a year after early negative press reaction, including Life ‘s comment that Welles’s film “doth foully slaughter Shakespeare.”^[44] Welles left for Europe, while co-producer and lifelong supporter Richard Wilson reworked the soundtrack. Welles returned and cut twenty minutes from the film at Republic’s request and recorded narration to cover some gaps. The film was decried as a disaster. Macbeth had influential fans in Europe, especially the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who hailed the film’s “crude, irreverent power” and careful shot design, and described the characters as haunting “the corridors of some dreamlike subway, an abandoned coal mine, and ruined cellars oozing with water.”^[45]

In the late 1970s, a fully restored version of Macbeth was released that followed Welles’s original vision, and all prints of the truncated theatrical release have gradually been withdrawn from circulation, turning Welles’s compulsory recut version—which has the distinction of being created by the director himself—into something of a lost work.

Europe (1948–1956)

Welles left Hollywood for Europe in late 1947, enigmatically saying that he had chosen “freedom.” In Italy he starred as Cagliostro in the 1948 film Black Magic. His co-star, Akim Tamiroff, impressed Welles so much that Tamiroff would appear in four of Welles’s productions during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Third Man

The following year, Welles starred as Harry Lime in Carol Reed‘s The Third Man, alongside Joseph Cotten, his friend and co-star from Citizen Kane, with a script by Graham Greene and a memorable score by Anton Karas. The film was an international smash hit, but unfortunately for Welles, he turned down a percentage of the gross in exchange for a lump-sum advance.

The film is also memorable for a scene that has entered Hollywood lore, an unscripted monologue Welles inserted that took director Reed completely by surprise. Talking to Joseph Cotton in a carriage atop a Ferris wheel, Lime says: “Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, 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.”

A few years later, British radio producer Harry Alan Towers would resurrect the Lime character in the radio series The Lives of Harry Lime. The 1951 series included new recordings by Karas and was very successful, running for 52 weeks. Welles claimed to have written a handful of episodes—a claim disputed by Towers, who maintains that they were written by Ernest Borneman—which later served as the basis for the screenplay by Welles, Mr. Arkadin (1955).

Welles appeared as Cesare Borgia in the 1949 Italian film Prince of Foxes, with Tyrone Power and Mercury Theatre alumnus Everett Sloane, and as the Mongol warrior Bayan in the 1950 film version of the novel The Black Rose (again with Tyrone Power). ^[46]

Othello

During this time, Welles was channeling his money from acting jobs into a self-financed film version of Shakespeare’s play Othello. From 1949 to 1951, Welles worked on Othello, filming on location in Europe and Morocco. The film featured Welles’s friends, Micheál Mac Liammóir as Iago and Hilton Edwards as Desdemona‘s father Brabantio. Suzanne Cloutier starred as Desdemona and Campbell Playhouse alumnus Robert Coote appeared as Iago’s associate Roderigo.

Filming was suspended several times as Welles ran out of funds and left for acting jobs, accounted in detail in MacLiammóir’s published memoir Put Money in Thy Purse. When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival it won the Palme d’Or, but the film did not receive a general release in the United States until 1955 (by which time Welles had re-cut the first reel and re-dubbed most of the film, removing Cloutier’s voice entirely), and it played only in New York and Los Angeles. The American release prints had a technically flawed soundtrack, suffering from a drop-out of sound at every quiet moment. Welles’s daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, restored Othello in 1992 for a wide re-release. The restoration included reconstructing Angelo Francesco Lavagnino‘s original musical score, which was originally inaudible, and adding ambient stereo sound effects, which were not in the original film. The restoration went on to a successful theatrical run in America. A print of the U.S. version was released on laserdisc in 1995 but soon withdrawn after a legal challenge by Beatrice Welles-Smith. The original Cannes version has survived but is not available commercially.

In 1952, Welles continued finding work in England after the success of the Harry Lime radio show. Harry Alan Towers offered Welles another series, The Black Museum, which ran for 52 weeks with Welles as host and narrator. Director Herbert Wilcox offered Welles the part of the murdered victim in Trent’s Last Case, based on the novel by E. C. Bentley. In 1953, the BBC hired Welles to read an hour of selections from Walt Whitman‘s epic poem Song of Myself. Towers hired Welles again, to play Professor Moriarty in the radio series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.

Welles briefly returned to America to make his first appearance on television, starring in the Omnibus presentation of King Lear, broadcast live on CBS October 18, 1953. Directed by Peter Brook, the production costarred Natasha Parry, Beatrice Straight and Arnold Moss.^[47] While Welles received good notices, he was guarded by IRS agents, prohibited to leave his hotel room when not at the studio, prevented from making any purchases, and forced to turn over the entire sum (less expenses) he earned, all of which went to his tax bill.

In 1954, director George More O’Ferrall offered Welles the title role in the ‘Lord Mountdrago’ segment of Three Cases of Murder, co-starring Alan Badel. Herbert Wilcox cast Welles as the antagonist in Trouble in the Glen opposite Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker and Victor McLaglen. Old friend John Huston cast him as Father Mapple in his 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick, starring Gregory Peck.

Mr. Arkadin

Welles’s next turn as director was the film Mr. Arkadin (1955), which was produced by his political mentor from the 1940s, Louis Dolivet. It was filmed in France, Germany, Spain and Italy on a very limited budget. Based loosely on several episodes of the Harry Lime radio show, it stars Welles as a billionaire who hires a man to delve into the secrets of his past. The film stars Robert Arden, who had worked on the Harry Lime series; Welles’s third wife, Paola Mori, whose voice was dubbed by actress Billie Whitelaw; and guest stars Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, Katina Paxinou and Mischa Auer. Frustrated by his slow progress in the editing room, producer Dolivet removed Welles from the project and finished the film without him. Eventually five different versions of the film would be released, two in Spanish and three in English. The version that Dolivet completed was retitled Confidential Report. In 2005 Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum oversaw a reconstruction of the surviving film elements. Included in a DVD box set (The Complete Mr. Arkadin) released by The Criterion Collection, it is considered by Welles scholar and director Peter Bogdanovich to be the best version of Welles’s original intentions for the film.

In 1955, Welles also directed two television series for the BBC. The first was Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, a series of six 15-minute shows featuring Welles drawing in a sketchbook to illustrate his reminiscences for the camera (including such topics as the filming of It’s All True and the Isaac Woodard case), and the second was Around the World with Orson Welles, a series of six travelogues set in different locations around Europe (such as Venice, the Basque Country between France and Spain, and England). Welles served as host and interviewer, his commentary including documentary facts and his own personal observations (a technique he would continue to explore in later works). A seventh episode of this series, based on the Gaston Dominici case, was suppressed at the time by the French government, but was reconstructed after Welles’s death and released to video in 1999.

In 1956, Welles completed Portrait of Gina. Dissatisfied with the results—Welles recalled he had worked on it a lot and the result looked like it—he left the only print behind at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.} The film cans would remain in a lost-and-found locker at the hotel for several decades, where they were discovered after Welles’s death. The work posthumously aired on German television under the title Viva Italia, a 30-minute personal essay on Gina Lollobrigida and the general subject of Italian sex symbols.

Return to Hollywood (1956–1959)

In 1956, Welles returned to Hollywood, guesting on radio shows, notably as narrator of Tomorrow, a nuclear holocaust drama produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. He guest starred on television shows including I Love Lucy, and began filming a projected pilot for Desilu, owned by Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz, who had recently purchased the former RKO studios. The film was The Fountain of Youth, based on a story by John Collier. Originally deemed not viable as a pilot, the film was not aired until 1958 — and won the Peabody Award for excellence. Welles’s next feature film role was in Man in the Shadow for Universal Pictures in 1957, starring Jeff Chandler. Around this time period Welles began to suffer from weight problems that would eventually cause a deterioration in his health.

Touch of Evil

Welles stayed on at Universal to direct (and co-star with) Charlton Heston in the 1958 film Touch of Evil, based on Whit Masterson‘s novel Badge of Evil. Welles, who wrote the screenplay for the film, claimed never to have read the book. Originally only hired as an actor, Welles was promoted to director by Universal Studios at the insistence of Charlton Heston.^[48]:154 The film reunited many actors and technicians with whom Welles had worked in Hollywood in the 1940s, including cameraman Russell Metty (The Stranger), makeup artist Maurice Seiderman (Citizen Kane), and actors Joseph Cotten, Marlene Dietrich and Akim Tamiroff). Filming proceeded smoothly, with Welles finishing on schedule and on budget, and the studio bosses praising the daily rushes. Nevertheless, after the end of production, the studio re-edited the film, re-shot scenes, and shot new exposition scenes to clarify the plot.^{[48]:175–176} Welles wrote a 58-page memo outlining suggestions and objections, stating that the film was no longer his version—it was the studio’s, but as such, he was still prepared to help with it.^{[48]:175–176} The studio followed a few of the ideas, but cut another 30 minutes from the film and released it. The film was widely praised across Europe, and was awarded the top prize at the Brussels World’s Fair.

In 1978, a longer preview version of the film was discovered and released. In 1998, editor Walter Murch and producer Rick Schmidlin, consulting Welles’s memo, used a workprint version to attempt to create a version of the film as close as possible to that outlined by Welles in the memo.

As Universal reworked Touch of Evil, Welles began filming his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes‘ novel Don Quixote in Mexico, starring Mischa Auer as Quixote and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. While filming would continue in fits and starts for several years, Welles would never complete the project.

Welles continued acting, notably in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and Compulsion (1959), but soon returned to Europe.

Return to Europe (1959–1970)

He continued shooting Don Quixote in Spain and Italy, but replaced Mischa Auer with Francisco Reiguera, and resumed acting jobs. In Italy in 1959, Welles directed his own scenes as King Saul in Richard Pottier’s film David and Goliath. In Hong Kong he co-starred with Curt Jürgens in Lewis Gilbert‘s film Ferry to Hong Kong. In 1960, in Paris he co-starred in Richard Fleischer‘s film Crack in the Mirror. In Yugoslavia he starred in Richard Thorpe‘s film The Tartars and Veljko Bulajić‘s “Battle of Neretva“.

Throughout the 1960s, filming continued on Quixote on-and-off until the decade, as Welles evolved the concept, tone and ending several times. Although he had a complete version of the film shot and edited at least once, he would continue toying with the editing well into the 1980s, he never completed a version film he was fully satisfied with, and would junk existing footage and shoot new footage. (In one case, he had a complete cut ready in which Quixote and Sancho Panza end up going to the moon, but he felt the ending was rendered obsolete by the 1969 moon landings, and burned 10 reels of this version.) As the process went on, Welles gradually voiced all of the characters himself and provided narration. In 1992, the director Jesús Franco constructed a film out of the portions of Quixote left behind by Welles. Some of the film stock had decayed badly. While the Welles footage was greeted with interest, the post-production by Franco was met with harsh criticism.

In 1961, Welles directed In the Land of Don Quixote, a series of eight half-hour episodes for the Italian television network RAI. Similar to the Around the World with Orson Welles series, they presented travelogues of Spain and included Welles’s wife, Paola, and their daughter, Beatrice. Though Welles was fluent in Italian, the network was not interested in him providing Italian narration because of his accent, and the series sat unreleased until 1964, by which time the network had added Italian narration of its own. Ultimately, versions of the episodes were released with the original musical score Welles had approved, but without the narration.

The Trial

In 1962, Welles directed his adaptation of The Trial, based on the novel by Franz Kafka and produced by Alexander Salkind and Michael Salkind. The cast included Anthony Perkins as Josef K, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Paola Mori and Akim Tamiroff. While filming exteriors in Zagreb, Welles was informed that the Salkinds had run out of money, meaning that there could be no set construction. No stranger to shooting on found locations, Welles soon filmed the interiors in the Gare d’Orsay, at that time an abandoned railway station in Paris. Welles thought the location possessed a “Jules Verne modernism” and a melancholy sense of “waiting”, both suitable for Kafka. The film failed at the box-office. Peter Bogdanovich would later observe that Welles found the film riotously funny. During the filming, Welles met Oja Kodar, who would later become his muse, star and mistress for the last twenty years of his life. Welles also stated in an interview with the BBC that it was his best film.^[49]

Welles played a film director in La Ricotta (1963)—Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s segment of the Ro.Go.Pa.G. movie, although his renowned voice was dubbed by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani.^[13]:516 He continued taking what work he could find acting, narrating or hosting other people’s work, and began filming Chimes at Midnight, which was completed in 1966. Filmed in Spain, it was a condensation of five Shakespeare plays, telling the story of Falstaff and his relationship with Prince Hal. The cast included Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey and Margaret Rutherford, with narration by Ralph Richardson. Music was again by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. Jess Franco served as second unit director.

Chimes at Midnight

Chimes at Midnight was based on Welles’s play Five Kings which condensed five of Shakespeare’s plays into one show in order to focus on the story of Falstaff. Welles produced the show in New York in 1939 but the opening night, where part 1 was acted, was a disaster and part 2 was never put on. He revamped the show and revisited it in 1960 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. But again, it was not successful. However, this later production was used as the base for the movie. The script contained text from five plays: primarily Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, but also Richard II, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Keith Baxter played Prince Hal, and internationally respected Shakespearean interpreter, John Gielgud, played the King, Henry IV. The film’s narration, spoken by Ralph Richardson, is taken from the chronicler Raphael Holinshed. According to Jeanne Moreau, Welles delayed filming for two weeks due to stage fright. Welles held this film in high regard and considered it, along with The Trial, his best work. As he remarked in 1982, “If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I’d offer up.”^[50]

In 1966, Welles directed a film for French television, an adaptation of The Immortal Story, by Karen Blixen. Released in 1968, it stars Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio and Norman Eshley. The film had a successful run in French theaters. At this time Welles met Oja Kodar again, and gave her a letter he had written to her and had been keeping for four years; they would not be parted again. They immediately began a collaboration both personal and professional. The first of these was an adaptation of Blixen’s The Heroine, meant to be a companion piece to The Immortal Story and starring Kodar. Unfortunately, funding disappeared after one day’s shooting. After completing this film, he appeared in a brief cameo as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann‘s adaptation of A Man for All Seasons—a role for which he won considerable acclaim.

In 1967, Welles began directing The Deep, based on the novel Dead Calm by Charles Williams and filmed off the shore of Yugoslavia. The cast included Jeanne Moreau, Laurence Harvey and Kodar. Personally financed by Welles and Kodar, they could not obtain the funds to complete the project, and it was abandoned a few years later after the death of Harvey. The surviving footage was eventually edited and released by the Filmmuseum München. In 1968 Welles began filming a TV special for CBS under the title Orson’s Bag, combining travelogue, comedy skits and a condensation of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice with Welles as Shylock. Funding for the show sent by CBS to Welles in Switzerland was seized by the IRS. Without funding, the show was not completed. The surviving film clips portions were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.

In 1969, Welles authorized the use of his name for a cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Orson Welles Cinema remained in operation until 1986, with Welles making a personal appearance there in 1977. Also in 1969 he played a supporting role in John Huston‘s The Kremlin Letter. Drawn by the numerous offers he received to work in television and films, and upset by a tabloid scandal reporting his affair with Kodar, Welles abandoned the editing of Don Quixote and moved back to America in 1970.

Later career (1970–1985)

Welles returned to Hollywood, where he continued to self-finance his film and television projects. While offers to act, narrate and host continued, Welles also found himself in great demand on television talk shows. He made frequent appearances for Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, Dean Martin and Merv Griffin.

Welles’s primary focus during his final years was The Other Side of the Wind, an unfinished project that was filmed intermittently between 1970 and 1976. Written by Welles, it is the story of an aging film director (John Huston) looking for funds to complete his final film. The cast includes Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Edmond O’Brien, Cameron Mitchell and Dennis Hopper. Financed by Iranian backers, ownership of the film fell into a legal quagmire after the Shah of Iran was deposed. While there have been several reports of all the legal disputes concerning ownership of the film being settled, enough disputes still exist to prevent its release.

Welles portrayed Louis XVIII of France in the 1970 film Waterloo, and narrated the beginning and ending scenes of the historical comedy Start the Revolution Without Me (1970).

In 1971, Welles directed a short adaptation of Moby-Dick, a one-man performance on a bare stage, reminiscent of his 1955 stage production Moby Dick—Rehearsed. Never completed, it was eventually released by the Filmmuseum München. He also appeared in Ten Days’ Wonder, co-starring with Anthony Perkins and directed by Claude Chabrol, based on a detective novel by Ellery Queen. That same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary award “For superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures”. Welles pretended to be out of town and sent John Huston to claim the award, thanking the Academy on film. Huston criticized the Academy for awarding Welles, even while they refused to give Welles any work.

In 1972, Welles acted as on-screen narrator for the film documentary version of Alvin Toffler‘s 1970 book Future Shock. Working again for a British producer, Welles played Long John Silver in director John Hough‘s Treasure Island (1972), an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, which had been the second story broadcast by The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938. This was the last time he played the lead role in a major film. Welles also contributed to the script, his writing credit was attributed to the pseudonym ‘O. W. Jeeves’. Some of Welles’ original recorded dialog was redubbed by Robert Rietty.

In 1973, Welles completed F for Fake, a personal essay film about art forger Elmyr de Hory and the biographer Clifford Irving. Based on an existing documentary by François Reichenbach, it included new material with Oja Kodar, Joseph Cotten, Paul Stewart and William Alland. An excerpt of Welles’s 1930s War of the Worlds broadcast was recreated for this film; however, none of the dialogue heard in the film actually matches what was originally broadcast. Welles filmed a five-minute trailer, rejected in the U.S., that featured several shots of a topless Kodar.

Welles hosted and narrated a syndicated anthology series, Orson Welles’s Great Mysteries, over the 1973–1974 television season. It did not last beyond that season; however, the program could be perceived as a television revival of the Mercury Theatre whose executive producer Welles had been in the 1930s and 1940s. The year 1974 also saw Welles lending his voice for that year’s remake of Agatha Christie‘s classic thriller Ten Little Indians produced by his former associate, Harry Alan Towers and starring an international cast that included Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer and Herbert Lom.

In 1975, Welles narrated the documentary Bugs Bunny: Superstar, focusing on Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s. Also in 1975, the American Film Institute presented Welles with its third Lifetime Achievement Award (the first two going to director John Ford and actor James Cagney). At the ceremony, Welles screened two scenes from the nearly finished The Other Side of the Wind.

In 1976, Paramount Television purchased the rights for the entire set of Rex Stout‘s Nero Wolfe stories for Orson Welles.^[51][52] Welles had once wanted to make a series of Nero Wolfe movies, but Rex Stout – who was leery of Hollywood adaptations during his lifetime after two disappointing 1930s films – turned him down.^[53] Paramount planned to begin with an ABC-TV movie and hoped to persuade Welles to continue the role in a mini-series.^[54] Frank D. Gilroy was signed to write the television script and direct the TV movie on the assurance that Welles would star, but by April 1977 Welles had bowed out.^[55] In 1980 the Associated Press reported “the distinct possibility” that Welles would star in a Nero Wolfe TV series for NBC television.^[56] Again, Welles bowed out of the project due to creative differences and William Conrad was cast in the role.^[57]

In 1979, Welles completed his documentary Filming Othello, which featured Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. Made for West German television, it was also released in theaters. That same year, Welles completed his self-produced pilot for The Orson Welles Show television series, featuring interviews with Burt Reynolds, Jim Henson and Frank Oz and guest-starring The Muppets and Angie Dickinson. Unable to find network interest, the pilot was never broadcast. Also in 1979, Welles appeared in the biopic The Secret of Nikola Tesla, and a cameo in The Muppet Movie as Lew Lord.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Welles participated in a series of famous television commercial advertisements. For two years he was on-camera spokesman for the Paul Masson Vineyards,^[58] and sales grew by one third during the time Welles intoned what became a popular catchphrase: “We will sell no wine before its time.”^[59] He was also the voice behind the long-running Carlsberg “Probably the best lager in the world” campaign,^[60] promoted Domecq sherry on British television^[61] and provided narration on adverts for Findus, though the actual adverts have been overshadowed by a famous blooper reel of voice recordings, known as the Frozen Peas reel.

In 1981, Welles hosted the documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, about Renaissance-era prophet Nostradamus. In 1982, the BBC broadcast The Orson Welles Story in the Arena series. Interviewed by Leslie Megahey, Welles examined his past in great detail, and several people from his professional past were interviewed as well. It was reissued in 1990 as With Orson Welles: Stories of a Life in Film. Welles provided narration for the tracks “Defender” from Manowar‘s album Fighting the World and “Dark Avenger” on Manowar‘s 1982 album, Battle Hymns. His name was misspelled on the latter album, as he was credited as “Orson Wells”.^[62]

During the 1980s, Welles worked on such film projects as The Dreamers, based on two stories by Isak Dinesen and starring Oja Kodar, and Orson Welles’ Magic Show, which reused material from his failed TV pilot. Another project he worked on was Filming The Trial, the second in a proposed series of documentaries examining his feature films. While much was shot for these projects, none of them was completed. All of them were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.

In 1984, Welles narrated the short-lived television series Scene of the Crime. During the early years of Magnum, P.I., Welles was the voice of the unseen character Robin Masters, a famous writer and playboy. Welles’s death forced this minor character to largely be written out of the series. In an oblique homage to Welles, the Magnum, P.I. producers ambiguously concluded that story arc by having one character accuse another of having hired an actor to portray Robin Masters.^[63] He also, in this penultimate year released a music single, titled “I Know What It Is To Be Young (But You Don’t Know What It Is To Be Old)”, which he recorded under Italian label Compagnia Generale del Disco. The song was performed with the Nick Perito Orchestra and the Ray Charles Singers and produced by Jerry Abbott who was father to famed metal guitarist Dimebag Darrell.^[64]

The last film roles before Welles’s death included voice work in the animated films The Enchanted Journey (1984) and The Transformers: The Movie (1986), in which he played the planet-eating robot Unicron. His last film appearance was in Henry Jaglom‘s 1987 independent film Someone to Love, released after his death but produced before his voice-over in Transformers: The Movie. His last television appearance was on the television show Moonlighting. He recorded an introduction to an episode entitled “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”, which was partially filmed in black and white. The episode aired five days after his death and was dedicated to his memory.

In the mid-1980s, Henry Jaglom taped lunch conversations with Welles at Los Angeles’s Ma Maison as well as in New York. Edited transcripts of these sessions appear in Peter Biskind‘s 2013 book My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.^[65]

Personal life

Relationships and family

Orson Welles and Chicago-born actress and socialite Virginia Nicolson (1916–1996) were married November 14, 1934.^[13]:332 The couple divorced February 1, 1940.^[66][67]

Welles fell in love with Mexican actress Dolores del Río, ten years his senior, with whom he was involved between 1938 and 1942.^[68] They acted together in the movie Journey into Fear (1943) but the affair ended soon after filming ended. Rebecca Welles, the daughter of Welles and Hayworth, met Del Rio in 1954 and said, “My father considered her the great love of his life … She was a living legend in the history of my family”.^[69]

Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943. The couple became estranged by 1946 – Welles blamed Hayworth for making unfounded accusations of infidelity, and after he was turned out of the marital bed he then actually started to have affairs, which in turn prompted Hayworth to have affairs of her own. They briefly reconciled in 1947 during the making of The Lady from Shanghai, before finally separating. In 1948 Hayworth filed for divorce, her reason to the press being, “I can’t take his genius any more.”^[70] During his last interview and only five hours before his death, Welles answered Merv Griffin‘s suggestive comment “But one of your wives—oh, I have envied you so many years for Rita Hayworth”, by calling her “one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived” and saying that he was “lucky enough to have been with her longer than any of the other men in her life.”^[71]

In 1955, Welles married actress Paola Mori (née Countess Paola di Girifalco), an Italian aristocrat who starred as Raina Arkadin in his 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin. The couple had embarked on a passionate affair, and after she became pregnant they were married at her parents’ insistence.^[17]:168 They were wed in London May 8, 1955,^{[13]:417, 419} and never divorced.

Croatian-born actress Oja Kodar became Welles’s longtime companion both personally and professionally from 1966 onwards, and they lived together for some of the last 19 years of his life. They first met in Zagreb in 1962, while Welles was filming The Trial, and embarked on a passionate, short-lived affair which ended when Paola Mori had a cancer scare and Welles returned to his wife. Kodar assumed Welles had left for good, and Welles hired a private detective to track down Kodar, to no avail. Three years passed, and Kodar was by then living in Paris and in a relationship with a struggling young actor. When they saw a press feature that Welles was in Paris, the young actor persuaded a reluctant Kodar to use her influence with Welles to get him a job. When she telephoned him, Welles immediately rushed to her hotel room, broke down the door, and pulled out a small metal box from his jacket. It contained a love letter to her. He had been carrying it every day for the last three years, in case he might meet her again one day.

With the passing years, Welles’s domestic arrangements became more complicated. From 1966 he always maintained at least two separate homes, one with Kodar, the other with Mori and their daughter Beatrice. In the 1960s and 1970s, he shared houses just outside Paris and Madrid with Kodar. Although British tabloids reported his affair with Kodar as early as 1969 (which was a factor in his moving permanently to the United States in 1970), both Mori and Beatrice remained oblivious as to Kodar’s existence until 1984. Welles set up a home with Mori and Beatrice in the United States (first in Sedona, then in Las Vegas), ostensibly because the climate would be good for his asthma. But while they lived in Las Vegas, he spent most of his time in Los Angeles, where he openly shared a house with Kodar. When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw him out of their Las Vegas house, and she and Beatrice did not see him for the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone.

This situation had serious ramifications for the copyright status of his work after his death. Welles left Kodar his Los Angeles home and the rights to his unfinished films, and turned the rest over to Mori. Mori contended that she should have been left everything, and a year after Welles’s death, Mori and Kodar finally agreed on the settlement of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Mori was killed in a car accident in August 1986. Mori’s half of the estate was inherited by Beatrice, who refused to come to an arrangement with Kodar, who she blames for undermining her parents’ marriage. Legal wranglings between the two have persisted for over 25 years, leading to complex ongoing legal battles over who owns his unfinished films.

Welles had three daughters from his marriages: Christopher Welles Feder (born March 27, 1938, with Virginia Nicolson); Rebecca Welles Manning (December 17, 1944 – October 14, 2004,^[72] with Rita Hayworth); and Beatrice Welles (born November 13, 1955, with Paola Mori). His only known son, British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 5th baronet, born May 5, 1940), is from Welles’s affair with Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, then the wife of Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, 4th baronet. Although Hogg knew Welles sporadically and occasionally worked as his assistant, and had long been rumoured to be his son given their strong physical resemblance, he refused to believe such rumours until he eventually took a paternity test in 2010.^[73] In her autobiography, In My Father’s Shadow, Feder wrote about being a childhood friend and neighbor of Lindsay-Hogg’s and always suspecting he might be her half-brother.^[74]

After the death of Rebecca Welles Manning, a man named Marc McKerrow was revealed to be her biological son, and therefore the direct descendant of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. McKerrow’s reactions to the revelation and his meeting with Oja Kodar are documented in the 2008 film Prodigal Sons.^[75] McKerrow died June 18, 2010.^[76]

Despite an urban legend promoted by Welles himself, he was not related to Abraham Lincoln’s wartime Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. The myth dates back to 1944 when, bantering with Lucille Ball on The Orson Welles Almanac before an audience of U.S. Navy service members, Welles says, “my great-granduncle was Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy in Lincoln’s cabinet”.^[77] In a 1970 TV interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Welles refers to Gideon Welles as his great-grandfather. As presented by Charles Higham in a genealogical chart that introduces his 1985 biography of Welles, Orson Welles’s father was Richard Head Welles, son of Richard Jones Welles (born Wells), son of Henry Hill Wells (who had an uncle named Gideon Wells), son of William Hill Wells, son of Richard Wells (1734–1801).^[9]

Welles is related to Charles Head (1899–1951), first husband of costume designer Edith Head (1897–1981). They are direct descendants of Henry Head (1647–1716), who emigrated to America before 1683 and settled in Little Compton, Rhode Island..

Physical characteristics

“Never robust, even as a baby Welles was given to ill health”, wrote biographer Frank Brady, who notes that from infancy he suffered from asthma, sinus headaches and back pain, with bouts of diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and malaria. “As he grew older,” Brady wrote, “his ill health was exacerbated by the late hours he was allowed to keep [and] an early penchant for alcohol and tobacco”.^[1]:8

Welles reached a height of six feet at the age of 14.^[9]:50 Peter Noble’s biography describes him as “a magnificent figure of a man, over six feet tall, handsome, with flashing eyes and a gloriously resonant speaking-voice”^[78] According to a 1941 physical exam taken when he was 26, Welles was 6 feet (183 cm) tall and weighed 218 pounds (99 kg). His eyes were brown.^[79] Other sources cite that he was 6 feet 4 inches (193 cm) tall, but the slates from costume tests made during the 1940s show him as 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm). Welles gained a significant amount of weight in his 40s, eventually rendering him morbidly obese, at one point weighing nearly 400 pounds (180 kg). The weight gain may have caused him to appear slightly shorter than his actual height. His obesity was severe to the point that it restricted his ability to travel, aggravated other health conditions, including his asthma, and even required him to go on a diet in order to play the famously portly character Sir John Falstaff.^[80] Some have attributed his over-eating and drinking to depression over his marginalization by the Hollywood system.^[81]

Religious beliefs

When Peter Bogdanovich once asked him about his religion, Orson Welles gruffly replied that it was none of his business. Welles then added that he was raised Catholic — “and once a Catholic, always a Catholic, they say.”^[13]:xxx In an April 1982 interview, Merv Griffin asked Welles about his religious beliefs. Welles replied, “I try to be a Christian. I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.”^[1]:576

Politics

Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained aligned with the left throughout his life, and always defined his political orientation as “progressive“. He was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and often spoke out on radio in support of progressive politics. He campaigned heavily for Roosevelt in the 1944 election.

For several years, he wrote a newspaper column on political issues and considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1946, representing his home state of Wisconsin (a seat that was ultimately won by Joseph McCarthy).

In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the administration of President Richard Nixon titled The Begatting of the President.

He was also an early and outspoken critic of American racism and the practice of segregation.

Death and tributes

On the evening of October 9, 1985, Welles recorded his final interview on the syndicated TV program, The Merv Griffin Show, appearing with biographer Barbara Leaming. “Both Welles and Leaming talked of Welles’s life and the segment was a nostalgic interlude,” wrote biographer Frank Brady.^{[1]:590–591} Welles returned to his house in Hollywood and worked into the early hours typing stage directions for the project he and Gary Graver were planning to shoot at UCLA the following day. Welles died sometime on the morning of October 10, following a heart attack.^[13]:453 He was found by his chauffeur at around 10 a.m.; the first of Welles’s friends to arrive was Paul Stewart.^{[82]:295–297}

Welles’s funeral was the subject of some disagreement among his family. It was handled by his widow Paola Mori, who had not seen him since she had thrown him out of their family home a year earlier, and his youngest daughter, Beatrice Welles. Mori would die the following year at age 57. On the pretext that “Daddy left no money for funerals or anything else”, Beatrice planned for it to be “a simple affair”, which intentionally excluded “Hollywood types”. Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, has written of her horror at arriving in “a slum” district of downtown Los Angeles and finding that the funeral took place in a building that “looked more like a hot sheets motel than a funeral home”, and that the funeral was booked in a small, bare, sparsely furnished shabby back room, which “had the look of a cheap motel room” and had no music or flowers. No ministers, speakers, or ceremony had been organized, and so the mourners sat in silence by Welles’s cremated remains until his 90-year-old former teacher and mentor, Roger Hill, gave an impromptu eulogy. Paola Mori had refused to allow most of Welles’s friends to attend, limiting the mourners to nine: herself, Welles’s three daughters, Roger Hill, three of Welles’s friends (Gary Graver, Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, and Greg Garrison), and the doctor who had signed Welles’s death certificate. Welles’s companion for the last 20 years, Oja Kodar, was not invited, nor were his ex-wives. Regarding the proceedings, Hill exclaimed, at the funeral, “This is awful! Awful!” Hill took particular exception to Welles’s having been cremated to save money, because “Orson never wanted to be cremated. He hated the whole idea of cremation. Thank God he doesn’t know what they did to him!”^[17]:1–9

In 1987 the cremated remains of Welles and Paola Mori were taken to Ronda, Spain, and buried in an old well covered by flowers on the rural estate of a longtime friend, retired bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.^{[82]:298–299} A photograph of the grave site appears opposite the title page of Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts, edited by Richard France.^[83]:ii

Unfinished projects

Welles’s reliance on self-production meant that many of his later projects were filmed piecemeal or were not completed. Welles financed his later projects through his own fundraising activities. He often also took on other work to obtain money to fund his own films.

Don Quixote

In the mid-1950s, Welles began work on Don Quixote, initially a commission from CBS television. Welles expanded the film to feature length, developing the screenplay to take Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age. Filming stopped with the death of Francisco Reiguera, the actor playing Quixote, in 1969. Orson Welles continued editing the film into the early 1970s. At the time of his death, the film remained largely a collection of footage in various states of editing. The project and more importantly Welles’s conception of the project changed radically over time. A version of the film was created from available fragments in 1992 and released to a very negative reception. A version Oja Kodar supervised, with help from Jess Franco, assistant director during production, was released in 2008 to mixed reactions.

The Merchant of Venice

In 1969, Welles was given another TV commission to film a condensed adaptation of The Merchant of Venice.^[84] Although Welles had actually completed the film by 1970 the finished negative was later mysteriously stolen from his Rome production office.^[82]:234

The Other Side of the Wind

In 1970, Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind. The film relates the efforts of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture and is largely set at a lavish party. By 1972 the filming was reported by Welles as being “96% complete”,^[1]:546 though it is likely that Welles had only edited about 40 minutes of the film by 1979.^[3]:320 In that year, legal complications over the ownership of the film forced the negative into a Paris vault where it remained until 2004, when Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the film) announced his intention to complete the production. As of 2009, legal complications over the Welles estate have kept the film from being finished or released. Some footage is included in the documentaries Working with Orson Welles (1993) and Orson Welles: One Man Band (1995).

Other unfinished films and unfilmed screenplays

• Too Much Johnson, a 1938 comedy film written and directed by Welles. Designed as the cinematic aspect of Welles’s Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette‘s 1894 comedy, the film was not completely edited or publicly screened. Too Much Johnson was considered a lost film until August 2013 news reports that a pristine print was discovered in Italy in 2008. A copy restored by the George Eastman House museum was scheduled to premiere October 9, 2013, at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, with a U.S. premiere to follow.^[85]
• Heart of Darkness: Welles’s projected first film in 1940, planned in extreme detail and with some test shots filmed. (The footage is now lost.) It was planned to be entirely shot in long takes from the point of view of the narrator, Marlow, who would be played by Welles, seeing his own reflection in the window as his boat sailed down river. The project was abandoned because it could not be delivered on budget, and Citizen Kane was made instead.^{[13]:30–33, 355–356}
• The Life of Christ: In 1941, Welles sought the approval of church leaders including Bishop Fulton Sheen for a turn-of-the-century retelling of the life of Christ. He scouted locations in Baja California and Mexico with Perry Ferguson and Gregg Toland, and wrote a screenplay with dialogue from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. “Every word in the film was to be from the Bible — no original dialogue, but done as a sort of American primitive,” Welles said, “set in the frontier country in the last century.” The unrealized project was revisited by Welles in the 1950s when he wrote a second unfilmed screenplay, to be shot in Egypt.^{[13]:361–362}
• It’s All True: Welles did not originally want to direct this 1942 documentary on South America, but after its abandonment by RKO, he spent much of the 1940s attempting to buy the negative of his material from RKO, so that he could edit and release it in some form. The footage remained unseen in vaults for decades, and was assumed lost. Over 50 years later, some (but not all) of the surviving material saw release in the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
• Monsieur Verdoux: In 1944, Welles wrote the first-draft script of this film, which he also intended to direct. Charlie Chaplin initially agreed to star in it, but later changed his mind, citing never having been directed by someone else in a feature before. Chaplin bought the film rights and made the film himself in 1947, with some changes (Welles said the gallows scenes were written by Chaplin, but that much of the film was unchanged from his own script). The final film credits Chaplin with the script, “based on an idea by Orson Welles”.
• Cyrano de Bergerac: Welles spent around nine months c. 1947-8 co-writing the screenplay for this along with Ben Hecht, a project Welles was assigned to direct for Alexander Korda. He began scouting for locations in Europe whilst filming Black Magic, but Korda was short of money, so sold the rights to Columbia pictures, who eventually dismissed Welles from the project, and then sold the rights on to United Artists, who in turn made a film version in 1950, which was not based on Welles’s script.^{[13]:106–108}
• Around the World in Eighty Days: After Welles’s elaborate musical stageshow of this Jules Verne novel, encompassing 38 different sets, he began shooting some test footage in Morocco for a film version in 1947. The footage was never edited, funding never came through, and Welles abandoned the project. Nine years later, the stage show’s producer Mike Todd made his own award-winning film version of the book.^[13]:402
• Moby Dick—Rehearsed: a film version of Welles’s 1955 London meta-play, starring Gordon Jackson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan, and with Welles as Ahab. Using bare, minimalist sets, Welles alternated between a cast of nineteenth-century actors rehearsing a production of Moby Dick, with scenes from Moby Dick itself. Kenneth Williams, a cast member who was apprehensive about the entire project, recorded in his autobiography that Welles’s dim, atmospheric stage lighting made some of the footage so dark as to be unwatchable. The entire play was filmed, but is now presumed lost. The recording was made during one weekend at the Hackney Empire theatre.^[86]
• Histoires extraordinaires: The producers of this 1968 anthology film, based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, announced in June 1967 that Welles would direct one segment based on both “Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado” for the omnibus film. Welles withdrew in September 1967 and was replaced. The script, written in English by Welles and Oja Kodar, is in the Filmmuseum Munchen collection.^[87]
• One-Man Band: This Monty Python-esque spoof in which Welles plays all but one of the characters (including two characters in drag), was made around 1968-9. Welles intended this completed sketch to be one of several items in a television special on London. Other items filmed for this special – all included in the “One Man Band” documentary by his partner Oja Kodar – comprised a sketch on Winston Churchill (played in silhouette by Welles), a sketch on peers in a stately home, a feature on London gentlemen’s clubs, and a sketch featuring Welles being mocked by his snide Savile Row tailor (played by Charles Gray).^[88]
• Treasure Island: Welles wrote two screenplays for this in the 1960s, and was eager to seek financial backing to direct it. Eventually, his own screenplay (under the pseudonym of O.W. Jeeves) was further rewritten, and formed the basis of the 1972 film version directed by John Hough, in which Welles played Long John Silver.
• The Deep: An adaptation of Charles Williams‘ Dead Calm. The picture was entirely set on two boats and shot mostly in close-ups, and was filmed off the coasts of Yugoslavia and the Bahamas, between 1966 and 1969, with all but one scene completed. Originally planned as commercially viable thriller, to show that Welles could make a popular, successful film. It was put on hold in 1970 when Welles worried that critics would not respond favourably to this film as his theatrical follow-up to the much-lauded Chimes at Midnight, and Welles focused instead on F for Fake. It was abandoned altogether in 1973 due to the death of its star Laurence Harvey. The Munich Film Museum holds a restored copy, with title cards filling out the missing scene.
• Dune: An early attempt at adapting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune by Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky was to star Welles as the evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, whom Jodorowsky had personally chosen for the role. However, the planned film never advanced past pre-production.
• Saint Jack. In 1978 Welles was lined up by his long-time protégé Peter Bogdanovich (who was then acting as Welles’s de facto agent) to direct this adaptation of the 1973 Paul Theroux novel about an American pimp in Singapore. Hugh Hefner and Bogdnovich’s then-partner Cybill Shepherd were both attached to the project as producers, with Hefner providing finance through his Playboy productions. However, both Hefner and Shepherd became convinced that Bogdanovich himself would be a more commercially viable director than Welles, and insisted that Bogdanovich take over. Since Bogdanovich was also in need of work after a series of box office flops, he agreed. When the film was finally made in 1979 by Bogdanovich and Hefner (but without Welles or Shepherd’s participation), Welles felt betrayed and according to Bogdanovich the two “drifted apart a bit”.^[89]
• Filming The Trial: After the success of his 1978 film Filming Othello made for West German television, and mostly consisting of a monologue to the camera, Welles began shooting scenes for this follow-up film, but never completed it.^[82]:253 What Welles did film was an 80-minute question-and-answer session in 1981 with film students asking about the film. The footage was kept by Welles’s cinematographer Gary Graver, who donated it to the Munich Film Museum, which then pieced it together with Welles’s trailer for the film, into an 83-minute film which is occasionally screened at film festivals.
• The Big Brass Ring: This 1982 screenplay, written by Welles with Oja Kodar was adapted and filmed by director George Hickenlooper in partnership with writer F.X. Feeney. Both the Welles script and the 1999 film center on a U.S. Presidential hopeful in his 40s, his elderly mentor—a former candidate for the Presidency, brought low by homosexual scandal—and the Italian journalist probing for the truth of the relationship between these men. During the last years of his life, Welles struggled to get financing for the planned film; however, his efforts at casting Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Paul Newman as the main character were unsuccessful. All of the actors turned down the role for various reasons.
• Cradle Will Rock: Welles planned on writing and directing a film centered around the 1937 staging of The Cradle Will Rock. Rupert Everett was slated to play the young Welles. However, Welles was unable to acquire funding. Tim Robbins later directed a similar film, but it was not based on Welles’s script.
• King Lear: At the time of his death, Welles was in talks with a French production company to direct a film version of the Shakespeare play, in which he would also play the title role.
• An adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov‘s novel Ada for which Welles flew to Paris to discuss the project personally with the Russian author.

Theatre credits

• See Orson Welles theatre credits

Radio credits

• See Orson Welles radio credits

Filmography

• See Orson Welles filmography

Awards and honors

• The American Film Institute ranked Citizen Kane as the greatest American movie. These other Welles films were nominated for their list: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, director/producer/screenwriter); The Third Man (1949, actor); Touch of Evil (1958, actor/director/screenwriter); and A Man for All Seasons (1966, actor).
• Citizen Kane was nominated for numerous prizes at the 1941 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role. The only Oscar won, however, was Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
• The Magnificent Ambersons was nominated for four 1942 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• The Stranger was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1947.
• Othello won the Palme d’Or at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
• In 1959, for their ensemble work in Compulsion, Orson Welles, Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell shared the prize for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.^[13]:425
• In 1968, Welles was nominated for Best Foreign Actor in a Leading Role at the 21st British Academy Film Awards for his performance in Chimes at Midnight.
• Welles was given the first Career Golden Lion award in the Venice Film Festival in 1970.
• In 1970, Welles was given an Academy Honorary Award for “superlative and distinguished service in the making of motion pictures.”^[90] Welles did not attend the ceremony: “I didn’t go because I feel like a damn fool at those things. I feel foolish, really foolish. … I made piece of film and said that I was in Spain, and thanked them.”^[15]:511
• Welles was given the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975.
• In 1978, Welles was presented with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Career Achievement Award.
• In 1979, Welles was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
• In Paris on February 23, 1982, President François Mitterrand presented Welles with the Order of Commander of the Légion d’honneur, the highest civilian decoration in France.^{[13]:449[82]:207}
• In 1982, Welles was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture at the Golden Globe Awards for his role in Butterfly, the same role that had him nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor, won by Ed McMahon in the same film, which also won the award for Worst Picture.
• In 1982 Welles won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording for his role on Donovan’s Brain.
• In 1983, Welles was made a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.^[15]:508
• Welles was awarded a Fellowship of the British Film Institute in 1983.
• In 1984 the Directors Guild of America presented Welles with its greatest honor, the D. W. Griffith Award.^[91]
• The 1992 audiobook version of This is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album.^[92][93]
• In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Welles as the 16th Greatest Male Star of All Time.
• When asked to describe Welles’s influence, Jean-Luc Godard remarked: “Everyone will always owe him everything.” (Ciment, 42)
• A highly divergent genus of Hawaiian spiders “Orsonwelles” is named in his honor (Hormiga et al. 2003)
• He won three Grammy Awards, each win in the category of Best Spoken Word Recording: in 1976, for “Great American Documents” (shared with Helen Hayes, Henry Fonda and James Earl Jones; in 1978, for the original motion picture soundtrack to Citizen Kane; and in 1981, for a recording of Donovan’s Brain.
• In 2008, a statue of Welles sculpted by Oja Kodar was erected in the city of Split.^[94]
• In November 2012, the Woodstock Opera House announced plans to dedicate its stage to Welles in a ceremony tentatively scheduled for February 2013.^[95]

In popular culture

• One of the recurring celebrity characters on the influential Canadian sketch comedy TV show Second City Television was John Candy‘s impersonation of Welles. On SCTV, Candy appeared as Welles in an array of embarrassing commercials, talk shows and other low-budget productions.
• Author Kim Newman has featured Orson Welles as a character in several stories from his Anno Dracula series.
• Although the character Brain from the animated series Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain was not initially modeled after Welles, Maurice LaMarche was shown a picture of Brain and tasked with finding a voice for the character. LaMarche immediately thought of Welles^[96] and decided to do his Welles impersonation. LaMarche also played Welles in The Critic (where his “later work”, ads for such products as ‘Mrs. Pell’s Fishsticks’, is referenced) and in the Futurama episode “Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences“, in which he performs a War of the Worlds-like play.
• In Tim Burton‘s 1994 film Ed Wood, the character Orson Welles (played by Vincent D’Onofrio and dubbed by Maurice LaMarche) makes a brief “cameo appearance”, giving advice to director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who idolises Welles. D’Onofrio would again portray Welles in the 2005 30-minute film Five Minutes Mr. Welles concerning Welles’s role in the film The Third Man.
• In Peter Jackson‘s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, the character Pauline Parker (played by Melanie Lynskey) attempts to include a picture of Orson Welles in the pantheon of beauty Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) has crafted, but is rebuffed.
• The 1996 film The Battle Over Citizen Kane, which chronicles the conflict between Welles and Hearst, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
• A 1999 HBO docudrama, RKO 281, tells the story of the making of Citizen Kane, starring Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles.
• Tim Robbins’s 1999 film Cradle Will Rock chronicles the process and events surrounding Welles and John Houseman’s production of the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein. In it, Welles is played by actor Angus MacFadyen.
• Playwright and actor Austin Pendleton wrote the 2000 play Orson’s Shadow about Welles and his collaboration with Laurence Olivier. It deals with the time that Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Eugène Ionesco‘s play Rhinoceros.
• In Michael Chabon‘s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the three main characters meet Orson Welles and attend the premiere of Citizen Kane, then stay up all night discussing the film’s impression upon them afterwards.
• The film Fade to Black (2006) is a fictional thriller based on Welles’s 1948 journey to Rome to star in the movie Black Magic.^[97]
• Me and Orson Welles (2009), based on Robert Kaplow‘s novel, stars Zac Efron as a teenager who convinces Welles (Christian McKay) to cast him in Welles’s 1937 production of Julius Caesar.
• In March 2012, citizens of Woodstock, Illinois, and Wellesnet, the Orson Welles web resource, began petitioning the United States Postal Service to issue a stamp in 2015 to honor Orson Welles on the 100th anniversary of his birth.^[98][99]

Wikipédia

Orson Welles (1915-1985) est un artiste américain, à la fois dessinateur, auteur et écrivain, prestidigitateur, acteur, producteur, réalisateur et scénariste. Il a été parfois crédité sous les noms de O. W. Jeeves ou G. O. Spelvin¹.

D’abord révélé à lui-même par le théâtre de Shakespeare, puis devenu célèbre par une émission de radio (La Guerre des mondes), Orson Welles devient une figure incontournable du cinéma dès son premier long-métrage, Citizen Kane, que l’ensemble des critiques considère comme l’un des dix films les plus importants du XX^e siècle^2,3.

Par la suite, son style cinématographique, mais aussi son jeu d’acteur, exercent une grande influence sur le cinéma des années 1950-1970, en particulier sur Stanley Kubrick⁴. Artiste précoce et polymorphe, farouchement épris de son indépendance, amateur de cigares, de tauromachie et de magie, Welles ne cesse tout au long de sa carrière de revenir au théâtre et à la littérature, aux grands textes classiques (Othello, Don Quichotte) comme aux contemporains (Le Procès). Se défiant du système de production et entretenant sa propre légende d’effets à la fois spectaculaires et énigmatiques, il laisse de nombreux films inachevés.

Biographie

Un enfant précoce

Son père, Richard Heard Welles, est un industriel dilettante et un grand voyageur⁵ ; sa mère, Béatrice Welles née Ives, est pianiste⁶. Le fils les décrit ainsi : « Mon père était un bon vivant de l’époque édouardienne qui aimait se dire inventeur⁷. Il était généreux et tolérant, adoré de tous ses amis. Je lui dois une enfance privilégiée et l’amour des voyages⁸. Ma mère était une femme d’une beauté mémorable, elle s’occupait de politique, était une championne de tir au fusil, ainsi qu’une pianiste de concert très douée⁷. Je tiens d’elle l’amour de la musique et de l’éloquence sans lesquels aucun être humain n’est complet⁸».

Le jeune Orson grandit dans une ambiance raffinée et cultivée avec une touche d’excentricité. Les témoignages sur sa précocité abondent : il sait lire à deux ans, apprend à jouer du piano à trois ans et met en scène du Shakespeare à sept ans : en effet, la légende, difficile à démêler de la réalité, veut qu’il ait été un enfant prodige et qu’il ait joué Le Roi Lear tout seul à l’âge de sept ans et accompli d’autres exploits avant cela⁵. Ces « exploits » sont désormais connus : il fit à trois ans une apparition dans Samson et Dalila à l’Opéra de Chicago, puis plus tard dans Madame Butterfly.

En 1919, ses parents se séparent et Orson suit sa mère à Chicago. À dix ans, il interprète Peter Rabbit dans les locaux du centre commercial Marshall Field’s à Chicago⁹. Par la suite, le journal local lui consacre un article titré : « Dessinateur, acteur, poète ; il n’a que dix ans »⁹. Ses aptitudes et sa passion pour le monde du spectacle ne s’arrêtent pas là : il se veut également décorateur, metteur-en-scène et surtout comédien et ce qu’il préfère avant tout c’est le transformisme et les postiches.

Côté scolarité, il entre comme interne à dix ans dans une école située à Madison (Wisconsin), où il monte une adaptation théâtrale de L’Étrange Cas du docteur Jekyll et de M. Hyde. En 1926, il intègre la Todd School for Boys, un établissement ouvert aux pratiques artistiques situé à Woodstock (Illinois) et dirigé par Roger Hill, à qui Welles rendit hommage par la suite. En effet, durant ses quatre années passées à la Todd School, il approfondit son goût pour la tragédie et la poésie classique, mais aussi pour l’illusionnisme et la magie. Très attaché à cette école, il y retournera durant l’été 1934 pour y monter un festival de théâtre qui donnera lieu à son premier ouvrage, Everybody’s Shakespeare¹⁰..

Deux événements personnels viennent ternir l’enfance et l’adolescence d’Orson : il perd sa mère, âgée seulement de quarante ans, le 10 mai 1924, suivie six ans plus tard, par la mort de son père. Orphelin à quinze ans, il est pris en charge par le pédiatre Maurice Bernstein (qu’Everett Sloane incarnera plus tard dans un rôle transposé pour Citizen Kane), ami de longue date de ses parents et qui va continuer à parfaire son éducation : il avait identifié en Orson, dès son plus jeune âge, un goût hors-du-commun pour le théâtre et l’illusion, lui offrant même une lanterne magique et un théâtre de marionnettes¹¹.

En 1930, encore étudiant à la Todd School, il gagne le prix de la meilleure mise en scène estudiantine avec son Jules César, prix décerné par l’Association dramatique de Chicago. Bernstein lui propose de l’inscrire à Harward puis le présente à Boris Anisfeld du Chicago Art Institute qui se montre impressionné par ses dessins, et Welles demande un congé sabbatique pour faire un « tour d’Europe »¹².

Le Gate Theatre (1930-1933)

Il choisit de partir durant l’été 1930 pour l’Irlande, afin d’étancher sa soif de peinture – de fait, Welles dessina toute sa vie. Il parcourt le pays avec une roulotte tractée par une mule⁷ , fait un crochet par les Îles d’Aran, se rend à Dublin et de là, à Paris où le magicien Harry Houdini l’initie à la magie et à la prestidigitation⁵. Âgé de seize ans et sans un sou, il revient à Dublin et se présente comme « vedette de théâtre new-yorkaise » à Hilton Edwards et Micheál Mac Liammóir, directeurs du Gate Theatre¹³ : Orson se montre très convaincant, car il s’est habilement grimé, et sa voix chaude et grave le fait passer pour plus âgé qu’il n’est. Grâce à cette mystification, il est enrôlé et demeure à Dublin, où il approfondit son expérience de la scène : « Je commençai en jouant les premiers rôles en vedette. Les petits rôles vinrent plus tard. »¹⁴. Le Gate, où débuta également James Mason, révéla Welles à son « démon du théâtre ». Il interpréta le rôle du duc Karl Alexandre dans une adaptation du Juif Süss¹⁵, mais surtout les rôles titres dans Hamlet, Richard III, King John, Timon d’Athènes, soit une vingtaine de pièces, rencontrant pour la première fois un vrai public¹⁶. Par intermittence, il est également régisseur son et lumières pour l’Abbey Theatre, le concurrent plus conservateur du Gate.

L’Aficionado

Ambitieux, Welles décide de partir à la conquête des théâtres londoniens, mais son permis de travail lui est refusé et il retourne à Dublin. Entre deux saisons théâtrales, il effectue un séjour à Séville et se fait passer pour un auteur de romans policiers¹⁷. Il déclara à ce propos : « J’habitais dans le quartier de Triana. J’écrivais des romans policiers, ce qui me prenait deux jours par semaine et me rapportait trois cents dollars. Avec cet argent, j’étais un grand seigneur à Séville »¹⁸. C’est également durant cette période qu’il se prend de passion pour la corrida. Après avoir découvert l’Andalousie à dix-sept ans, il pratique la tauromachie en tant que Aficionado practico, puis la corrida en tant que novillero¹⁹. Ce fut une passion de toute une vie (voir plus loin).

En 1932, il réalise un premier exercice cinématographique, un essai de dix minutes, mettant en image le Docteur Jekyll et Mister Hyde, mais d’après McBride, « il ne s’agit que d’un travail amateur et chaotique, dans lequel Welles et quelques amis dublinois, s’amusent »²⁰.

En 1934, il décide de retourner aux États-Unis.

New York (1934-1938)

En 1934, après cette immersion dans le théâtre, il retourne aux États-Unis, non sans amertume et quelque peu désœuvré. Le jeune homme possède alors une solide culture littéraire, ainsi qu’une bonne maîtrise des techniques de mise en scène. Pourtant les années 1933-1934 apportent nombre de changements, d’abord par la scène puis par son mariage.

Off-Broadway

Alors qu’il peine à trouver des rôles à sa mesure, que ses propres pièces comme The Marching Song sont refusées et que les États-Unis s’enfoncent dans la crise, Welles produit, toujours grâce à Roger Hill, une série d’ouvrages éducatifs illustrés intitulée Everybody’s Shakespeare, qui lui permet de visiter l’Afrique du Nord et de là, de ramener des centaines de dessins. Entre temps, il rencontre Thornton Wilder qui lui ouvre les portes de spectacles produits off-Broadway : c’est ainsi qu’il commence à jouer dans la troupe de Katharine Cornell, et c’est durant son interprétation dans Roméo et Juliette²¹ qu’il fut remarqué par John Houseman.

La chance lui sourit également quand Roger Hill, directeur de la Todd School, le contacte pour lui demander d’organiser un festival théâtral (Sumer Festival of Drama) durant l’été²². Il réussit à inviter Mac Liammóir et Edwards, les directeurs du Gate. Au cours des répétitions, il rencontre une jeune actrice en devenir, Virginia Nicholson (1916-1996), qu’il épouse quatre mois plus tard — en mars 1938, le couple aura une fille prénommée Chris²³, mais divorcera en 1939. Virginia se remariera avec le scénariste Charles Lederer l’année suivante.

The Hearts of Age

Dans l’intervalle, Welles tourne son premier film, The Hearts of Age²⁴ qui est un court-métrage muet d’une durée de huit minutes et par lequel, selon ses termes, il « raille l’univers poétique et fantasmagorique de Jean Cocteau ». Welles y interprète le rôle d’un homme en chapeau et grimé, tentant de descendre d’un bateau puis jouant du piano, tandis qu’une femme âgée le menace. Le montage « vigoureux et débridé », les angles et la lumière, révèlent un style très marqué par le cinéma expressionniste et l’esprit surréaliste²⁵. Virginia y campe la vieille dame et l’agent de police, son camarade de théâtre William Vance interprète un indien, le tout ponctué de plans de cloches d’église et de croix. Une séquence montre la main de Welles en train de dessiner. Restauré et conservé à la Bibliothèque du Congrès, ce premier opus ne détourne pas vraiment Welles de sa passion pour le théâtre.

Federal Theatre Project

Au vu de ses performances avec Cornell, le producteur et directeur de théâtre John Houseman lui offre de travailler avec lui, dans le cadre du Federal Theatre Project, un programme culturel issu du New Deal et opérationnel en septembre 1935¹⁷. En avril 1936, Il fit sensation en montant sur les planches d’un théâtre d’Harlem une adaptation très originale du Macbeth de Shakespeare, transposant sur scène la vieille Écosse, brumeuse et froide, en une ambiance caraïbe inspirée de l’histoire moderne d’Haïti²⁶, le tout interprété par des acteurs noirs. L’histoire se déroulait à l’époque du roi Henri I^er, et les sorcières devinrent des prêtresses vaudou. Il monta également le Faust de Marlowe dans une ambiance tamisée et mortifère. Après une adaptation d’Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (Horse Eats Hat) d’Eugène Labiche qui vit apparaître Joseph Cotten par la première fois, Houseman et Welles connurent en juin 1937 un véritable succès, doublé d’un autre scandale, avec une sorte de satire de la vie politique américaine en forme d’opéra composé par Marc Blitzstein et intitulée The Craddle will rock. De nombreux opposants politiques, ainsi que des ennemis du Federal Theatre, firent pression à Washington et obtinrent que la police donne l’ordre de fermer les portes du théâtre. Houseman et Welles décidèrent alors de jouer l’opéra dans la rue, où 600 personnes s’étaient rassemblées²⁷.

Les deux hommes démissionnent et fondent à la fin de l’année 1937 le Mercury Theatre, essentiellement pour servir le répertoire shakespearien. Leur première production fut Jules César dans une mise en scène inspirée du fascisme mussolinien.

Too Much Johnson

Deuxième court-métrage de Welles, Too Much Johnson fut produit par Mercury Productions et s’inscrit donc dans le cadre des représentations théâtrales engagées avec Houseman. L’origine du film n’est pas une œuvre de Shakespeare, mais une farce écrite par William Gillette. Tourné au cours du l’été 1938 dans les environs de New York et d’une durée de 40 minutes, ce film muet devait faire partie intégrante du spectacle, servant et de prologue et d’entractes. Pour des raisons multiples, il ne fut pas projeté lors de l’avant-première prévue au festival du Stony Creek Summer Theater. On voyait dans le rôle-titre Joseph Cotten déambuler sur les toits de New York, mais aussi Virginia Nicholson, Welles et Marc Blitzstein²⁸.

Radiophonie : les débuts

Parallèlement à son activité théâtrale, Welles fit dès 1935 ses débuts à la radio, dont l’émission March of Time, où sa voix chaude et grave séduit les auditeurs : durant quatre ans, il collabore à une quinzaine d’émissions par semaine^29,30. La chaîne CBS l’engagea pour réaliser des adaptations radiophoniques d’œuvres littéraires, avec ce qui constituera plus tard la troupe du Mercury Theatre : Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores del Río, Ray Collins, George Coulouris… L’émission hebdomadaire, intitulée Mercury Theatre on the Air, met en ondes de nombreux romans, dont La Splendeur des Amberson — qui sera plus tard son deuxième long-métrage —, mais aussi L’île au trésor de Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë, Jules César de Shakespeare et Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours de Jules Verne³¹. L’expérience dura vingt et un mois³².

L’émission du 30 octobre 1938

Durant la soirée du lundi 30 octobre 1938, veille d’Halloween, une adaptation de La Guerre des mondes de Herbert George Wells, où Welles, du fait de sa mise en onde très réaliste et se faisant passer pour un présentateur de CBS interrompant l’émission, aurait (selon une thèse très répandue, mais aujourd’hui remise en question³³) effrayé une bonne partie de la Côte Est des États-Unis qui aurait cru à l’invasion du pays par des Martiens³⁴.

Les circonstances de cette émission furent pourtant moins « glorieuses » que ses conséquences. Les standards de CBS, mais aussi des commissariats furent submergés d’appels de personnes prétendant avoir aperçu des Martiens. La panique fut relayée durant une semaine dans la presse. Rétrospectivement, l’ampleur de la panique aurait été, selon certains auteurs, considérablement exagérée au fil des années, de par les commentaires qui en ont été faits, à commencer par ceux de Welles lui-même³⁵.

Welles devient célèbre dans tout le pays du jour au lendemain, ce qui lui ouvrit les portes de Hollywood, où il lui sera offert un contrat en or³⁴.

Hollywood (1939-1947)

Tandis que Welles continuait à travailler avec Houseman pour CBS dans une émission identique, mais désormais rebaptisée The Campbell Playhouse (du nom de la Campbell Soup Company, sponsor du show), il fut contacté au cours de l’année 1939 par le tout nouveau président de la RKO Radio Pictures, George J. Schaefer (1888-1981) dont l’ambition était de faire des films de qualité³⁶. Le magazine Life venait de désigner Welles comme le « nouveau Max Reinhardt »³⁷. Et le 22 juin, il débarquait sur la Côte Ouest.

Contrairement à la légende, ce contrat des studios ne lui laissait pas « une entière liberté », mais prévoyait tout de même qu’il pouvait être à la fois scénariste et réalisateur, mais aussi coproducteur via sa société Mercury Production, un statut en vérité assez inhabituel, mais la RKO restant le distributeur, son droit de veto était considérable notamment sur le choix des acteurs et sur le montant des sommes avancées. Par ailleurs, on lui demandait un film par an sur une durée de cinq ans, en échange de 25 % des bénéfices et 150 000 dollars d’avance, avec une liberté sur le choix de la musique et même du montage, chose rarement vue à Hollywood.

Divorcé, puis installé à Brentwood (Los Angeles) et entouré de secrétaires, Welles travaille d’abord à l’adaptation du roman de Joseph Conrad, Au cœur des ténèbres (Heart of Darkness) et propose l’utilisation d’une caméra subjective³⁸. La RKO refuse pour cause de dépassement de budget prévisionnel³⁹, le projet, pourtant scénarisé, n’aboutit pas⁴⁰.

À peine le Conrad refusé, Welles propose une adaptation cette fois de Cecil Day-Lewis⁴¹, un polar politique intitulé The Smiler with a Knife, qui raconte l’histoire d’un femme détective qui enquête sur un mystérieux personnage vivant incognito et qui s’avère être un futur despote doublé d’un aviateur excentrique (visiblement inspiré d’Howard Hughes). Le choix de Lucille Ball pour le rôle-titre déplut aux studios, Carole Lombard ayant décliné l’offre.

Côté vie privée, Welles noua une relation avec Dolores del Río ; en 1940, il rompt son association avec John Houseman⁴².

Citizen Kane

Un an après son arrivée à Hollywood, Orson Welles, associé au scénariste Herman Mankiewicz (frère du cinéaste Joseph L. Mankiewicz), écrit le scénario de Citizen Kane et s’inspire en partie de la vie du magnat de la presse William Randolph Hearst. Toute la troupe du Mercury est intégrée dans la distribution. Le cinéaste a enfin obtenu le contrôle total du tournage, car il désire maintenir secret le sujet de son film. Les producteurs essaient de s’en mêler en débarquant à l’improviste sur le plateau, mais ils n’y trouvent que les techniciens et les acteurs en train de jouer au baseball, sur l’ordre du réalisateur rendu méfiant⁴³.

Le tournage se déroula du 30 juillet au 23 octobre 1940⁴⁴. Une fois le montage et la postproduction achevés durant l’hiver, Orson Welles participa à de nombreuses manifestations promotionnelles où on ne lui parlait que du parallèle entre le personnage de Charles Foster Kane et Hearst, et de la réaction de ce dernier qui venait d’engager une campagne de dénigrement par l’intermédiaire de ses propres journaux. Lassé, Welles déclara : « Lorsque le bruit déclenché par Citizen Kane sera apaisé, je tournerai un grand film sur la vie de Hearst ». Les choses s’envenimèrent à tel point qu’au sein de l’état-major de la RKO, il fut question de confisquer le négatif du film ; les dirigeants décidèrent malgré tout de lâcher du lest non sans avoir fait passer une copie à Hearst³⁵, et Welles, s’estimant trahi, menaça publiquement la société d’un procès en rupture de contrat, en son nom et en celui du Mercury Theatre : le film avait coûté 800 000 dollars. Sa santé s’altéra tant que son médecin l’envoya prendre du repos dans une clinique de Palm Springs³⁵. Malgré la campagne de dénigrement orchestrée par Hearst qui dure jusqu’en avril 1941, le film sort en salles, avec retard, le 1^er mai et d’abord au New York Palace⁴⁵. La critique est unanimement positive : le film apparaît comme une révolution du point de vue de la technique cinématographique et de la structure du récit. Plus tard, Welles dira que, pour la réalisation, il s’était inspiré du Roman d’un tricheur de Sacha Guitry quant à certains effets stylistiques (flashbacks, fondus, caméra subjective, voix-off, etc.), effets que l’on retrouve dans les films suivants⁴⁶.

Toujours est-il que si le public ne fut pas au rendez-vous, Welles décrocha tout de même le premier Oscar du meilleur scénario original et qu’il partagea avec Herman Mankiewicz.

La Splendeur des Amberson

Pour échapper au monde d’Hollywood, Welles s’accorda quelques semaines de mise en scène sur les planches où il monta une adaptation de Native Son de Richard Wright. Puis il s’attela à un nouveau script inspiré du roman La Splendeur des Amberson (The Magnificent Ambersons) de Booth Tarkington, qu’il avait en octobre 1939 déjà transposé à la radio.

Le tournage se déroula du 28 octobre 1941 au 22 janvier 1942 : la destruction de Pearl Harbor arriva entre-temps et le film se termina dans un climat oppressant, surtout que Welles était déjà sur d’autres projets. Pour ce deuxième film, le studio reconsidéra en effet son contrat, réduisant sa marge de manœuvre en termes de montage final  : n’y ayant pas accès, Welles partit au Brésil pour tourner dans un premier temps un reportage sur le carnaval de Rio. Là-bas, il apprit que Schaefer était viré (Welles perdait son protecteur) et qu’à la suite de deux pré-projections négatives en termes de retour, la RKO amputait le film de près de 43 minutes, lesquelles ne seront jamais retrouvées. La RKO fit également tourner une autre fin plus « moralement acceptable » par l’assistant-réalisateur Freddie Fleck et le monteur Robert Wise qui s’était déjà illustré sur Citizen Kane. Par ailleurs, mécontent que sa partition soit également amputée, Bernard Herrmann refusa que son nom soit porté au générique qui est l’un des premiers aux États-Unis à être récité à haute voix, se concluant par la marque finale devenue mythique  : My name is Orson Welles (Mon nom est Orson Welles, selon l’habitude des présentateurs radio).

La première eut lieu le 13 août 1942 et le film, qui n’engrangea que 620 000 dollars, fut sur la liste de quatre Oscars, mais sans succès⁴⁷.

Conflits avec la RKO

Commencé en même temps que La Splendeur des Amberson, le tournage du Voyage au pays de la peur (Journey into Fear) plaçait Welles dans une position délicate : il était sur ce dernier à la fois acteur et producteur, mais dans son contrat avec la RKO, il était initialement prévu qu’il le dirigerait.

Visiblement plus intéressé par La Splendeur des Amberson, Welles froissa quelque peu les studios en quittant le plateau. Par ailleurs, et sur les instances de Nelson Rockefeller, il mit en chantier un troisième projet durant cet automne 1941 : intitulé d’abord Pan American et bientôt rebaptisé It’s All True, regroupant quatre épisodes documentaires, Welles y brossait la vie des Américains sur les deux continents. Durant l’été 1941, et dans le cadre de ce travail de commande visant à rapprocher les peuples américains menacés par la guerre, Welles prit contact avec Duke Ellington et lui commanda une suite musicale pour un portrait de Louis Armstrong qui jamais ne se fit. En septembre, Norman Foster fut dépêché à Mexico pour tourner l’épisode intitulé “My Friend Bonito”, l’histoire d’un taureau et d’un garçon, lequel fut intégré plus tard au projet de documentaire.

De février à août 1942, Welles parcourut le Brésil en quête d’images pour deux épisodes : “The Sory of Samba” (l’histoire de la samba) et “Four Men on a Raft” (quatre pécheurs brésiliens sur un radeau). On peut supposer aussi qu’une telle distance permit à la RKO d’en profiter : « J’étais en Amérique du Sud et attendais les rushes de Voyage au pays de la peur ; c’est alors qu’un galopin de la RKO, ayant reçu l’approbation bienveillante d’un couple de vice-présidents et des censeurs du studio, se permit de monter le film. Le résultat fut heureusement présenté par une nuit noire, alors que personne ne regardait. » dira plus tard Welles⁴⁸.

Les raisons pour lesquelles It’s All True resta inachevé sont multiples : d’abord la direction de la RKO changea, après le départ de Schaefer, c’est Rockefeller qui se retira. Et puis il y eut le montage de La Splendeur des Amberson qui rendit furieux Welles. Par la suite, le tournage fut annulé et les bobines disparurent.

L’année 1943 marqua un retour à l’optimisme : le 7 septembre 1943, il épousa la star Rita Hayworth – ils eurent une fille, Rebecca (1944-2004)⁴⁹, puis divorcèrent en 1948. Invité par Franklin Roosevelt à participer à l’effort de guerre, il proposa une série de conférences un peu partout aux États-Unis, dont certaines furent publiées dans le New Farmer Almanac et le New York Post ou diffusées sur CBS, et ce, durant toute la guerre. CBS programma en 1942-43 : Ceiling Unlimited, une série radiophonique de 13 épisodes qui valorise l’armée de l’air américaine, commandée par Lockheed-Vega, mais écrite, réalisée et récitée par Welles ; puis Hello Americans qui consiste en 12 épisodes enregistrés dans différents pays du continent américain⁵⁰.

Début 1944, Welles devient une vedette de cinéma avec Jane Eyre de Robert Stevenson, qui est par ailleurs une adaptation de la pièce radiophonique jouée par The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Welles y incarne le premier rôle et connaît un beau succès commercial⁵¹.

Le Criminel

Welles s’investit à la fin de l’année 1943 dans le théâtre aux armées, produisant entre autres des tours de magie. La revue est baptisée The Mercury Wonder Show et participa notamment au film à sketch Hollywood Parade (Follow the Boys), dans duquel il découpe en morceaux Marlene Dietrich et où il se qualifie de « magicien amateur »⁵². Cette même année, il écrivit un scénario intitulé Monsieur Verdoux, inspiré d’un fait divers français, l’affaire Landru, et pour lequel il pressentait Charlie Chaplin pour le rôle titre : Chaplin n’ayant jamais été dirigé par personne le réécrivit après lecture et le transforma selon ses besoins, y incluant notamment une critique socio-économique, et, pour dédommager Welles, lui proposa 5 000 dollars, ainsi que sa présence au générique.

Welles revint derrière la caméra seulement à la fin à l’automne 1945 avec Le Criminel (The Stranger) : Sam Spiegel et la RKO, plus réticente que jamais, lui proposèrent de réaliser ce film, à condition de prendre le scénario de Anthony Veiller sans modification ; John Huston qui n’est pas crédité aida Welles du mieux qu’il put et les deux hommes devinrent amis. Welles expédia la mise en scène avec dix jours d’avance sur la date prévue et le film sortit le 25 mai 1946, puis connut un franc succès, mais fut considéré par Welles lui-même « comme étant son plus mauvais. Il n’y a rien de moi là-dedans. Je l’ai fait pour prouver que je pouvais tourner un film comme tout le monde. […] Les deux bobines tournées en Amérique du Sud étaient ce qu’il y a de mieux dans le film. Spiegel les a supprimées »⁵³. Welles y interprète un ancien nazi et c’est aussi le premier film à montrer des images de camps de concentration.

Toutefois, l’année 1946 devait lui apporter une véritable satisfaction : tourner librement avec son épouse, Rita Hayworth.

La Dame de Shanghai

Il réalise cette année-là La Dame de Shanghai (The Lady of Shanghai) vaguement inspiré d’un roman de Sherwood King, et magnifié grâce à la présence de Rita Hayworth — avec qui il est déjà en instance de divorce. Le public cria au scandale en voyant la rousse Rita, symbole du glamour hollywoodien, transformée en blonde platine aux cheveux courts, devenue à l’écran cynique et froide ; on bouda le film pendant les projections tests, lesquelles n’emballèrent pas non plus la Columbia qui préféra retarder sa sortie au profit de Gilda, autre film avec Hayworth en vedette. Le film ne sortit qu’en mai 1948. Ce quatrième long-métrage de celui que la presse décrivait déjà comme l’« enfant terrible d’Hollywood à l’étoile pâlissante »⁵⁴ s’achève sur la séquence du palais des glaces, où Rita Hayworth et Everett Sloane, qui jouent un couple marié, s’entretuent dans un terrifiant vacarme de verre brisé, labyrinthe de miroirs dont peut s’échapper le personnage principal (et narrateur), Michael O’Hara, interprété par Welles. Woody Allen y rendra hommage dans Meurtre mystérieux à Manhattan.

Juste après le tournage, Welles revint au théâtre et donc à New York. Certaines séquences de La Dame de Shanghai furent utilisées par Welles pour sa pièce, Around the World in 80 Days d’après Jules Verne et dont l’adaptation filmique fut envisagée par Michael Todd⁵⁵. Engloutissant d’énormes sommes dans cette production théâtrale et le public ne répondant que moyennement, Welles connaît pour la première fois des ennuis d’argent.

Macbeth

Durant l’été 1947, Herbert Yates, le président de Republic Pictures, un petit studio indépendant spécialisé dans le western et les séries B, accepte de financer son nouveau projet de film, l’adaptation du Macbeth de Shakespeare contre 200 000 dollars⁵⁶, le dépassement devant être payé par Mercury Theatre, autrement dit Welles. Ce pari économique ne fut pas tenu : Orson Welles paya près de 100 000 dollars en extra, tout en dissimulant la pauvreté des décors au milieu d’un brouillard artificiel, mais tournant son film en seulement vingt et un jours. Le résultat est saisissant d’étrangeté et de mystère, restituant parfaitement « l’atmosphère tellurique de la tragédie »⁵⁷. Sorti le 1^er octobre 1948, le film faillit être présenté à la Mostra de Venise, face à l’Hamlet de Laurence Olivier, puis disparut des écrans. Il sortit en France en 1950 et André Bazin fut l’un des ses plus ardents défenseurs, contribuant, avec Jean Cocteau, à faire venir « l’enfant prodigue » en Europe.

En réalité, Welles sortait totalement ruiné de cette expérience et le fisc américain lui réclamait de fortes sommes. Dès la fin 1948, il embarquait pour Cinecitta, où il acceptait contre cachets divers rôles, profitant ainsi de sa côte en tant qu’acteur, du moins sur le Vieux Continent.

Le tour d’Europe (1949-1956)

Outre ses ennuis avec le fisc, Welles est désormais tombé en disgrâce auprès des producteurs américains, en particulier parce qu’il figure depuis novembre 1947 à la suite des recommandations de l’HUAAC sur la liste noire de la MPAA, laquelle refuse d’employer des artistes supposés être de tendance communiste. Paradoxalement, Welles n’avait jamais caché son aversion pour les fascismes et le stalinisme, entretenant même une correspondance entre autres avec Eisenstein. Victime collatérale du Maccartysme, Welles partit en Europe où il joua dans de nombreux films pour financer son nouveau projet shakespearien : Othello.

Le Troisième Homme

Après Rome dont on peut retenir Black Magic (Cagliostro) qui permit la rencontre avec Akim Tamiroff, puis après quelques projets parisiens avortés, Welles tourna surtout à Londres⁵⁸.

Le film qui amorça la transformation d’Orson Welles en un véritable mythe en Europe fut celui où, entre ombre et brouillard, il n’apparaît que peu (comparé à Joseph Cotten) et qui ne connut pas non plus un énorme succès : adapté du roman éponyme de Graham Greene (également scénariste), Le Troisième Homme du Britannique Carol Reed reste pourtant un cas à part dans sa carrière d’acteur. Reed reconnut plus tard que Welles s’était particulièrement investi dans cette aventure qui les mena à Vienne, prodiguant même quelques conseils sur deux ou trois séquences, mais pas plus. Son personnage fit corps avec lui et Welles devint pour tous Harry Lime, « l’homme qui meurt deux fois » doublé d’un truand équivoque et fascinant⁵⁹.

La France

Le public français découvrit les premiers films de Welles bien entendu après la Libération. Jean-Paul Sartre fit alors l’éloge de Citizen Kane⁶⁰ un an avant qu’il sorte en salles en juillet 1946. Plus tard, les jeunes critiques des Cahiers du cinéma se laissèrent également séduire, André Bazin⁶¹ en tête.

Pagnol et Guitry

À New York pendant la guerre, Orson Welles avait assisté à une projection de La Femme du boulanger de Marcel Pagnol⁶². Welles débarqua à Marseille en septembre 1946⁶³, et Pagnol raconta qu’il a vu surgir dans son bureau un géant qui s’est exclamé : « Je veux voir monsieur Raimu ! ». Mais Raimu venait juste de mourir, et Welles de fondre alors en larmes : « C’était le meilleur de nous tous ! », finit-il par dire⁶⁴, avant d’expliquer qu’il avait envisagé de faire appel à Raimu pour quelques projets de films. Entre Pagnol et Welles, ce fut l’amitié, ce dernier n’hésitant pas le à critiquer, disant par exemple de La Femme du boulanger qu’il est « parmi les meilleurs films du monde, mais parmi les plus mal filmés ». Welles fit aussi la connaissance d’un collaborateur de Pagnol, le photographe de plateau Roger Corbeau, qui fut engagé sur Dossier secret et Le Procès⁶⁵. Quelques années plus tard, Welles est contacté par Sacha Guitry qui lui proposa le rôle de Benjamin Franklin dans Si Versailles m’était conté et celui de Hudson Lowe pour son Napoléon. Lorsque Bill Krohn s’entretint avec Welles à la fin des années 1970, celui-ci lui révéla qu’il avait forgé son style « d’essayiste, en s’inspirant du travail de Guitry »⁶⁶.

Londres

En 1951, le producteur indépendant Harry Allan Towers demande à Welles, alors installé entre Londres et l’Italie, de réaliser Tales from the Black Museum, une série radiophonique en 51 épisodes inspirés de faits divers réels tirés des dossiers de Scotland Yard et de la Metropolitan Police Service. Towers réussit à exporter ce programme sur l’ensemble des chaînes anglophones dans le monde. Aux États-Unis, il fut diffusé sur Mutual Broadcasting System durant l’année 1952. La scénarisation est signée Ira Marion et possède l’originalité de faire entendre à la fois le point-de-vue de la police et des criminels.

Othello

Welles va mettre quatre ans à tourner Othello (The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice). Bien qu’inscrit au répertoire du Mercury Theatre, André Bazin situe le début de ce projet lorsque Welles se trouvait en Italie. Un séjour à Venise et une liaison avec Lea Padovani qui devait interpréter Desdémone, permettent de faire remonter le début du tournage à l’été 1948⁶⁷. Les cachets italiens de l’acteur (via Mercury Productions) servirent à payer les premières séquences, puis ceux de Londres. Après une première audition décevante, il fit appel à Micheál MacLiammóir pour jouer Iago, puis Suzanne Cloutier pour Desdémone. L’équipe du film se trouva bientôt composée de personnels de différentes nationalités, car le tournage, interrompu par les problèmes d’argent, tentait de s’accommoder des nombreux changements de lieux. Ainsi, Welles utilisa de nombreux plans extérieurs (Venise, Rome, Pérouse, Viterbe, Essaouira)⁶⁸ en réalisant d’invisibles raccords, tissant son film de façon obstinée, et suivi tant bien que mal par son équipe, se retrouvant sans producteur italien (Michele Scalera déposa le bilan en 1950) et sauvé par Les Films Marceau, pour un budget total d’environ 6 000 000 lires⁶⁹ et un montage qui comprend 2 000 plans (contre 500 pour Citizen Kane). Le film conserve cependant la marque du réalisateur, lequel affirmait : « Le montage est essentiel pour le metteur en scène, c’est le seul moment où il contrôle complètement la forme de son film »⁷⁰.

Sa réussite artistique fut saluée par le Grand prix (ex-æquo) à Cannes en 1952, le film étant présenté sous pavillon… marocain !

Débuts à la télévision

Welles revint ensuite sur les planches et c’est au théâtre Édouard VII à Paris qu’il proposa une adaptation de sa propre pièce The Unthinking Lobster (Miracle à Hollywood), une fable satirique contre le système de production hollywoodien pour laquelle il tourna en guise de prélude le court-métrage The Miracle of St. Anne et recruta Eartha Kitt ; l’ensemble s’intitulait The Blessed and the Damned. La critique parisienne dont Le Monde salua les prouesses techniques, mais s’inquiéta du coût financier, aussi Welles remplaça le tout par du Musset et du Shakespeare, Eartha clôturant la soirée avec un récital de chanson puis le spectacle partit en tournée.

Revenu à Londres, Welles finit enfin par y monter du Shakespeare grâce à l’aide de Laurence Olivier, puis participa au lancement de la chaîne BBC2 avec une adaptation du Marchand de Venise. En 1955, la BBC lui commande une série, The Orson Welles Sketchbook, six épisodes dans lesquels il raconte des anecdotes personnelles tout en dessinant. Dans la foulée, Associated-Rediffusion, une société de production londonienne, passe commande de treize téléfilms : Around The World with Orson Welles (ITA, 1956) est un « travels essays film »⁷¹, tourné à Londres, en France, en Espagne et qui comprenait : Le Pays basque, La Vie au Pays basque, Le Troisième Homme à Vienne, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Les Pensionnaires de la Reine, Tauromachie en Espagne et enfin L’Affaire Dominici.

Pour la radio anglaise, il participa à une série en 52 épisodes, préquelle au Troisième homme et intitulée The Adventures of Harry Lime (BBC, 1951-52). Sur ce, il rencontra Peter Brook qui adapta avec lui King Lear (Le roi Lear) pour la télévision américaine (Omnibus Theatre, CBS, 1953).

Dossier secret

Après des débuts remarqués à la télévision, il se lança totalement dans le projet d’un nouveau film, en partie inspiré de trois épisodes des Adventures of Harry Lime ⁷². Non seulement ce film eut deux titres (voire trois), mais aussi cinq versions en salle⁷³. L’histoire du tournage est aussi complexe que celle d’Othello.

Intitulé sur le script de départ Masquerade, puis Confidential Report (Dossier secret) et produit par le français Louis Dolivet (qui confisquera le montage), le tournage s’étala sur sept mois (1953-54), entre Ségovie, Madrid, Valladolid, Munich, Paris, la Côte d’Azur et le Château de Chillon. Arkadin, le personnage que joue Welles, prend sa source dans la vie du milliardaire Basil Zaharoff et l’homme chargé d’enquêter sur son passé est Lime, mais Welles le rebaptisa Van Stratten. La sortie du film prit deux ans de retard, car le montage entrepris par Welles dura presque toute l’année 1954, à cause surtout de la postsynchronisation. La première eut cependant lieu à Madrid en mars 1955 sous le titre Mister Arkadin, puis à Londres cinq mois plus tard et enfin Paris (juin 1956). La critique est partagée, mais Éric Rohmer compara alors Welles à Eisenstein⁷⁴.

Au début du tournage, Welles rencontre l’actrice italienne Paola Mori qu’il épousa en mai 1955 – ils eurent une fille, Beatrice Welles, née à la fin de la même année ; Welles quitta Paola en 1962 pour vivre avec Oja Kodar.

Intermède américain (1956-1959)

Welles était déjà revenu à Broadway en 1954 pour un King Lear remarqué et d’ailleurs capté par CBS, mais c’est à Londres qu’il transposa pour la scène Moby Dick, le roman de Melville en 1955, mise en scène bientôt captée par la télévision anglaise : intitulée Moby Dick – Rehearsed, le montage ne fut jamais achevé. Peu après, John Huston fut alors chargé de faire un film, à partir d’un scénario de Ray Bradbury : ce fut Moby Dick (film, 1956), où Welles jouait le Père Mapple, et qui revint donc après dix ans d’absence à Hollywood. Il participa à nombre d’adaptations shakespeariennes pour CBS et NBC, mais surtout, et contre toute attente, il réalisa un long-métrage.

La Soif du mal

En 1958, il se voit confier la réalisation de La Soif du mal (The Touch of Evil), d’après un petit roman noir, par les studios Universal. Dans des entretiens ultérieurs⁷⁵ avec Peter Bogdanovich, Welles expliquera comment Charlton Heston, véritable star à l’époque, joua dans ce choix un rôle déterminant. Désirant la star pour le projet, Universal convoqua Heston, qui apprend que la distribution comprendra Janet Leigh dans le rôle de sa femme, et Orson Welles, dans le rôle du commissaire Quinlan. À la suite d’un malentendu, Heston comprit que « Welles va être le réalisateur du film », alors il déclara : « Si Welles est le réalisateur, je suis d’accord ». Contacté, Welles donne son accord pour un bout d’essai. Les producteurs visionnant tous les soirs les rushes, sont emballés au point de proposer à Welles de signer un contrat de quatre films pour les cinq ans à venir^{[réf. nécessaire]}. Hélas pour lui, une fois le film monté, le studio changea radicalement de position. Universal décida de faire remonter complètement le film par un autre réalisateur, de couper des scènes et d’en tourner de nouvelles à la hâte^{[réf. nécessaire]}. Welles déclara : « L’humour que j’ai mis dans le film était inhabituel pour l’époque. Aujourd’hui, il s’est banalisé. Mais à l’époque, il a déplu aux pontes d’Universal »⁷⁶. Ce fut là son dernier film hollywoodien : on y retrouvait Akim Tamiroff et Marlene Dietrich, et un plan séquence inaugural mythique.

Durant ce séjour, il tourne notamment dans Les Feux de l’été d’après William Faulkner où il décroche un rôle face à Paul Newman et travaille pour Desilu Productions, qui le contacte fin 1956 pour lancer une série, The Orson Welles Show, mais le projet est avorté. La chaîne NBC programmera The Fountain of Youth (La Fontaine de jouvence), seul épisode achevé et qui remporte un prestigieux Peabody Awards.

Retour en Europe

Avant de rentrer en Europe, Welles fait la connaissance à Mexico d’Oscar Dancigers, producteur entre autres de Luis Buñuel. Un nouveau projet émergea : adapter le Don Quichotte de Cervantès. Ce film ne fut jamais achevé, mais Welles tenta de le terminer toute sa vie durant (cf. plus loin). En 1961, la chaîne ABC programma Orson Welles and the Art of Bullfighting qu’il réalisa en Espagne : c’est vers cette époque qu’il s’installe à Madrid, mais Welles ne cesse d’aller et venir, prenant l’avion dès qu’une occasion se présente.

Le Procès

En 1960, Welles rencontra le producteur Alexander Salkind qui lui proposa d’adapter une œuvre moderne, mais libre de droit. Quelque temps auparavant, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, le (supposé) fils naturel de Welles (né en 1940 de Geraldine Fitzgerald⁷⁷) lui avait soumis l’idée d’adapter pour les planches Le Procès de Franz Kafka. Plus tard, les droits cinéma se révélèrent appartenir à un agent allemand. Toujours est-il que Salkind parvint à réunir 650 millions d’anciens francs (1,2 million de dollars de l’époque) avec un montage financier franco-italo-allemand et le tournage débuta en mars 1962 à Zagreb (à défaut de Prague), en passant par la Gare d’Orsay, et se termina en juin. Welles revisitait le roman, mais contournait quelque peu l’humour noir de l’auteur, innovant cependant en commandant à Alexandre Alexeïeff et Claire Parker une animation tirée de la Parabole de la Loi, incluse dans le texte originellement arrangé par Max Brod. Le film sort à Paris en décembre 1962 et décroche le Prix Méliès : The Trial fut mal perçu par la critique anglo-saxonne, jugé baroque et déstabilisant, il s’achève sur un champignon atomique, Guerre froide oblige.

Dès la fin du tournage, Welles commence à vivre avec Oja Kodar, qu’il avait rencontrée à Zagreb. Dans la foulée, il continue d’être acteur pour les films des autres, et retenons de cette période sa rencontre avec Pasolini pour La Ricotta en 1963.

Falstaff

Trois ans après le tournage du Procès, il réalise Chimes At Midnight (Falstaff), qui est une refonte de plusieurs tragédies de Shakespeare qu’il avait écrite sous le nom de Five Kings en 1939 (Richard II, Henri IV, Henri V, Les Joyeuses Commères de Windsor) et en s’inspirant également des chroniques de Raphael Holinshed ; en février 1960, il reprit Five Kings au Grand Opera House de Belfast qui fut pour Welles sa dernière performance sur les planches, mais qui servit en réalité de “pré-répétition” pour un film dont il avait déjà l’idée en tête⁷⁸.

Le tournage se déroula entre septembre 1964 et avril 1965, le film étant tourné en Espagne et produit par Emiliano Piedra avec l’aide ultérieure d’Harry Saltzman⁷⁹, que Welles avait rencontré à Madrid pour un projet, l’adaptation de L’Île au trésor.

Le thème central du film est l’amitié trahie et la jeunesse perdue ; Orson Welles y incarne Sir John Falstaff. Sa passion dévorante pour le dramaturge anglais irradie ce film à la fois mélancolique et bouffon. Il considère qu’il s’agit de sa plus grande réussite : « Mon meilleur film est Falstaff, ensuite Les Amberson. Falstaff est le complément, quarante ans plus tard, de ce Citizen Kane que j’ai tourné à l’aube de ma vie »⁸⁰. Le film est une coproduction hispano-suisse avec un tournage en anglais dans les environs de Barcelone entre l’hiver 1964 et le printemps 1965. Jeanne Moreau, déjà présente dans Le Procès y tient le rôle de Dolly, entourée d’une kyrielle d’acteurs issus du théâtre anglais dont John Gielgud.

Présenté à Cannes en mai 1966, le film décrocha deux récompenses : le Prix du XX^e Anniversaire du Festival du Film et le Prix de la Commission supérieure technique.

Une histoire immortelle

Durant l’automne 1966, il tourne pour la télévision française (ORTF) Une histoire immortelle (The Immortal Story), tiré d’une nouvelle de Isak Dinesen intitulée L’éternelle histoire⁸¹. Welles tourna pour la première fois en couleurs. Conçu à la façon d’une “miniature”, ce film comprend Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio et Orson Welles dans le rôle de Mr Clay. Il ne sera diffusé que sur la deuxième chaîne et projeté le 24 mai 1968, passant relativement inaperçu eu égard aux événements en cours, mis à part qu’il contient une scène d’un érotisme assez poussé pour l’époque et que Jean Renoir salua^{[réf. nécessaire]}.

Quelques mois plus tard, Welles “s’embarque” dans le tournage de The Deep (1967-69) d’après Dead Calm (1963) de Charles Williams, sur un bateau, au large des côtes yougoslaves, avec entre autres Oja Kodar et Jeanne Moreau. Le film resta inachevé (cf. plus loin).

Welles est alors à un nouveau tournant de sa carrière : il va faire face à une succession de projets avortés, dont le plus célèbre reste The Other Side of the Wind commencé en août 1970 avec ses amis John Huston et Peter Bogdanovich et dont le tournage (chaotique) s’étala jusqu’en 1976.

En 1969, CBS programme Around the World with Orson Welles puis en 1971 Orson Welles Bag (comprenant des extraits de The Merchant of Venice), mais le fisc américain confisqua les financements reçus par Welles et le téléfilm resta inachevé. Cette année-là, il reçoit l’Oscar d’honneur pour l’ensemble de sa carrière.

C’est sans doute au cours de l’année 1970 qu’il décida de quitter l’Espagne et de rentrer aux États-Unis, s’installant à Los Angeles avec Oja Kodar (il était toujours officiellement marié avec Paola Mori).

Les dernières années

En quinze ans, Welles ne réussira à sortir que deux documentaires. Tout en continuant à jouer dans des films, à se montrer dans des émissions télévisées, à participer même à des publicités, il occupe l’essentiel de son temps à tenter de monter de nouveaux projets. Sa liaison avec Kodar est désormais publique. Elle participa avec lui à la plupart des films de fiction (des adaptations) que Welles, faute d’argent et de temps, ne parvint pas à terminer.

Vérités et Mensonges

Réalisé avec la complicité de François Reichenbach, Vérités et Mensonges (F For Fake) est un essai documentaire, une réflexion sur le cinéma comme art de l’illusion, ainsi que sur les différentes techniques mises en œuvre pour y parvenir.

Filming Othello

Revenant sur le tournage d’Othello à partir de documents datant des années 1950-52, Filming Othello (1978), fut réalisé pour la télévision allemande (Hellwig Productions), mais bénéficia d’une distribution en salles américaines en juin 1979, fait rare et dû à la personnalité et au prestige de son auteur.

En 1982, Welles fut le président de la cérémonie des César. La même année le 23 février, le président François Mitterrand le nomme Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur, la plus haute distinction civile en France.

Il meurt à 70 ans, le 10 octobre 1985 à Los Angeles des suites d’un arrêt cardiaque⁸² quelques heures après avoir participé à l’émission télévisée le Merv Griffin Show.

Conformément à ses dernières volontés, ses cendres ont été dispersées en Espagne⁸³, dans la finca Recreo de San Cayetano près de Ronda en Andalousie, qui appartenait à son ami, le torero Antonio Ordóñez.

Films ébauchés, inachevés ou perdus

La carrière du réalisateur est émaillée de projets de films, soit restés à l’état de scénario, amorcés puis abandonnés, ou, mieux encore, tournés, mais invisibles⁸⁴. Après la mort de Welles en 1985, de nombreuses zones d’ombres demeurent : problèmes des droits et de la succession, localisation des archives, intentions de montage du cinéaste et statut des œuvres, etc. « S’inscrivant dans la vieille tradition des expérimentateurs » selon André Bazin⁸⁵, ces projets de films font sans doute partie intégrante de son œuvre, en tous cas participe de la construction du personnage Orson Welles, cas unique dans l’histoire du cinéma. Par ailleurs, Welles lui-même n’aura reconnu de son vivant⁸⁶ que deux films « en cours d’achèvement » (in progess), à savoir : Don Quichotte et The Other Side of the Wind.

Cette liste ne prétend pas être exhaustive, et ne répertorie que les films signés avec une maison de production ou pour lesquels il existe une source certaine.

It’s All True

Inachevé, le tournage de It’s All True commença fin 1941 et fut annulé en août 1942. Welles n’avait à l’origine nullement l’intention de réaliser seul ce documentaire, mais au cours des années qui suivirent, il chercha à remettre la main sur les rushes, afin de pouvoir les monter en quelque chose d’exploitable. Certains de ces rushes furent retrouvés en 1985. Les droits du film appartenaient désormais à Paramount, mais n’étaient libres que passés 50 ans. En 1993, sortit dans les salles un documentaire intitulé It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, écrit et réalisé par Richard Wilson (l’un des collaborateurs de Welles en 1942), Bill Krohn et Myron Meisel avec la participation de Catherine Benamou, fruit d’un long travail d’enquêtes sur les lieux de tournage (1986-1991) et montrant une bonne partie des rushes disponibles.

Don Quichotte

Welles commence à tourner les premières images de Don Quichotte en septembre-octobre 1957 au Mexique⁸⁷, avec un premier producteur, Oscar Dancigers. Le film ne verra jamais le jour. Il va tourner pendant sept ans, interrompant volontairement le film, le plus souvent pour des raisons budgétaires. En 1969, Francisco Reiguera, l’un des protagonistes meurt. Welles tentera de monter le film dans les années 1970. Une tentative de montage réalisée à partir des rushes et suivant les notes laissées par Welles fut produite en 1992 : les réactions critiques furent mitigées.

The Deep

Inachevé, le tournage de Dead Reckoning (titre prévu) fut interrompu en 1969. L’un des chefs opérateurs était Willy Kurant, le même que sur Une Histoire immortelle. L’un des acteurs, Laurence Harvey, étant mort en 1973, Welles ne put jamais compléter les scènes manquantes. Une partie du film fut également tourné aux Bahamas. Toutes les scènes devaient être en couleurs, mais faute de moyens, certaines sont en noir et blanc. Les négatifs sont réputés perdus, mais le Munich Stadtmuseum possède une copie de travail qui fut projetée au Festival de Berlin en 2000. En 1989, Philip Noyce tourna une adaptation du roman (inachevé) de Williams, qui sortit en français sous le titre Calme blanc.

The Merchant of Venice

C’est à l’origine un téléfilm couleur commencé en 1969 pour la chaîne CBS, mais réputé inachevé, et tiré de la tragédie de Shakespeare, Le Marchand de Venise. Welles y interprète Shylock et l’on peut découvrir dans le documentaire The Lost Films of Orson Welles⁸⁸ ses saisissants monologues tournés face caméra, dans le désert d’Arizona. Une partie des négatifs aurait été perdue à Rome, mais Bogdanovich laisse entendre que CBS aurait tout simplement suspendu le tournage à cause des ennuis de Welles avec le fisc américain⁸⁹.

The Other Side of the Wind

The Dreamers

The Craddle will rock’ et King Lear

L’artiste

Acteur shakespearien génial et inspiré, scénariste inventif et puissant, réalisateur visionnaire et novateur, conteur magique d’histoires extraordinaires dans Vérités et Mensonges, the wonder boy Orson Welles a su poser sur l’Amérique et la société moderne, sur le monde du spectacle et de la communication un regard lucide et sans complaisance. Son analyse du pouvoir des médias, dans Citizen Kane, n’a pas pris une ride^{[non neutre]}. Et les dangers liés aux progrès de la science, cristallisés dans l’accident de George Amberson, dans son deuxième film, sont toujours d’actualité. Mais l’homme est avant tout un féru de littérature, de musique, de peinture et de théâtre. En 1958, venu présenter La Soif du mal en France, Orson Welles rencontre André Bazin, journaliste et fondateur des Cahiers du cinéma, à qui il accorde un long entretien qui est repris dans le livre que le critique consacre à Welles. Il parle des cinéastes qu’il admire : Marcel Pagnol, John Ford dont il a vu La Chevauchée fantastique une quarantaine de fois avant de réaliser son premier film, Vittorio De Sica, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sergueï Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, René Clair et David Wark Griffith. Mais il n’est pas tendre avec certains de ses pairs. Toujours dans l’entretien avec Bazin, il descend Roberto Rossellini, Nicholas Ray et Vincente Minnelli. Seul Stanley Kubrick trouve grâce à ses yeux. Du reste, il est possible de considérer Kubrick comme le meilleur disciple de Welles tant les deux artistes ont de points communs.

Sa carrière n’a pas été un long fleuve tranquille. Il a été obligé de batailler ferme pour mener à bien tous ses projets, qu’il s’agisse de théâtre ou de cinéma. Après 1946 et l’échec commercial cuisant du Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours de Jules Verne, au théâtre⁹⁰, il a eu des ennuis avec le fisc. Mais il a également connu des moments heureux. Il a pu monter quelques pièces de Shakespeare en Angleterre. Visionnaire et audacieux, il a monté, à New-York, Macbeth et transposé l’histoire de l’Écosse brumeuse à l’île d’Haïti sous le règne du roi Christophe, en faisant jouer des acteurs noirs. Sa passion pour le grand dramaturge anglais ne s’arrête pas au théâtre et au cinéma : il réalise plusieurs adaptations radiophoniques qu’il sortira par la suite en disque.

Il a collaboré avec entre autres avec plusieurs musiciens : en tant que narrateur, sur l’album musical d’Alan Parsons Project intitulé Tales of Mystery and Imagination sur le titre A Dream Within a Dream ; avec le groupe de heavy métal Manowar en prêtant sa voix pour des narrations sur les titres Dark Avenger et Defender.

Shakespeare

Orson Welles dès son plus jeune âge entretient une relation privilégiée avec le dramaturge anglais. Dans les multiples entretiens qu’il accordait, il ne cessait de répéter que Shakespeare était le plus grand poète de tous les temps. Le choc, dans le plus beau et le plus noble sens du terme, entre les deux artistes ne pouvait déboucher que sur des chefs-d’œuvre. Avant même de faire du cinéma, Welles maîtrisait parfaitement le théâtre de Shakespeare: Richard III, monstre du théâtre du dramaturge anglais, était à son répertoire. En 1939, il produit Les cinq rois, où il refond plusieurs pièces, et le fait jouer par le Mercury Theatre. La consécration eut lieu dans les années 1950, quelque temps après avoir terminé son adaptation de Othello. Grâce à l’aide de l’acteur Laurence Olivier, il put monter la pièce sur la scène du Saint James Theatre, le temple du théâtre élisabéthain. Le triomphe fut total. En 1956, à New-York, il a mis en scène Le roi Lear, au théâtre City Center, toujours avec le même succès.

Au cinéma, l’influence de Shakespeare se manifeste dès Citizen Kane : un roi de la presse, qui cherche à étendre son empire, doit essuyer plusieurs échecs sentimentaux, relationnels et professionnels qui le conduiront à la solitude et à la mort. Nous retrouvons dans ce premier film de nombreuses thématiques shakespeariennes: un roi solitaire, tentant en vain de concilier ambition, pouvoir et vie de famille, et devant faire face à la trahison. Celle de ses amis, mais aussi la sienne propre, car Charles Kane trahit sa profession de foi. Ce thème de la trahison, et de l’échec qui s’ensuit, va se retrouver tout au long de son œuvre, mais également de sa vie professionnelle. Il suffit de penser à It’s all true et Don Quichotte : trahi par ses échecs commerciaux, le cinéaste a de nombreuses difficultés pour mener à bien ses projets.

Les adaptations qu’Orson Welles réalise sont chacune différentes, mais également fascinantes. Macbeth est composé majoritairement de plans-séquences très longs. Le seul couronnement du roi dure près de dix minutes. Le cinéaste plonge le film dans des brumes, rappelant celles d’Écosse, afin de cacher la pauvreté des décors. À l’inverse, Othello est composé d’environ deux mille plans. Véritable prouesse technique de Welles qui interrompt son film pour le reprendre quelques mois plus tard, une fois les finances arrivées. C’est également le film où le thème de la trahison est sublimé : Othello est trompé par Iago qu’il croit être son ami, alors qu’en fait ce dernier ne sert que ses ambitions. Sa dernière adaptation est également grandiose puisqu’il s’agit de Falstaff, où il refond plusieurs pièces du dramaturge et fait de John Falstaff, personnage secondaire, presque un faire-valoir chez Shakespeare, un personnage de premier plan. La séquence de bataille est admirable, et le pachyderme Welles, très loin du jeune premier de Citizen Kane, incarne le bouffon, mais sincère Falstaff, renié par son ami devenu roi.

La tauromachie

Welles, nous l’avons vu, découvre l’Espagne à 17 ans. Au cours de l’année 1935, il sillonne de nouveau l’Espagne sous l’apodo de El Americano. Mais après deux blessures, l’une au cou, l’autre à la cuisse, il renonce à son ambition de devenir torero.

Il déclara plus tard, lors d’un entretien avec un journaliste de Arriba le 10 février 1951, qu’il avait cherché à devenir torero mais « ne pus atteindre ce que je me proposais… C’est (la tauromachie) un véritable art de Titan »⁹¹. Il cultiva toute sa vie une passion pour la tauromachie au point qu’il a fait répandre ses cendres dans la finca de son ami Antonio Ordóñez⁹² et que l’Espagne s’est trouvé être parfois le décor de plusieurs de ses films. Cependant il n’a jamais réussi, au cours de sa carrière, à trouver le financement pour son film Monstres sacrés^{[réf. nécessaire]} dont le sujet est celui d’un cinéaste (lui-même) qui suit des toreros de ville en ville. De son Afición, seuls subsistent My Friend Bonito ainsi que quelques émissions de télévision, parmi lesquelles Corrida à Madrid (1955), The Orson Welles Sketchbook (Around the World with Orson Welles, ABC, 1955) et Orson Welles on the Art of Bullfighting (ABC, 1961)⁹².

Au cours de sa carrière, il tente de « contaminer » un certain nombre de célébrités de Hollywood, occupant dans les arènes les places du premier rang en compagnie d’acteurs et d’actrices. Certains le suivent parce que c’est en quelque sorte à la mode : Frank Sinatra, Debra Paget Lee Marvin, Glenn Ford. D’autres étaient devenus de réels aficionados : Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Stefanie Powers (qui était elle-même une Aficionada practica), Joseph Cotten, Anthony Quinn⁹³.

L’écrivain et le dessinateur

Textes publiés de son vivant :

• (en) Everybody’s Shakespeare avec Roger Hill, Everybody’s Shakespeare, Woodstosk (Ill.), The Todd Press, 1934 comprenant Le Marchand de Venise, La Nuit des rois et Jules César ; illustr. de Welles – réédité avec Macbeth sous le titre The Mercury Shakespeare, Londres & New York, Harper & Bros., 1939 (illustré par O. Welles)., Woodstosk (Ill.), The Todd Press, 1934 comprenant Le Marchand de Venise, La Nuit des rois et Jules César ; illustr. de Welles – réédité avec Macbeth sous le titre The Mercury Shakespeare, Londres & New York, Harper & Bros., 1939 (illustré par O. Welles).
• (en) Invasion from Mars, New York, Dell Publishing, 1949, anthologie comprenant le scénario radiophonique de La Guerre des mondes écrit par Howard Koch.
• Une grosse légume⁹⁴, roman trad. par M. Bessy, coll. « L’Air du temps », Gallimard, 1953.
• Miracle à Hollywood (The Unthinking Lobster) suivi de A bon entendeur (Fair Warning), théâtre⁹⁵, trad. par Serge Greffet, La Table ronde, 1953.
• Monsieur Arkadin (Mr Arkadin), roman adapté par M. Bessy⁹⁶, coll. « L’Air du temps », Gallimard, 1954 – rééd. en 1969 et 1973 (La Guilde du Livre / Edito-Service).
• (en)Moby Dick — Rehearsed: A Drama in Two Acts, New York, Samuel French Inc., 1965 (ISBN 0-573-61242-0).
• (en)This is Orson Welles écrit avec Peter Bogdanovich, New York, Harper & Row, 1972.

Publications posthumes :

• (en) The Big Brass Ring: An Original Screenplay, Black Spring Press, 1991 (ISBN 978-0948238161).
• (en) Les Bravades: A Portfolio of Pictures Made for Rebecca Welles by Her Father⁹⁷, Workman Publishing, 1997 (ISBN 978-0761105954).
• (en)(fr) Giorgio Gosetti (éd.), Orson Welles & Oja Kodar, The Other Side of the Wind: scénario-screenplay, Cahiers du Cinéma & Festival International du Film de Locarno, 2005.

Welles fut également un dessinateur accompli, et ce dès Hearts of Age. Dans The Orson Welles Sketchbook, il illustre diverses anecdotes à partir de ses propres croquis ; dans Vérités et Mensonges, on le voit en train de dessiner dans plusieurs séquences⁹⁸.

Radiophonie

Cette liste présente l’essentiel des contributions radiophoniques d’Orson Welles entre 1934 et 1952 et montre qu’au cours des cinq premières années l’homme de théâtre et de radio fusionnent en un travail très prenant, exploratoire et fondateur, et qui connaît son apogée avec l’adaptation de La Guerre des mondes en octobre 1938 :

1934

The American School of the Air (CBS) – acteur

1935

Panic d’Archibald MacLeish produit par The March of Time⁹⁹ (CBS) – acteur

Documentaire de William S. Paley produit par America’s Hour (CBS) – acteur

Dramatique historique pour Calvacade of America (CBS / DuPont) – acteur

1936

Poèmes pour Musical Reveries (CBS) – récitant

The Bells pour Terror by Night (CBS) – acteur

The Wonder Show, 6 émissions pour (Mutual) – récitant

Hamlet de William Shakespeare pour Columbia Workshop¹⁰⁰ (CBS) – adaptateur et acteur

1937

The Fall of the City d’Archibald MacLeish pour Columbia Workshop (CBS) – acteur

Les Misérables de Victor Hugo, 7 épisodes coproduit par Mercury Theatre (Mutual¹⁰¹) – adaptation, réalisation et acteur

Twelfth Night de Shakespeare pour Shakespearean Cycle (CBS) – adaptation, réalisation et acteur

Dramatiques pour la série reprenant le personnage The Shadow (Mutual) – voix de The Shadow¹⁰²

Adaptation de Miss Middleton’s Lover de Laura Jean Libbey (Mutual) – acteur

1938

The Magic Key (Blue) – acteur

Dracula de Bram Stocker pour First Person Singular¹⁰³ (CBS) – production, adaptation, réalisateur, acteur

The Treasury Island de Robert Louis Stevenson – idem

A Tale of Two Cities de Charles Dickens – idem

The Thirty-Nine Steps de John Buchan – idem

Trois nouvelles de Carl Ewald, Saki et Sherwood Anderson – idem

Abraham Lincoln de John Drinkwater – idem

The Affairs of Anatol d’Arthur Schnitzler – idem

The Count of Monte Cristo d’Alexandre Dumas – idem

The Man Who Was Thursday de G. K. Chesterton – idem

Jules César de William Shakespeare, The Mercury Theatre on the Air (CBS) – production, adaptation, réalisateur, acteur

Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë – idem

Sherlock Holmes de Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – idem

Oliver Twist de Charles Dickens – idem

Hell on Ice de Edward Ellsberg – idem

Seventeen de Booth Tarkington¹⁰⁴ – idem

Around the World in Eighty Days de Jules Verne – idem

The War of the Worlds de H. G. Wells – idem

Heart of Darkness de Joseph Conrad – idem

Stars in Their Courses de I.A.R. Riley, The Silver Theatre (CBS) – acteur

A Passenger to Bali de Ellis St. Joseph, The Mercury Theatre on the Air (CBS) – production, adaptation, réalisateur, acteur

The Pickwick Papers de Charles Dickens – idem

Clarence de Booth Tarkington – idem

The Bridge of San Luis Rey de Thornton Wilder – idem

Rebecca de Daphne du Maurier pour The Campbell Playhouse¹⁰⁵ (CBS) – production, adaptation, réalisateur, acteur

1939

Série d’adaptations pour The Campbell Playhouse (CBS)

1940

Suite des adaptations pour The Campbell Playhouse (CBS)

The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny (NBC) – lui-même

This is Radio (Mutual) – acteur

Entretien entre Welles et H.G. Wells par Charles Shaw (KTSA)¹⁰⁶

Filmographie

Réalisateur

Courts-métrages

• 1934 : Hearts of Age
• 1938 : Too Much Johnson
• 1978 : Moby Dick
• 1984 : The Spirit of Charles Lindberg
• 1985 : Orson Welles’ Magic Show

Longs-métrages

• 1941 : Citizen Kane
• 1942 : La Splendeur des Amberson (The Magnificent Ambersons)
• 1942 : It’s All True (inachevé)
• 1943 : Voyage au pays de la peur (Journey into fear) avec Norman Foster
• 1946 : Le Criminel (The Stranger)
• 1947 : La Dame de Shanghai (The Lady from Shanghaï)
• 1948 : Macbeth
• 1952 : Othello (The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice)
• 1955 : Dossier secret ou (Mr. Arkadin/Confidentiel Report)
• 1957 : Don Quichotte (inachevé)
• 1958 : La Soif du mal (The Touch of Evil)
• 1962 : Le Procès (The Trial)
• 1965 : Falstaff – Chimes at Midnight
• 1968 : Une histoire immortelle (The Immortal Story)
• 1970 : The Deep (inachevé)
• 1972 : The Other Side of the Wind (inachevé)
• 1973 : Vérités et Mensonges (F for Fake)
• 1978 : Filming Othello
• 1984 : The Dreamers (inachevé)

Documentaires et fictions télévisés

• 1955 : The Orson Welles Sketchbook
• 1955 : Around the World with Orson Welles

1. L’Affaire Dominici (inachevé)
2. Corrida à Madrid
3. Saint-Germain-des-Prés
4. Le Pays Basque Visionner le début
5. La Pelote Basque
6. Le Troisième Homme à Vienne
7. Les Prisonniers de la Reine

• 1960 : Hong Kong vu par Orson Welles
• 1964 : In the Land of Don Quixote
• 1967 : Le Marchand de Venise (The Merchant of Venice) (inachevé)

Producteur associé

La réalisation est d’Orson Welles, sauf mention contraire

• 1938 : Too Much Johnson
• 1940 : Citizen Kane
• 1942 : La Splendeur des Amberson (The Magnificent Ambersons)
• 1942 : Voyage au pays de la peur (Journey Into Fear) de Norman Foster
• 1944 : Jane Eyre de Robert Stevenson
• 1947 : La Dame de Shanghai (The Lady from Shanghai)
• 1948 : Macbeth
• 1952 : Othello (The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice)
• 1955 : Dossier secret (Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report)
• 1956 : Orson Welles and People (télévision)
• 1964 : In the Land of Don Quixote (série télévisée)
• 1968 : Vienna
• 1970 : The Deep
• 1985 : Orson Welles Magic Show

Scénariste

• 1966 : La Bible (The bible… in the beginning) de John Huston (non crédité)
• 1968 : La Cible (Target) de Peter Bogdanovich (non crédité)

Acteur

Années 1930/1940

• 1938 : Too Much Johnson d’Orson Welles
• 1940 : Citizen Kane d’Orson Welles
• 1942 : La Splendeur des Amberson (The Magnificent Ambersons) d’Orson Welles
• 1942 : Voyage au pays de la peur (Journey into fear) de Norman Foster
• 1944 : Jane Eyre de Robert Stevenson
• 1944 : Hollywood Parade (Follow the boys) de A. Edward Sutherland
• 1946 : Demain viendra toujours (Tomorrow Is Forever) de Irving Pichel
• 1946 : Le Criminel (The Stranger) d’Orson Welles
• 1947 : La Dame de Shanghai (The Lady from Shanghai) d’Orson Welles
• 1948 : Macbeth d’Orson Welles
• 1949 : Cagliostro (Black Magic) de Gregory Ratoff
• 1949 : Échec à Borgia (Prince of Foxes) de Henry King
• 1949 : Le Troisième Homme (The Third Man) de Carol Reed
• 1949 : Désordre de Jacques Baratier

Années 1950

• 1950 : La Rose noire (The Black Rose) de Henry Hathaway
• 1952 : Othello (The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice) d’Orson Welles
• 1953 : L’Affaire Manderson (Trent’s Last Case) d’Herbert Manderson
• 1953 : Si Versailles m’était conté… de Sacha Guitry
• 1953 : Révolte dans la vallée (Trouble in the Glen) de Herbert Wilcox
• 1955 : Trois meurtres (Three Cases of Murder) de Wendy Toye, David Eady et George More O’Ferrall
• 1955 : Napoléon de Sacha Guitry
• 1955 : Dossier secret (Mr. Arkadin) d’Orson Welles
• 1956 : Moby Dick de John Huston
• 1957 : Le Salaire du diable (Man in the Shadow) de Jack Arnold
• 1958 : Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven) de John Huston
• 1958 : Les Feux de l’été (The Long Hot Summer) de Martin Ritt
• 1958 : Le Génie du mal (Compulsion) de Richard Fleischer
• 1958 : La Soif du mal (The Touch of Evil) d’Orson Welles
• 1959 : David e Golia (David e Golia) de Richard Pottier

Années 1960

• 1960 : Drame dans un miroir (Crack in the Mirror) de Richard Fleischer
• 1960 : Interview with Orson Welles documentaire d’Allan King
• 1960 : Austerlitz d’Abel Gance
• 1961 : Les Tartares (I tartari / The tartars) de Richard Thorpe et Ferdinando Baldi
• 1961 : La Fayette de Jean Dréville : Benjamin Franklin
• 1962 : Le Procès (The Trial) d’Orson Welles
• 1963 : Rogopag (Ro.Go.Pag.), épisode La Ricotta de Pier Paolo Pasolini
• 1963 : Hôtel International (The V.I.P.s ou International Hotel) d’Anthony Asquith
• 1964 : In the Land of Don Quixote (série télévisée) d’Orson Welles
• 1965 : La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo ( Marco the magnificent / le meravigliose avventure di Marco Polo) de Noel Coward et Denys de La Patellière
• 1965 : Falstaff d’Orson Welles
• 1966 : Paris brûle-t-il ? de René Clément
• 1966 : Un Homme pour l’éternité (A Man for all Seasons) de Fred Zinnemann
• 1967 : Le Désordre à vingt ans de Jacques Baratier
• 1967 : Le Marin de Gibraltar (The Sailor of Gibraltar) de Tony Richardson
• 1967 : Une histoire immortelle d’Orson Welles
• 1967 : Casino Royale de John Huston et Ken Hughes
• 1967 : Qu’arrivera-t-il après ? (I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname) de Michael Winner
• 1968 : Un cri dans l’ombre (House of Cards) de John Guillermin
• 1968 : Œdipe Roi (Oedipus the King) de Philip Saville
• 1968 : Portrait : Orson Welles documentaire de François Reichenbach et Frédéric Rossif
• 1968 : Pour la conquête de Rome I (Kampf um Rom I) de Robert Siodmak
• 1969 : Pour la conquête de Rome II (Kampf um Rom II – Der Verrat) de Robert Siodmak
• 1969 : La Bataille de la Neretva (La battaglia della Neretva / Bitka na Neretvi) de Veljko Bulajić
• 1969 : La Lettre du Kremlin (The Kremlin Letter) de John Huston
• 1969 : 12 + 1 (Una su 13) de Nicolas Gessner et Luciano Lucignani

Années 1970

• 1970 : Trois pour un massacre (Tepepa…viva la revolución) de Giulio Petroni : Colonel Cascorro
• 1970 : Catch 22 de Mike Nichols
• 1970 : Waterloo de Serguei Bondartchouk
• 1970 : Commencez la révolution sans nous (Start the Revolution Without Me) de Bud Yorkin
• 1971 : La Décade prodigieuse de Claude Chabrol
• 1971 : A Safe Place d’Henry Jaglom
• 1972 : Malpertuis de Harry Kümel
• 1972 : Necromancy de Bert I. Gordon
• 1972 : Get to Know Your Rabbit de Brian De Palma
• 1973 : L’Île au trésor (Treasure Island) de John Hough
• 1973 – 1974 : Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (Les mystères d’Orson Welles), 26 épisodes produits par Anglia Television/ITV et Roald Dahl, présentés et interprétés entre autres par Welles¹⁰⁷, dont La Grande Bretèche (TV), d’après le nouvelle d’Honoré de Balzac¹⁰⁸.
• 1974 : The challenge… A tribute to modern art documentaire de Herbert Kline
• 1974 : Une légende une vie : Citizen Welles documentaire de Maurice Frydland
• 1975 : Vérités et Mensonges (F for Fake) d’Orson Welles
• 1976 : Le Voyage des damnés (Voyage of the damned) de Stuart Rosenberg
• 1979 : Les Muppets, ça c’est du cinéma (The Muppet movie) de James Frawley

Années 1980/2000

• 1980 : Tesla (Tajna Nikole Tesle) de Krsto Papic
• 1980 : The man who saw tomorrow Nostradamus 1999 de Robert Guenette : Narrateur
• 1980 : Filming Othello d’Orson Welles
• 1982 : Butterfly de Matt Cimber
• 1982 : Slapstick (Of Another Kind) de Steven Paul
• 1982 : Where is Parsifal? d’Henry Helman
• 1983 : Hot money / Getting centred de Zale Magder et George McCowan
• 1983 : Orson Welles à la Cinémathèque documentaire de Pierre-André Boutang et Guy Séligmann
• 1984 : Almonds and raisins documentaire de Russ Karel
• 1984 : De weg naar Bresson / The road to Bresson documentaire de Leo de Boer et Jurriën Rood
• 1984 : In our hands documentaire de Robert Richer et Stanley Warnow
• 1985 : Someone to love d’Henry Jaglom
• 1985 : Orson Welles magic show d’Orson Welles (inachevé)
• 2005 : Lucifer et moi de Jacques Grand-Jouan (utilisation d’images tournées en 1982)

Voxographie

Narrateur

Doublage français¹¹⁰

Georges Aminel dans : Voyage au pays de la peur (2e doublage) La Splendeur des Amberson (Voix – 2e doublage) Masters of the Congo Jungle (Documentaire – Voix) Le Roi des rois (Voix) Hôtel international Paris brûle-t-il ? Casino Royale Catch 22 La Décade prodigieuse Vérités et Mensonges Le Voyage des damnés La Folle Histoire du monde (Voix) Clair de lune (série télévisée) Jean Davy dans : Le Troisième Homme La Rose noire (1er doublage) Othello Le Salaire du diable Les Racines du ciel Les Feux de l’été Le Génie du mal La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo Un homme pour l’éternité L’Île au trésor

Yves Brainville dans : Visa pour Hong Kong Austerlitz La Fayette Claude Péran dans : Citizen Kane Le Criminel Jacques Erwin dans : Dossier secret Moby Dick Raoul Delfosse dans : L’Étoile du sud Commencez la révolution sans nous et aussi : Claude Bertrand dans La Dame de Shanghai Marc Valbel dans Échec à Borgia Pierre Hatet dans La Rose noire (2e doublage) Yves Montand dans Les Vikings (Voix) Paul Bonifas dans La Soif du mal Pierre Morin dans David et Goliath Jean Topart dans Le Procès Philippe Noiret dans Une histoire immortelle Jean Martinelli dans Malpertuis Jean Roche dans Dix petits nègres (Voix) Roger Lumont dans Les Muppets, le film Jean-Claude Balard dans Shogun (mini-série – Voix)

Box-office américain

Recettes au moment de la sortie en salles :

• Citizen Kane : 1 585 634 dollars
• La Splendeur des Amberson : 620 000 dollars

Annexes

Bibliographie

• Notices d’autorité : Fichier d’autorité international virtuel • International Standard Name Identifier • Bibliothèque nationale de France • Système universitaire de documentation • Bibliothèque du Congrès • Gemeinsame Normdatei • Bibliothèque nationale de la Diète • WorldCat

Monographies

• André Bazin, Orson Welles, Paris, Éditions des Cahiers du cinéma. 2002. Réédition de l’étude réalisée en 1972 et préfacée par André S. Labarthe, avec ajout d’un texte de François Truffaut. Étude d’autant plus précieuse que le critique a pu s’entretenir avec Orson Welles qui venait à Paris pour présenter La Soif du mal.
• Alain Bergala, Jean Narboni et Claudine Paquot, Orson Welles, Paris, Éditions des Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Les auteurs ont rassemblé de nombreuses études critiques de différents numéros des Cahiers du cinéma, ainsi que des entretiens avec Orson Welles.
• Jean-Pierre Berthomé et François Thomas, Orson Welles au travail, Paris, Éditions des Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006.
• Maurice Bessy, Orson Welles, Paris, Seghers, coll. Cinéastes de notre temps, 1965.
• Maurice Bessy, Orson Welles, Paris, Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 1982.
• Peter Bogdanovich. Moi, Orson Welles, Paris, Le Seuil, collection Points, 1997. Cet ouvrage est composé de plusieurs entretiens avec Peter Bogdanovich, réalisés à partir de 1968 et s’étendant sur 15 ans. C’est sa seule véritable autobiographie.
• Youssef Ishaghpour, Orson Welles, cinéaste, une caméra visible, Paris, La Différence, 2001. Monumentale monographie en trois volumes, 1984 pages.
• Paolo Mereghetti, Orson Welles, Paris, Éditions des Cahiers du cinéma. collection Les grands cinéastes, 2007.
• Peter Noble. Orson Welles le magnifique, Paris, Éditions Pierre Horay. 1957.
• Danièle Parra et Jacques Zimmer, Orson Welles, Paris, Éditions Filmo 13. 1985.
• Brigitte Tast, Hans-Jürgen Tast : Orson Welles – Othello – Mogador. Aufenthalte in Essaouira, Kulleraugen Vis.Komm. Nr. 42, Schellerten 2013, ISBN 978-3-88842-042-9

Ouvrages généralistes

• Robert Bérard (dir.), Histoire et dictionnaire de la Tauromachie, Paris, Bouquins Laffont,‎ 2003 (ISBN 2221092465)
• Francis Courtade, Cinéma expressionniste, Paris, Henri Veyrier. 1984. L’auteur consacre un chapitre à analyser l’œuvre de cinéastes influencés par le courant expressionniste, parmi lesquels Orson Welles, Fritz Lang et Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.
• Jean-Pierre Coursodon et Bertrand Tavernier, 50 ans de cinéma américain, Paris, Omnibus. 2003.
• Jean Tulard, Dictionnaire du cinéma : les réalisateurs, Paris, Robert Laffont. 2003 (dernière édition).
• Jean Tulard, Dictionnaire du cinéma : les acteurs, Paris, Robert Laffont. 2004 (dernière édition).
• Jean-Loup Passek, Michel Ciment, Jean-Pierre Frouard, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Éditions Larousse,‎ 1986, 888 p. (ISBN 2-03-512303-8)
• Claude Popelin, Le Taureau et son combat, Paris, Seuil,‎ 1993 (ISBN 2877061779)
• (en) Lynn Sherwood, Yankees in the afternoon, une histoire illustrée des toreros américains, Jefferson, Caroline du Nord, Mac Farland,‎ 2001 (ISBN 2-8666-5034-4) préface de Barnaby Conrad, réédition 2008.

Documentaires sur Orson Welles

• Leslie Megahey, With Orson Welles, Story of a life in film, où la carrière de Welles est passée en revue, film par film. BBC TV Prod., 1989, diff. 1990.

Discographie et supports audio

• Il existe un CD audio édité en France qui restitue l’ensemble de l’émission La Guerre des mondes de 1938 accompagné d’un livret de commentaires (coll. « Les grandes heures de la radio », Phonurgia nova Éditions, Arles, France, 1989).
• En 1984 Orson Welles a enregistré un 45 tours dont il a écrit les paroles I know what it is to be young (but you don’t know what it is to be old) accompagné par les Ray Charles Singers.^{[réf. nécessaire]}

Wikipédia

Citizen Kane est un film dramatique américain réalisé par Orson Welles sorti en 1941, considéré par l’American Film Institute comme le meilleur film de tous les temps et particulièrement vanté pour ses innovations cinématographiques, musicales et narratives1.

Synopsis

Au début des années 1940, Charles Foster Kane meurt dans son manoir de Xanadu, en prononçant dans un dernier souffle « rosebud » (bouton de rose) et en laissant échapper de ses mains une boule à neige. Ce dernier mot énigmatique attise la curiosité de la presse. Le journaliste Thompson est chargé de percer le mystère et va rencontrer tous ceux qui l’ont connu. Ces rencontres au présent où l’on plonge dans ses souvenirs sont accompagnées à chaque fois de flashbacks qui lèvent toujours un peu plus le voile sur sa vie.

Tout jeune, il a dû quitter sa mère, qui se trouvait par hasard héritière d’une mine d’or, pour être élevé par un financier dans la perspective de sa fortune à venir. Devenu un grand magnat de la presse, il épouse la nièce du président des États-Unis et espère faire une carrière politique, carrière qui s’interrompt lorsque l’on apprend qu’il trompe sa femme avec Susan, une pseudo-cantatrice. Sa femme demande le divorce et Kane épouse alors Susan, qui se sépare de lui par la suite. Kane finit par mourir seul dans son immense manoir inachevé.

Chaque personne qui l’a côtoyé, comme Thatcher, M. Bernstein, Jedediah Leland, Susan Alexander Kane et son majordome, a une perception bien particulière du personnage, souvent très différente de celle des autres : les récits, même entrecroisés, ne font donc qu’éclairer certains aspects ponctuels de Charles Foster Kane.

Fiche technique

Titre original : Citizen Kane

Titre francais : Citoyen Kane (pour le Canada et la Belgique)

Réalisation : Orson Welles

Scénario : Herman J. Mankiewicz et Orson Welles

Musique : Bernard Herrmann

Direction artistique : Van Nest Polglase

Décors de plateau : Darrell Silvera (non-crédité)

Costumes : Edward Stevenson

Photographie : Gregg Toland et Harry J. Wild (scènes additionnelles, non-crédité)

Effets spéciaux : Vernon L. Walker

Son : Bailey Fesler et James G. Stewart

Montage : Robert Wise

Production : Orson Welles

Sociétés de production : Mercury Productions et RKO Pictures

Société de distribution : RKO Pictures

Budget : 686 033 $2

Pays d’origine :  États-Unis

Langue : anglais

Format : Noir et blanc – 1,37:13 – Mono (RCA Sound System)- 35 mm3

Genre : Drame

Durée : 119 minutes

Dates de sortie4 :  États-Unis : 1er mai 1941 et 1er mai 1991 en ressortie.

France : 3 juillet 1946 et 20 mars 2002 en ressortie.

Belgique : 5 février 1948

Box-office :  France : 867 840

Distribution

Joseph Cotten

Dorothy Comingore

Agnes Moorehead

Ruth Warrick

Everett Sloane

Paul Stewart

Orson Welles : Charles Foster Kane

Buddy Swan : Charlie Kane à 8 ans

Joseph Cotten : Jedediah Leland

Dorothy Comingore : Susan Alexander, seconde épouse de Kane

Agnes Moorehead : la mère de Kane

Harry Shannon : le père de Kane, aubergiste dans le Colorado

Sonny Bupp : le fils de Kane

Ruth Warrick : Emily, première épouse de Kane

Ray Collins : James W. Gettys

Erskine Sanford : Carter

Everett Sloane : Bernstein

William Alland : Thompson

Paul Stewart : Raymond

George Coulouris : Thatcher, tuteur de Charlie Kane

Fortunio Bonanova : Matiste

Gus Schilling : le maître d’hôtel

Philip Van Zandt : monsieur Rawlston

Georgia Backus : madame Anderson

Arthur Yeoman : Voix du speaker de News on the march

Et, parmi les acteurs non-crédités :

Charles Bennett : un artiste

Gino Corrado : Gino

Alan Ladd : un reporter fumant la pipe

Walter Sande : un reporter à Xanadu

N.B : Le film n’a jamais été doublé en francais.

Analyse

Le narrateur

Le narrateur de Citizen Kane est omniprésent et omnipotent. En attestent la première et la dernière scène du film. Ainsi, dès le début du film, la pancarte filmée en gros plan sur laquelle on lit « No trespassing » (« Défense d’entrer ») est immédiatement transgressée par la caméra qui franchit les grilles de Xanadu. Ensuite, la caméra finit par arriver devant la fenêtre de Kane, et par un champ-contrechamp, passe outre cette barrière de verre pour s’immiscer dans la vie du vieillard. De même, lors de la conclusion du film, la caméra décrit des arabesques au cœur des innombrables objets laissés par Kane pour aboutir simplement sur une luge dont se saisit un ouvrier ou un domestique pour la livrer aux flammes. L’œil de la caméra aura encore le temps de se rapprocher suffisamment de l’inscription que porte le jouet avant que l’action de la chaleur ne la fasse définitivement disparaître : « Rosebud », le mot qu’avait prononcé le mourant.

Les flashbacks

Contrairement aux traditions de l’époque, Welles décide de raconter la vie de Charles Foster Kane sous la forme de flashbacks. Cependant, afin de ne pas perdre le spectateur, le réalisateur prend la peine de réaliser un « sommaire » grâce à la scène de la bande d’actualité, qui résume la vie de Kane. D’autre part, les flashbacks reprennent un ordre chronologique, avec dans le pire des cas des superpositions (par exemple entre le témoignage de Leland et celui de Susan).

La rupture de Susan avec Kane est ainsi racontée successivement en flashback par deux protagonistes différents, Susan elle-même et le majordome de Xanadu. Kane et Susan connaissent leur dernière altercation, et Kane, impuissant, regarde Susan quitter la pièce et s’éloigner en franchissant différentes ouvertures. Le dernier plan cadrant Susan peut prendre toute sa dimension dans la mesure où c’est elle qui relate leur séparation. Thompson interroge ensuite le majordome dont les souvenirs font l’objet du flashback suivant, qui débute de manière abrupte (par un cri de cacatoès) au moment où le majordome voit Susan partir. Welles choisit ainsi de couvrir la fin de la liaison entre Kane et Susan Alexander par deux personnages différents. La construction en flashbacks remplit ici son office car elle autorise une variation sur ce qui avait déjà été dit auparavant en ménageant un nouveau point de vue. Plus précisément, la rupture était déjà connue lors du flashback précédent, mais est visible dans toute sa continuité grâce à la présence du majordome qui assure sa fluidité à la narration.

Welles brise ainsi le style linéaire habituel des films et invente de nouveaux codes cinématographiques.

La profondeur de champ

Le recours à une longue profondeur de champ est omniprésent dans le film. Comme pour le flashback, c’est la systématisation du procédé plus que le procédé lui-même qui marque une date dans l’histoire du cinéma[réf. nécessaire][travail inédit ?].

Un plan devenu à ce titre exemplaire est celui de la découverte de la tentative de suicide de la femme de Kane. L’image montre en amorce le verre et la fiole tandis que Kane force la porte à l’arrière-plan, Susan respirant avec difficulté sur sa couche dans le plan intermédiaire. On sait que ce plan n’a pas été effectué en une seule prise mais que la mise au point a été successivement faite sur les différents composants du plan avant intégration dans une image unique[réf. nécessaire][travail inédit ?].

De même, l’enfance de Kane qui fait l’objet des mémoires de Thatcher est représentée grâce à cette technique. La séquence débute par des images du jeune Charlie Kane jouant dans la neige avec sa luge. Puis, un travelling arrière fait comprendre que le point de vue se situait à l’intérieur de la maison familiale. Les jeux du garçon sont ensuite perçus en arrière-plan, tandis que son proche avenir est débattu dans le foyer, les deux plans étant nets.

Les plongées/contre-plongées

De nombreux plans du film sont filmés en plongée, ou en contre-plongée. Si la contre-plongée traduit souvent l’exaltation, comme dans le discours de Kane contre Gettys, la plongée sert à illustrer les périodes de doute et d’échec, telles que la demande de mutation de Leland à Kane après la débâcle électorale, et la destruction de la chambre par Kane après le départ de Susan[travail inédit ?][réf. nécessaire].

Welles transgresse aussi les règles basiques des contre-plongées en les inversant. Car si cette même contre-plongée traduit généralement l’exaltation, la puissance écrase parfois Kane, comme dans la scène de la rupture avec sa seconde femme[travail inédit ?][réf. nécessaire].

Effets spéciaux et trucages

Welles aime faire appel à des effets spéciaux pour enrichir son film. Ils sont dus pour la plupart au talent de Vernon L. Walker. On peut en citer six exemples, tous assez remarquables :

La scène où Leland parle à Thompson à l’hôpital a été jouée devant un mur blanc, des diapositives ayant ensuite été utilisées pour créer le fond.

Les vues extérieures de Xanadu et la foule du meeting politique sont des illusions : ce sont en réalité des toiles peintes.

La scène où Gettys surveille le discours de Kane depuis le poulailler possède une caractéristique très particulière : chaque moitié d’image a été filmée séparément puis rassemblée, ce qui permet de voir nettement les deux personnages.

Le départ de Susan a été filmé en trois fois, pour pouvoir avoir les trois plans nets. Seul un plan est éclairé et filmé, puis la bobine est rembobinée et le plan suivant est éclairé, et ainsi de suite.

Welles a employé le procédé d’impression optique à la Truca. Cela consiste à aligner une caméra avec un projecteur dont le fonctionnement est synchronisé. La pellicule peut ensuite être retravaillée en post-production.

Au début du film, dans la longue séquence de la bande d’actualités News on the March retraçant la carrière de Kane, est inséré un plan où Kane et Adolf Hitler sont côte à côte sur un balcon, ce qui est un habile montage.

Dernière réplique

« Throw that junk », traduit en français par Jette ce machin (ou mieux : cette vieillerie, ce déchet), constitue l’ultime réplique du film. Elle survient lors de la séquence finale de l’inventaire dans le château de Kane, lorsque le majordome Raymond (interprété par Paul Stewart) passe devant une luge d’enfant et s’écrie ces mots « Throw that junk ». On jette la luge dans un brasier, puis la caméra sur la musique de Bernard Herrmann s’avance lentement en travelling, et le mot gravé sur le bois noirci par le feu apparaît soudain : « Rosebud », révélant peut-être que la seule chose à laquelle Kane restait encore attaché à la toute fin de sa vie était la luge avec laquelle il aimait à jouer lors des hivers neigeux de son enfance.

La séquence de révélation concernant le mot « Rosebud » peut être rapprochée de la dernière scène du film d’Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca, qui, un an plus tôt, se concluait sur la lettre « R » soigneusement cousue sur le coussin de la chambre de Rebecca, et qui brûlait en conclusion du film[travail inédit ?].

Récompenses

Oscar du meilleur scénario original 1941 (décerné en 1942)

National Film Registry 1989 : Sélectionné et conservé à la Bibliothèque du Congrès américain.

Élu « Meilleur film de tous les temps » en 2002 par 108 réalisateurs et 144 critiques internationaux consultés par la revue britannique “Sight and Sound” du British Film Institute.

Élu « Meilleur film de tous les temps » en 1997 et 2007 par l’American Film Institute1.

Lieux de tournage

Le film a été tourné aux studios de la RKO à Hollywood (Californie) du 29 juin au 23 octobre 1940[réf. nécessaire].

Autour du film

Orson Welles

Il s’agit du premier film du réalisateur, et les acteurs proviennent pour la plupart de son groupe de théâtre : le Mercury Theatre[réf. nécessaire].

Le titre initial devait être American[réf. nécessaire].

Pour Kane, Orson Welles s’est inspiré d’un personnage réel : William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), qui s’était réfugié dans un château, le Hearst Castle, à la fin de sa vie, comme Kane à Xanadu dans le film. Toutefois, d’autres sources, et certains auteurs comme Peter Harry Brown et Pat H. Broeske, ont fait valoir que le film devait être, à l’origine, une biographie plus ou moins fidèle du millionnaire Howard Hughes, alors autant connu pour ses entreprises cinématographiques (Les Anges de l’enfer, Scarface), pour ses records et ses activités dans l’aviation, que pour certaines de ses excentricités : il était victime de troubles obsessionnels compulsifs, lui faisant par exemple répéter plusieurs fois de suite la même phrase, et souffrait d’une phobie des microbes. L’ironie veut que Howard Hughes soit devenu quelques années plus tard le patron de la RKO qui a produit le film.

Les tentatives d’interdire le film par Hearst ont donné lieu à un documentaire télévisé intitulé The Battle Over Citizen Kane5.

Rosebud, le fameux mot-clé prononcé par Kane, veut dire littéralement « bouton de rose ». On[Qui ?] dit que ce mot était utilisé par William Randolph Hearst pour désigner le clitoris de sa maîtresse, Marion Davies (ce mot est également employé par La Mettrie pour désigner le clitoris, notamment dans L’Art de jouir). Certains estiment que c’est une des raisons pour lesquelles William Randolph Hearst a essayé d’interdire le film à sa sortie.[travail inédit ?][réf. nécessaire]

Orson Welles a dit à propos de son film : “Le public est seul juge. Kane est à la fois un idéaliste et un escroc, un très grand homme et un individu médiocre. Tout dépend de celui qui en parle. Il n’est jamais vu à travers l’œil objectif d’un auteur. Le but du film réside d’ailleurs plus dans la présentation du problème que dans sa solution.”

Références au film dans la culture populaire

Au cinéma

Otto Preminger rendra hommage à ce film avec son propre film Rosebud (1974).

Le grand détournement La Classe Américaine : Georges Abitbol, l’homme le plus classe du monde, meurt en prononçant ces mots : « Monde de merde »

Des journalistes, Peter & Steven, enquêtent sur son passé, ce qui donne lieu à des flashbacks. Orson Welles fait même une apparition détournée au début du film, et meurt tué par balle en s’écriant « Ohhhhhhh, Rosebud ! ».

Peter, un des journalistes enquêtant sur la mort de Georges Abitbol, répond à son patron qui les interroge sur leurs pistes, qu’ils avaient « plutôt pensé à un traîneau ».

Le patron du journal reprend une réplique de Citizen Kane : « Si c’est une femme, je veux savoir son nom. Si c’est un cheval, je veux savoir dans quelle course. »

Le film Velvet Goldmine de Todd Haynes est une transposition de “Citizen Kane” à la période glam’rock. On retrouve une construction semblable ainsi que de nombreuses références telles la mort dans la neige, les coupures de journaux, les personnages secondaires. Certaines images et certaines positions du héros sont les mêmes que dans le film.

Dans Kill Bill : Volume 1 de Quentin Tarantino, l’une des premières scènes où l’on voit dans l’ombre la mariée agonisante sur le sol est une référence au début de Citizen Kane où l’on voit dans l’ombre Charles Foster Kane mourant sur son lit.

En 1995, Marc Dorcel a réalisé Citizen Shane, parodie pornographique de ce film.

Dans Rhum Express sorti en 2011, Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) loge dans un hôtel nommé le Xanadu.

Dans Inception de Christopher Nolan, l’idée implantée par l’équipe de Dom Cobb dans le subconscient du chef d’entreprise richissime est une éolienne en papier ayant appartenue à son fils. Cet objet sans valeur pécuniaire (comme la luge) provoque une grande réaction d’ordre affectif.

Dans The Dark Knight de Christopher Nolan, le plan qui révèle au spectateur l’entrée de la batcave (dans des entrepôts du port), est un travelling descendant sur une grille qui mentionne ” private property no trespassing. Violators will be procecuted ” exactement comme la grille de Xanadu.

À la télévision

L’épisode 43 de l’émission Les Tiny Toons,intitulé “Citizen Max”, consiste en une parodie mettant en vedette Montana Max. L’enfant gâté du pays ACME voulait devenir président des élèves de Loonyversité afin de se débarrasser de Buster. La scène d’ouverture le montre dans un manoir qui ressemble à Xanadu. Il détruit ses jouets, puis s’écrie: “ACME!” Hamton, jouant un rôle de journaliste, cherche à savoir pourquoi, du haut de son manoir, Montana Max a crié ACME. Il interroge Buster, Plucky et Elmyra.

Dans la série Twin Peaks, de David Lynch et Mark Frost, le père de Laura Palmer, la jeune fille assassinée dès l’épisode pilote, s’appelle Leland.

La série télévisée Kaamelott, réalisée par Alexandre Astier et produite par CALT, a pour logo un « K » entouré d’un cercle (représenté dans le Livre IV par un sceau de cire), similaire au symbole ornant le haut du portail d’entrée de Xanadu, la résidence de Charles Foster Kane

La série télévisée des Simpsons a, à plusieurs reprises, parodié le film, notamment dans les épisodes suivants : Dans le bureau de Monsieur Burns, un portrait le représentant ressemble exactement à un placé dans la bibliothèque que visite Thompson.

Monsieur Chasse-Neige : à la fin du spot publicitaire pour Monsieur Chasse-Neige, une boule à neige tombe à terre et se brise.

Rosebud : Le portail de la propriété de Burns est surmonté d’un « B » qui fait penser au « K » sur le portail de Xanadu. Sur le grillage se trouvent également des pancartes d’avertissement semblables à celles du film.

On aperçoit la silhouette de Burns, « mort », à travers des fenêtres ouvragées et grillagées, comme on aperçoit le corps de Kane dans le film.

Burns a été confié, dans son enfance, à un précepteur aisé, tout comme Kane. Les deux personnages ont eu une enfance modeste mais sont tout de même parvenus au pouvoir.

L’ours en peluche Bobo remplit exactement le même rôle que le traîneau Rosebud, il est comme ce dernier enseveli sous la neige et son nom est prononcé, dans un râle, à la « mort » de Burns.

Le sang, c’est de l’argent : Burns est allongé sur son lit, souffrant, et au second plan, le docteur s’entretient avec Smithers. Dans le film, Kane parle avec le docteur au chevet de sa femme.

Marge a trouvé un boulot : le spectacle de chant et de danse organisé par Smithers est très semblable à celui organisé pour Kane, surtout au niveau des costumes (vestes rayées, chapeau et canne). Dans cette scène, la chanson est également une parodie de celle du film.

Un tramway nommé Marge : Homer assiste à la comédie musicale dans laquelle joue sa femme et s’ennuie. Il souffle sur un programme déchiré en bandelettes. Jebediah Leland agit de la même façon lorsqu’il assiste à l’opéra chanté par la femme de Kane.

Le maire est amer et Sous le signe du poisson : la tribune depuis laquelle Tahiti Bob pour le premier épisode et Burns pour le deuxième s’adressent au public est un clin d’œil à celle utilisée par Kane. De plus, derrière eux se trouve une affiche représentant leur photo et leur nom. Bart, qui regarde à la télé le discours de campagne de Burns, demande à Homer : « Est-ce que ton patron est déjà gouverneur ? ». Dans le film, le fils de Kane demande à sa mère : « Est-ce que Papa est déjà gouverneur ? »

Sous le signe du poisson : Burns, fou de rage en apprenant que sa campagne tombe à l’eau, tente de s’en prendre à son mobilier, ce que fait Kane dans le film en apprenant que sa seconde femme le quitte.

Sous le signe du poisson : Burns déclare : “Vous ne pouvez pas me faire ça, je suis Charles Mongomery Burns !”. Dans le film, apparaît la phrase “Vous ne pouvez pas me faire ca, je suis Charles Foster Kane !”.

Le député Krusty : le maire a déplacé les couloirs aériens pour pouvoir entendre la voix de sa maîtresse, et quand il l’entend parler il dit “C’est ça ta voix ?! Je regrette de t’avoir fait construire un opéra”. Dans le film, Kane construit un opéra pour sa femme alors qu’elle n’est pas très bonne chanteuse.

Homer de Séville : durant le spectacle de Homer, la caméra monte et s’arrête finalement sur Carl et Lenny sur une passerelle. Dans le film, la même scène est présente durant l’opéra de Susan Alexander Kane.

Dans un épisode de Columbo (“Jeu de mots”), le criminel se sert du mot “Rosebud” pour dresser ses chiens à tuer. Le criminel est également collectionneur d’art et fan de “Citizen Kane”. Il possède d’ailleurs la grille d’entrée du domaine de Kane ainsi que sa luge.

Dans la série Veronica Mars, la jeune détective fait allusion au film dans la saison 2, en disant « Et Rosebud n’était qu’une luge ! Je ne vous ai pas gâché la fin de “Citizen Kane” au moins ? ».

Dans la série Weeds (saison 4, épisode 3 “The blah thing”), au bout de 3 minutes, Andy Botwin se moque de son père qui refuse d’admettre que sa mère veut mourir : “Kill me… Kill me… What do you think she meant by that? Maybe it was her sled!” (Tue moi…Tue moi… Qu’est-ce qu’elle veut dire ? Peut-être c’était de sa luge !)

Dans la série Friends (saison 8, épisode 12), Joey demande à Rachel si elle a déjà réussi à regarder Citizen Kane en entier, elle lui répond que certes, c’est ennuyeux, mais qu’apparemment c’est un classique (“Have you ever tried to sit through Citizen Kane ?” “Yeah I know it’s really boring, but it’s like a big deal.”).

Dans l’épisode 2 de la saison 3 de Fringe, Walter parle de “Rosebud” pour trouver le petit détail qui les mènera à découvrir l’énigme de l’épisode.

Dans La Web – Série “Flander’s Company” le mot “Rosebud” est plusieurs fois utilisés lorsque les personnages sont à l’agonie et “Rosebud” est aussi le mot de passe d’un serveur secret de la “Flander’s Company”.

Dans les jeux vidéo

Le jeu TimeSplitters: Future Perfect rend également hommage à ce film avec la dernière remarque de Crow : « Rosebud… »

Dans le jeu Les Sims, « Rosebud » est un code triche qui débloque des fonds illimités.

Dans le jeu Zoo Tycoon, si l’on renomme un visiteur « Xanadu », on accède à la licorne.

Dans le jeu vidéo Uplink, le mot de passe du serveur de test est « rosebud ».

Dans plusieurs jeux vidéo de guerre, comme Call of Duty certains soldats meurent en prononçant « rosebud ».

Dans la bande dessinée

Un comic strip des Peanuts montre toute l’importance du mystère de « Rosebud » pour le spectateur. Alors que Linus annonce à sa soeur Lucy qu’il regarde Citizen Kane pour la première fois, elle lui révèle la solution de l’énigme.

Le dessinateur Don Rosa a imité plusieurs fois des scènes du film dans ses aventures de Picsou : William Randolph Hearst, qui a inspiré Welles, est cité dans la liste des milliardaires dépassés par Picsou dans le onzième épisode de La Jeunesse, « Le Bâtisseur d’empires du Calisota ». Picsou a donc une fin de vie proche de celle du réel Hearst et du fictif Kane.

La séquence d’ouverture (« Rosebud » et le reportage) dans le dernier épisode de La Jeunesse de Picsou, « Le Canard le plus riche du monde ». Dans cette histoire, Picsou prononce « Goldie », qui, pour Don Rosa dans la suite de Carl Barks, est la clé pour comprendre la vie du canard de fiction. Dans cet épisode, on voit également Donald sortir la luge « Rosebud » de Kane d’une caisse.

La consultation des Mémoires du financier Thatcher est reprise dans Sa Majesté Picsou Ier lorsque Picsou va lire les mémoires de Cornélius Écoutum, fondateur de Donaldville.

Le dessin animé SOS Fantômes y fait explicitement référence. Dans un épisode, les héros se rendent dans un manoir pour chasser un fantôme qui ne cesse d’appeler BOUTON DE ROSE. Après avoir tenté de le capturer en vain, les chasseurs vont être poursuivis par ce fantôme et tenteront de fuir avec le premier moyen qu’ils trouveront dans un débarras : une luge sur laquelle on peut lire bouton de rose, comme dans le film. Ils rendront la luge à son propriétaire (le fantôme) qui disparaîtra avec.

Dans la BD La Tour de Kyla, Eapon prononce « Rosebud » avant de mourir.

Batman fut créée par Bob Kane né Kahn et la première apparition du vengeur masqué au cinéma est en 1943 quelques mois après la sortie du film Citizen Kane. Orson Welles prête sa voix pour la bande annonce du film6 et pour celle de The Shadow à la radio7. Le nom Bruce Wayne, choisi par Bill Finger, s’inspire de celui de son créateur. Dans son projet d’adaptation, il voyait Humphrey Bogart en Double-Face, James Cagney en Sphinx, Basil Rathbone en Joker, Marlène Dietrich en Catwoman et lui-même en Batman.

Dans la BD Pin-Up, de Berthet et Yann, Dorothy Partington répond ironiquement à des soldats qui l’interrogent sur son mystérieux tatouage R. P. H. que « c’était le nom inscrit sur [sa] luge préférée quand [elle] étais en enfant »8.

Dans la presse

Le magazine de mode Citizen K rend hommage au film.

Un portail d’information en français s’intitule citizenkane.fr

Dans la musique

Le morceau intitulé “The Union Forever” du groupe américain The White Stripes a pour sujet le film. De plus, au milieu du morceau est chantée la chanson en hommage à Kane présente dans le film.

Jack Black, chanteur du groupe de rock américain Tenacious D fait une référence au film dans une de ses chansons. Dans The Pick of Destiny, chanson promotionnelle du film éponyme, il chante “You know our movie’s better than a Citizen Kane” pour montrer avec humour à quel point son film est bon.

Autres

La poste américaine a émis sur timbre-poste une scène du film dans la série Celebrate the Century en 19999,10.

Voir aussi

Bibliographie

Jean Roy, Citizen Kane – Orson Welles (étude critique), Nathan, 1989, 116p. ISBN 2-09-188622-X

Sandra Joxe, Citizen Kane – Orson Welles, éd. Hatier, collection Image par image, 1990.

Jean-Pierre Berthomé & François Thomas, Citizen Kane, éditions Flammarion, collection cinémas, 1992.

Claude-Jean Philippe, 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale, Cahiers du cinéma, 2008

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed, co-written, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. The picture was Welles’ first feature film. The film was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories; it won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles. Considered by many critics, filmmakers, and fans to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was voted the greatest film of all time in five consecutive Sight & Sound’s polls of critics,[5] until it was displaced by Vertigo in the 2012 poll.[6] It topped the American Film Institute’s 100 Years … 100 Movies list in 1998, as well as AFI’s 2007 update. Citizen Kane is particularly praised for its cinematography, music, and narrative structure, which were innovative for its time.

The story is a film à clef that examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a character based in part upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst,[7] Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick,[8] and aspects of Welles’ own life.[9] Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers. Kane’s career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is told through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate’s dying word: “Rosebud”.

After his success in the theatre with his Mercury Players, and his controversial 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds on The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles was courted by Hollywood. He signed a contract with RKO Pictures in 1939. Unusual for an untried director, he was given the freedom to develop his own story, to use his own cast and crew, and to have final cut privilege. Following two abortive attempts to get a project off the ground, he wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, collaborating on the effort with Herman Mankiewicz. Principal photography took place in 1940 and the film received its American release in 1941.

While a critical success, Citizen Kane failed to recoup its costs at the box office. The film faded from view after its release but was subsequently returned to the fore when it was praised by such French critics as Jean-Paul Sartre and André Bazin and given an American revival in 1956.

The film was released on Blu-ray Disc on September 13, 2011, for a special 70th anniversary edition.[10]

Plot

Charles Foster Kane, an enormously wealthy newspaper publisher, has been living alone in Florida on his vast palatial estate, Xanadu, for the last years of his life, with a “No Trespassing” sign on the gate. On his deathbed, he holds a snow globe and utters the single word, “Rosebud”, before dying; the globe slips from his hand and smashes on the floor. Kane’s death becomes sensational news around the world. Newsreel reporter Jerry Thompson becomes intrigued, and decides to learn all he can about Kane’s private life to discover the meaning of “Rosebud”.

The reporter interviews the great man’s friends and associates, and Kane’s story unfolds as a series of flashbacks. Thompson approaches Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, now an alcoholic who runs her own nightclub, but she refuses to tell him anything and demands that he leave. Thompson then goes to the private archive of the late Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker who served as Kane’s guardian during his childhood and adolescence. Through Thatcher’s written memoirs, Thompson learns about Kane’s childhood. Thompson then interviews Kane’s personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein; his estranged best friend, Jedediah Leland; Susan, for a second time, successfully this time; and, finally, his butler, Raymond, at the Xanadu estate.

These flashbacks reveal that Kane’s childhood was spent in poverty in Colorado (his parents ran a boarding house), until “the world’s third largest gold mine” was discovered on the seemingly worthless property his mother had acquired. His mother, Mary, sends him away to the East to live with Thatcher, so that he may be properly educated. After gaining full control over his trust fund at the age of 25, Kane enters the newspaper business and embarks on a career of yellow journalism. He takes control of the newspaper, the New York Inquirer, and hires the best journalists available. He then rises to power by successfully manipulating public opinion regarding the Spanish American War, marrying the niece of a President of the United States, and campaigning for the office of Governor of New York.

Kane’s marriage disintegrates over the years, and he begins an affair with Susan Alexander, a singer. Both his wife and his political opponent discover the affair and this brings an abrupt end to both his marriage and his political aspirations. Kane marries Susan, and forces her into a humiliating operatic career for which she has neither the talent nor the ambition. Kane finally allows her to abandon her singing career after she attempts suicide. After years spent in boredom and isolation on the Xanadu estate, constantly under his domination, Susan ultimately leaves Kane.

Kane spends his last years building his vast estate and lives alone, interacting only with his staff. The butler recounts that Kane had said “Rosebud” after Susan left him, right after seeing and pocketing a snow globe.

Back at Xanadu, Kane’s vast number of belongings are catalogued: priceless works of art are intermingled with worthless pieces of modern furniture. Thompson finds that he is unable to solve the mystery and concludes that the meaning of “Rosebud” will forever remain an enigma. He theorizes that “Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost.” As the film ends, the camera reveals that Rosebud was the name of a sled from Kane’s childhood–an allusion to the only time in his life that he was truly happy. The sled, thought to be junk, is burned in a basement furnace by Xanadu’s departing staff.

Cast and characters

The cast of Citizen Kane is listed at the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films.[4]

Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, the titular “Citizen Kane”, a wealthy, megalomaniacal newspaper publisher whose life is the film’s subject. His name actually appears last in the closing credits.

Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland, Kane’s best friend and the first reporter on Kane’s paper. Leland continues to work for Kane as his empire grows, although they grow apart over the years. Kane fires Leland after he writes a negative review of Susan Alexander Kane’s operatic debut (which, ironically, Kane himself finished when a drunk Leland fell unconscious).

Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander Kane, Kane’s mistress, who later becomes his second wife.

Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s friend and employee who remains loyal to him to the end. According to RKO records, Sloane was paid $2,400 for shaving his head.[4]

Ray Collins as Jim W. Gettys, Kane’s political rival and the incumbent governor of New York. Kane appears to be the frontrunner in the campaign, but Gettys exposes Kane’s relationship with Susan Alexander which leads to his defeat.

George Coulouris as Walter Parks Thatcher, a miserly banker who becomes Kane’s legal guardian.

Agnes Moorehead as Mary Kane, Kane’s mother.

Paul Stewart as Raymond, Kane’s cynical butler who assists him in his later years. Actor-director Stewart got Welles his first job in radio in 1934.[11]:10, 331

Ruth Warrick as Emily Monroe Norton Kane, Kane’s first wife and the niece of the President. She leaves him after discovering his affair with Susan Alexander. She dies in a car accident along with their only child, a son, a few years later. Warrick was the last surviving member of the principal cast at the time of her death in 2005.

Erskine Sanford as Herbert Carter, editor of the Inquirer.

William Alland as Jerry Thompson, the reporter in charge of finding out the meaning of Kane’s last word, “Rosebud”. Thompson is seen only in shadow or with his back turned to the camera.

Harry Shannon as Jim Kane, Kane’s father.

Georgia Backus as Bertha Anderson, attendant at the library of Walter Parks Thatcher.

Fortunio Bonanova as Signor Matiste, vocal coach of Susan Alexander Kane.

Sonny Bupp as Charles Foster Kane III, Kane’s young son. He later dies in a car accident with his mother, though only the voiceover narration acknowledges this. Bupp was the last surviving credited cast member of Citizen Kane when he died in 2007.[12]

Buddy Swan as Young Charles Foster Kane.

Gus Schilling as John, headwaiter at the Atlantic City nightclub.

Philip Van Zandt as Mr. Rawlston, News on the March producer.

Thomas A. Curran, the early American silent film star makes an uncredited bit part for his role in one scene with Welles as Teddy Roosevelt.[13][14]

Alan Ladd, uncredited, as a reporter at Xanadu.

Louise Currie, uncredited, as a reporter at Xanadu. When Currie died September 8, 2013, at age 100,[15] she was believed to have been the film’s last surviving cast member.[16]

The film’s closing credits read, “Most of the principal actors are new to motion pictures. The Mercury Theatre is proud to introduce them.”[4] Welles, along with his partner John Houseman, had assembled them into a group known as the Mercury Players to perform his productions in the Mercury Theatre in 1937. After accepting his Hollywood contract in 1939, Welles worked between Los Angeles and New York where the Mercury Theatre continued their weekly radio broadcasts for The Campbell Playhouse.[17] Welles had wanted all the Mercury Players to debut in his first film, but the cancellation of The Heart of Darkness project in December 1939 created a financial crisis for the group and some of the actors worked elsewhere.[17] This caused friction between Welles and Houseman, and their partnership ended.[17]

RKO executives were dismayed that so many of the major roles went to unknowns, but Welles’s contract left them with no say in the matter. The film features debuts from William Alland, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick and Welles himself.

Production

Development

Welles’s notoriety following The War of the Worlds broadcast earned him Hollywood’s interest, and RKO studio head George J. Schaefer’s unusual contract.[18] Welles made a deal with Schaefer on July 21, 1939, to produce, direct, write, and act in two feature films.[19]:1 The studio had to approve the story and the budget if it exceeded $500,000. Welles was allowed to develop the story without interference, cast his own actors and crew members, and have the privilege of final cut – unheard of at the time for a first-time director.[19]:1 He had spent the first five months of his RKO contract trying to get several projects going with no success. The Hollywood Reporter said, “They are laying bets over on the RKO lot that the Orson Welles deal will end up without Orson ever doing a picture there.”[19]:15 First, Welles tried to adapt Heart of Darkness, but there was concern over the idea of depicting it entirely with point of view shots. Welles considered adapting Cecil Day-Lewis’ novel The Smiler With The Knife, but realized that to challenge himself with a new medium, he had to write an original story.[20]

Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, recuperating from a car accident, was in-between jobs. He had originally been hired by Welles to work on The Campbell Playhouse radio program and was available to work on the screenplay for Welles’s film. The writer had only received two screenplay credits between 1935 and when he began work on Citizen Kane, and he needed the job.[19]:16 There is dispute amongst historians regarding whose idea it was to use William Randolph Hearst as the basis for Charles Foster Kane. Welles claimed it was his idea while film critic Pauline Kael (in her 1971 essay “Raising Kane”)[21] and Welles’s former business partner, John Houseman, claim that it was Mankiewicz’s idea.[19]:17 For some time, Mankiewicz had wanted to write a screenplay about a public figure – perhaps a gangster – whose story would be told by the people that knew him.[22]

Mankiewicz had already written an unperformed play about John Dillinger entitled The Tree Will Grow. Welles liked the idea of multiple viewpoints but was not interested in playing Dillinger. Mankiewicz and Welles talked about picking someone else to use as a model. They hit on the idea of using Hearst as their central character.[22] Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst’s parties until his alcoholism got him barred. The writer resented this and became obsessed with Hearst and Marion Davies.[22] Hearst had great influence and the power to retaliate within Hollywood, so Welles had Mankiewicz work on the script outside of the city. Because of the writer’s drinking problem, Houseman went along to provide assistance and make sure that he stayed focused.[19]:17 Welles also sought inspiration from Howard Hughes and Samuel Insull (who built an opera house for his wife). Although Mankiewicz and Houseman got on well with Welles, they incorporated some of his traits into Kane, such as his temper.[20]

During production, Citizen Kane was referred to as RKO 281. Most of the filming took place between June 29, 1940, and October 23, 1940, in what is now Stage 19 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood.[23] There was some location filming at Balboa Park in San Diego[24] and the San Diego Zoo, and still photographs of Oheka Castle in Huntington, New York, were used in the opening montage, representing Kane’s Xanadu estate.[25][26] Welles prevented studio executives of RKO from visiting the set. He understood their desire to control projects, and he knew they were expecting him to do an exciting film that would correspond to his The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Welles’s RKO contract had given him complete control over the production of the film when he signed on with the studio, something that he never again was allowed to exercise when making motion pictures. According to an RKO cost sheet from May 1942, the film cost $839,727 compared to an estimated budget of $723,800.[4]

Screenplay

Development

Mankiewicz as co-writer

Robert Carringer, author of The Making of Citizen Kane (1985), described the early stages of the screenplay:

Welles’s first step toward the realization of Citizen Kane was to seek the assistance of a screenwriting professional. Fortunately, help was near at hand. . . . When Welles moved to Hollywood, it happened that a veteran screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, was recuperating from an automobile accident and between jobs … Mankiewicz was an expatriate from Broadway who had been writing for films for almost fifteen years.[19]:16

Mankiewicz met newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst as a result of his friendship with Charles Lederer, another Hollywood screenwriter, who was a close nephew of Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress.[27]:212–213 Pauline Kael wrote that “Mankiewicz found himself on story-swapping terms with the power behind it all, Hearst himself … through his friendship with Charles Lederer.” Mankiewicz eventually saw Hearst as “… a finagling, calculating, Machiavellian figure,” noted Kael, “and he and Lederer often wrote and had printed parodies of Hearst newspapers …”[28]

Mankiewicz, according to film author Harlan Lebo, was also “… one of Hollywood’s most notorious personalities.”[29]:12 Mankiewicz was the older brother of producer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, was a former writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times before moving to Hollywood in 1926. By the time Welles contacted him he had “… established himself as a brilliant wit, a writer of extraordinary talent, [and] a warm friend to many of the screen world’s brightest artists … [he] produced dialogue of the highest caliber.”[29]:12

“Herman Mankiewicz was a legendary figure in Hollywood,” wrote Welles’s associate John Houseman:

The son of a respected New Jersey schoolteacher, one of a brilliant class at Columbia, he had fought the war as a Marine, worked for the World and the Times, collaborated on two unsuccessful plays with two otherwise infallibly successful playwrights, George Kaufman and Marc Connelly, come to California for six weeks to work on a silent film for Lon Chaney and stayed for sixteen years as one of the highest paid and most troublesome men in the business. His behavior, public and private, was a scandal. A neurotic drinker and a compulsive gambler, he was also one of the most intelligent, informed, witty, humane and charming men I have ever known.[30]:447

Speaking with Peter Bogdanovich in February 1969, Orson Welles said, “Nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank … a perfect monument of self-destruction. But, you know, when the bitterness wasn’t focused straight at you, he was the best company in the world.” When Bogdanovich asked how important Mankiewicz was to the Citizen Kane script, Welles responded, “Mankiewicz’s contribution? It was enormous.”[11]:52–53

Welles had engaged Mankiewicz to do script work on the stalled film project The Smiler with a Knife. Despite a violent quarrel with Houseman in December 1939, after which Houseman had resigned from the Mercury, Welles arranged a lunch at New York’s 21 Club with his former partner, and proposed that he work with Mankiewicz on a new project — “… little more than a notion, but an exciting one …,” Houseman wrote:

Mankiewicz was notoriously unreliable: I asked Orson why he didn’t take over the idea and write it himself. He said he didn’t want to do that. Besides, Mank had asked for me to work with him. In the name of our former association Orson urged me to fly out, talk to Mankiewicz and, if I shared his enthusiasm, stay and work with him as his collaborator and editor till the script was done. It was an absurd venture, and that night Orson and I flew back to California together.[30]:444

In February 1940 Mankiewicz was put on the Mercury payroll to work on a script with Houseman, a screenplay initially called Orson Welles #1, then American, and finally, Citizen Kane. Writing took place from late February or March through early May 1940.[11]:359

After finishing the script for Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz gave a copy to Lederer, which Kael regarded as foolish:

He was so proud of his script that he lent a copy to Charles Lederer. In some crazily naive way, Mankiewicz seems to have imagined that Lederer would be pleased by how good it was. But Lederer, apparently, was deeply upset and took the script to his aunt and Hearst. It went from them to Hearst’s lawyers … It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz’s idiotic indiscretion that the various forces were set in motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall [and] the commercial failure of Citizen Kane.[28]

Lederer, however, told director Peter Bogdanovich that Kael was wrong in her conclusion, and that she never bothered to check with him about the facts. Lederer said he did not give Davies the script Mankiewicz loaned him: “I gave it back to him. He asked me if I thought Marion would be offended and I said I didn’t think so.”[11]:557

Ideas and collaboration

According to film historian Clinton Heylin, “… the idea of Citizen Kane was the original conception of Orson Welles, who in early 1940 first discussed the idea with John Houseman, who then suggested that both he and Welles leave for Los Angeles and discuss the idea with scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz.” He adds that Mankiewicz “… probably believed that Welles had little experience as an original scriptwriter … [and] may even have felt that John Citizen USA, Welles’s working title, was a project he could make his own.”[31]:43

When Houseman returned to California, he sat by the bedside of Mankiewicz — who was convalescing with a triple fracture of his left leg — and heard the basic outline of the story. “It was something he had been thinking about for years,” Houseman wrote, “the idea of telling a man’s private life (preferably one that suggested a recognizable American figure), immediately following his death, through the intimate and often incompatible testimony of those who had known him at different times and in different circumstances.”[30]:448–449

Welles himself had ideas that meshed with that concept, as he described in a 1969 interview in the book, This is Orson Welles:

I’d been nursing an old notion – the idea of telling the same thing several times – and showing exactly the same thing from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure – couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords.[11]:53

Hearst as story model

According to film critic and author Pauline Kael, Mankiewicz “… was already caught up in the idea of a movie about Hearst …” when he was still working at The New York Times in 1925. She learned from his family’s babysitter, Marion Fisher, that she once typed as “… he dictated a screenplay, organized in flashbacks. She recalls that he had barely started on the dictation, which went on for several weeks, when she remarked that it seemed to be about William Randolph Hearst, and he said, ‘You’re a smart girl.'”[21]:35

In Hollywood, Mankiewicz had frequented Hearst’s parties until his alcoholism got him barred.[22] Hearst was also a person known to Welles. “Once that was decided”, wrote author Don Kilbourne, “Mankiewicz, Welles, and John Houseman, a cofounder of the Mercury Theatre, rented a place in the desert, and the task of creating Citizen Kane began.”[32]:221 This “place in the desert” was on the historic Verde ranch on the Mojave River in Victorville. In later years, Houseman gave Mankiewicz “total” credit for “the creation of Citizen Kane’s script” and credited Welles with “the visual presentation of the picture.”[29]:32

Mankiewicz was put under contract by Mercury Productions and was to receive no credit for his work as he was hired as a script doctor. According to his contract with RKO, Welles would be given sole screenplay credit, and had already written a rough script consisting of 300 pages of dialogue with occasional stage directions under the title of John Citizen, USA.[22]

In an interview with Huw Weldon on March 13, 1960, Orson Welles said: “Mr. Hearst was quite a bit like Kane, although Kane isn’t really founded on Hearst in particular, many people sat for it so to speak”.[33]

Authorship

Welles visiting Mankiewicz (center) in the California desert while in the process of writing Citizen Kane. John Houseman (right) is holding a copy of the screenplay.

One of the long standing debates of Citizen Kane has been the proper accreditation of the authorship of the screenplay, which the credits attribute to both Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles. Mankiewicz biographer Richard Meryman notes that the dispute had various causes, including the way the film was promoted. For instance, when RKO opened the film in New York City on May 1, 1941, followed by showings at theaters in other large cities, the publicity programs that were printed included photographs of Welles as “… the one-man band, directing, acting, and writing.” In a letter to his father afterward, Mankiewicz wrote, “I’m particularly furious at the incredibly insolent description of how Orson wrote his masterpiece. The fact is that there isn’t one single line in the picture that wasn’t in writing – writing from and by me – before ever a camera turned.”[27]:270

Film historian Otto Friedrich wrote, “… it made [Mankiewicz] unhappy to hear Welles quoted in Louella Parsons’s column, before the question of screen credits was officially settled, as saying, ‘So I wrote Citizen Kane. … Welles later claimed that he planned on a joint credit all along, but Mankiewicz claimed that Welles offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he would let Welles take full credit.”[34]:91–92

Controversy over the authorship of the Citizen Kane screenplay was revived in 1971 by film critic Pauline Kael, whose essay, “Raising Kane,” was printed in two installments in The New Yorker (February 20 and 27, 1971), and subsequently collected in The Citizen Kane Book (1971). According to Kael, Rita Alexander, Mankiewicz’s personal secretary, stated that she “… took the dictation from Mankiewicz from the first paragraph to the last … and later did the final rewriting and the cuts, and handled the script at the studio until after the film was shot. … [and said] Welles didn’t write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script of Citizen Kane.” She added that “Welles himself came to dinner once or twice … [and] she didn’t meet him until after Mankiewicz had finished dictating the long first draft.”[21]:38 However, Welles had his own secretary, Kathryn Trosper, who typed up Welles’s suggestions and corrections, which were incorporated into the final script; Kael did not interview Trosper before producing her article.[35]

Nevertheless, Kael maintained that Mankiewicz went to the Writers Guild and declared that he was the original author. According to Kael, “… he had ample proof of his authorship, and when he took his evidence to the Screen Writers Guild … Welles was forced to split the credit and take second place in the listing.”[21]:38 Charles Lederer, a screenwriter and a source for Kael’s article, insisted that the credit never came to the Screen Writers Guild for arbitration.[36]

Kael argued that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay and therefore responsible for much of what made the film great. This angered many critics of the day, most notably critic-turned-filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend of Welles who rebutted Kael’s claims in an October 1972 article for Esquire titled “The Kane Mutiny.” Other rebuttals included articles by Joseph McBride (Film Heritage, Fall 1971) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Film Comment, Spring 1972 and Summer 1972), interviews with George Coulouris and Bernard Herrmann that appeared in Sight & Sound (Spring 1972), and remarks in Welles biographies by Barbara Leaming and Frank Brady. Rosenbaum also reviewed the controversy in his editor’s notes to This is Orson Welles (1992).[11]:494–501

“I happen to disagree with the premise of the whole book, because she tries to pretend that Welles is nothing and that a mediocre writer by the name of Mankiewicz was a hidden Voltaire,” Bernard Herrmann said during a question-and-answer session following an October 1973 lecture at the George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, New York. “I’m not saying that Mankiewicz made no contribution. The titles clearly credit him. Orson says that he did make a valuable contribution. But really, without Orson, all of Mankiewicz’s other pictures were nothing, before and after. With Orson, however, something happened to this wonderful man, but he could not have created Citizen Kane.”[37]

Robert L. Carringer likewise rebutted Kael’s conclusions in an article titled “The Scripts of Citizen Kane” for the Winter 1978 edition of Critical Enquiry. Carringer refers to early script drafts with Welles’s incorporated handwritten contributions, and mentions the issues raised by Kael rested on the evidence of an early draft which was mostly written by Mankiewicz. However Carringer points out that subsequent drafts clarified Welles’s contribution to the script:

Fortunately enough evidence to settle the matter has survived. A virtually complete set of script records for Citizen Kane has been preserved in the archives of RKO General Pictures in Hollywood, and these provide almost a day-to-day record of the history of the scripting … The full evidence reveals that Welles’s contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive.[38]:80

Carringer notes that Mankiewicz’ principal contribution was on the first two drafts of the screenplay, which he characterizes as being more like “rough gatherings” than actual drafts. Houseman accompanied Mankiewicz so as to ensure that the latter’s drinking problem did not affect the screenplay. The early drafts established “… the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours, established the main characters, and provided numerous scenes and lines that would eventually appear in one form or another in the film.”[38]:115 However he also noted that Kane in the early draft remained a caricature of Hearst rather than the fully developed character of the final film. The main quality missing in the early drafts but present in the final film is “… the stylistic wit and fluidity that is the most engaging trait of the film itself.”[38]:116

According to film critic David Thomson, “No one can now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed language of the screenplay, but no one who has seen the film as often as it deserves to be seen would dream that Welles is not its only begetter.”[39] Carringer considered that at least three scenes were solely Welles’s work and, after weighing both sides of the argument, including sworn testimony from Mercury assistant Richard Baer, concluded, “We will probably never know for sure, but in any case Welles had at last found a subject with the right combination of monumentality, timeliness, and audacity.”[19]:11 Harlan Lebo agrees, and adds, “… of far greater relevance is reaffirming the importance of the efforts that both men contributed to the creation of Hollywood’s greatest motion picture.”[29]:32

Carringer notes that Citizen Kane was unusual in relation to his later films in that it was original material rather than adaptations of existing sources. He cites that Mankiewicz’s main contribution was providing him with “… what any good first writer ought to be able to provide in such a case: a solid, durable story structure on which to build.”[38]:117

For his part, Welles stated the process of collaborating with Mankiewicz on the Citizen Kane screenplay in a letter to The Times (London), November 17, 1971:

The initial ideas for this film and its basic structure were the result of direct collaboration between us; after this we separated and there were two screenplays: one written by Mr. Mankiewicz, in Victorville, and the other, in Beverly Hills, by myself. … The final version of the screenplay … was drawn from both sources.[11]:500

In his 1982 chronicle of the studio, The RKO Story, scholar Richard B. Jewell concluded the following:

Besides producing, directing and playing the role of Kane, Welles deserved his co-authorship credit (with Herman J. Mankiewicz) on the screenplay. Film critic Pauline Kael argues otherwise in a 50,000 word essay on the subject, but her case against Welles is one-sided and unsupported by the facts.[40]

Sources

Charles Foster Kane

Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane

William Randolph Hearst was born rich. He was the pampered son of an adoring mother. That is the decisive fact about him. Charles Foster Kane was born poor and was raised by a bank.

— Orson Welles[41]

Orson Welles never confirmed a principal source for the character of Charles Foster Kane. John Houseman, who edited and collaborated on the draft of the script written by Herman Mankiewicz, wrote that Kane is a synthesis of different personalities:

For the basic concept of Charles Foster Kane and for the main lines and significant events of his public life, Mankiewicz used as his model the figure of William Randolph Hearst. To this were added incidents and details invented or derived from other sources.[30]:444

Houseman set out the obvious parallels, “… to which were grafted anecdotes from other giants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank’s first boss, Herbert Bayard Swope.”[30]:444

The film is commonly regarded as a fictionalized, unrelentingly hostile parody of William Randolph Hearst, in spite of Welles’s statement that “Citizen Kane is the story of a wholly fictitious character.”[21]:42 According to film historian Don Kilbourne, “… much of the information for Citizen Kane came from already-published material about Hearst … [and] some of Kane’s speeches are almost verbatim copies of Hearst’s. When Welles denied that the film was about the still-influential publisher, he did not convince many people.”[32]:222

Hearst biographer David Nasaw finds the film’s depiction of Hearst unfair:

Welles’ Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him. Hearst, to the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion [Davies] or his wife. He did not, at the end of his life, run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage. Orson Welles may have been a great filmmaker, but he was neither a biographer nor a historian.[42]:574

Arguing for the release of Citizen Kane before the RKO board, Welles pointed out the irony that it was Hearst himself who had brought so much attention to the film being about him, and that it was his own columnist, Louella Parsons, who was doing the most to publicize Kane’s identification with Hearst. Public denials aside, Welles held the view that Hearst was a public figure and that the facts of a public figure’s life were available for writers to reshape and restructure into works of fiction. Welles’s legal advisor, Arnold Weissberger, put the issue in the form of a rhetorical question: “Will a man be allowed in effect to copyright the story of his life?”[43]:210–211

In an interview in the 1992 book This is Orson Welles, Welles said that he had excised one scene from Mankiewicz’s first draft that had certainly been based on Hearst. “In the original script we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character. If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him.[11]:85

Pauline Kael wrote that a vestige of this abandoned subplot survives in a remark made by Susan Alexander to the reporter interviewing her: “Look, if you’re smart, you’ll get in touch with Raymond. He’s the butler. You’ll learn a lot from him. He knows where all the bodies are buried.” Kael observed, “It’s an odd, cryptic speech. In the first draft, Raymond literally knew where the bodies were buried: Mankiewicz had dished up a nasty version of the scandal sometimes referred to as the Strange Death of Thomas Ince.”[21] Referring to the suspicious 1924 death of the American film mogul after being a guest on Hearst’s yacht, and noting that Kael’s principal source was John Houseman, film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that “it seems safe to conclude, even without her prodding, that some version of the story must have cropped up in Mankiewicz’s first draft of the script, which Welles subsequently edited and added to.”[44]

One particular aspect of the character, Kane’s profligate collecting of possessions, was directly taken from Hearst. “And it’s very curious – a man who spends his entire life paying cash for objects he never looked at,” Welles said. “He just acquired things, most of which were never opened, remained in boxes. It’s really a quite accurate picture of Hearst to that extent.”[11]:50 But Welles himself insisted that there were marked differences between his fictional creation and Hearst. He acknowledged that aspects of Kane were drawn from the lives of two business tycoons familiar from Welles’s youth in Chicago — Samuel Insull and Harold Fowler McCormick.[8]

A financier closely associated with Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull (1859–1938) was a man of humble origins who became the most powerful figure in the utilities field.[45] He was married to a Broadway ingenue nearly 20 years his junior, and built the Chicago Civic Opera House. In 1925, after a 26-year absence, Gladys Wallis Insull returned to the stage in a charity revival of The School for Scandal that ran two weeks in Chicago.[46] When the performance was repeated on Broadway in October 1925, Herman Mankiewicz — then the third-string theatre critic for The New York Times — was assigned to review the production. In an incident that became infamous, Mankiewicz returned to the press room drunk and wrote only the first sentence of a negative review before passing out on his typewriter. Mankiewicz resurrected the experience in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane, incorporating it into the narrative of Jedediah Leland.[27]:77–78

In 1926 Insull took a six-year lease on Chicago’s Studebaker Theatre and financed a repertory company in which his wife starred. Gladys Insull’s nerves broke when her company failed to find success, and the lease expired at the same time Insull’s $3 billion financial empire collapsed in the Depression.[47][48] Like that of Charles Foster Kane, the life of Samuel Insull ended in bankruptcy and disgrace.

Like Kane, Harold McCormick was divorced by his aristocratic first wife, Edith Rockefeller, and lavishly promoted the opera career of his only modestly talented second wife, Ganna Walska.[11]:497

According to composer David Raksin, Bernard Herrmann used to say that much of Kane’s story was based on McCormick, but that there was also a good deal of Orson Welles himself in the flamboyant character.[9] Welles lost his mother when he was nine years old and his father when he was 15. After this, he became the ward of Chicago’s Dr. Maurice Bernstein. Bernstein is the last name of the only major character in Citizen Kane who receives a generally positive portrayal. Although Dr. Bernstein was nothing like the character in the film, Welles said, the use of the name “Bernstein” was a family joke. “I used to call people ‘Bernstein’ on the radio, all the time, too – just to make him laugh. … Mank did all the best writing for Bernstein. I’d call that the most valuable thing he gave us.”[11]:65–66

Welles cited financier Basil Zaharoff as another inspiration for Kane. “I got the idea for the hidden-camera sequence in the Kane ‘news digest’ from a scene I did on March of Time in which Zaharoff, this great munitions-maker, was being moved around in his rose garden, just talking about the roses, in the last days before he died,” Welles said.[11]:75 Robert L. Carringer reviewed the December 3, 1936, script of the radio obituary in which Welles played Zaharoff, and found other similarities. In the opening scene, Zaharoff’s secretaries are burning masses of secret papers in the enormous fireplace of his castle. A succession of witnesses testify about the tycoon’s ruthless practices. “Finally, Zaharoff himself appears — an old man nearing death, alone except for his servants in the gigantic palace in Monte Carlo that he had acquired for his longtime mistress. His dying wish is to be wheeled out ‘in the sun by that rosebush.'”[19]:18

Jedediah Leland

In Hollywood in 1940, Orson Welles invited longtime friend and Mercury Theatre colleague Joseph Cotten to join a small group reading the script aloud for the first time. They got together around the pool at the Beverly Hills home of Herman Mankiewicz, Cotten wrote:

“I think I’ll just listen,” Welles said. “The title of this movie is Citizen Kane, and I play guess who.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you think of yourself as Jedediah Leland? His name, by the way, is a combination of Jed Harris and your agent, Leland Hayward.” “There all resemblance ceases,” Herman reassured me. These afternoon garden readings continued, and as the Mercury actors began arriving, the story started to breathe.[49]

“I regard Leland with enormous affection,” Orson Welles told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.[11]:84 He explained to Bogdanovich that the character of Jed Leland was based on drama critic Ashton Stevens, George Stevens’s uncle and a close boyhood friend of Welles:

What I knew about Hearst came more from him than from my father – though my father did know him well … But Ashton had taught Hearst to play the banjo, which is how he first got to be a drama critic, and, you know, Ashton was really one of the great ones. The last of the dandies – he worked for Hearst for some 50 years or so, and adored him. A gentleman … very much like Jed.[11]:66

Regarded as the dean of American drama critics, Ashton Stevens (1872–1951) began his journalism career in 1894 in San Francisco and started working for the Hearst newspapers three years later. In 1910 he moved to Chicago, where he covered the theatre for 40 years and became a close friend of Orson Welles’s guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein.[50]

Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz incorporated an incident from his own early career as a theatre critic for The New York Times into the narrative of Jed Leland. Mankiewicz was assigned to review the October 1925 opening of The School for Scandal[51] — a production that marked the return of Gladys Wallis to the Broadway stage. A famous ingenue of the 1890s, Wallis had retired upon her marriage to Chicago utilities magnate Samuel Insull but now, 26 years later, used her husband’s fortune to form her own repertory company. After her opening-night performance in the role of Lady Teazle, drama critic Mankiewicz returned to the press room “… full of fury and too many drinks …,” wrote biographer Richard Meryman:

He was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator. Herman began to write: “Miss Gladys Wallis, an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur, opened last night in …” Then Herman passed out, slumped over the top of his typewriter.[27]:77–78

The unconscious Mankiewicz was discovered by his boss, George S. Kaufman, who composed a terse announcement that the Times review would appear the following day.[52]

Mankiewicz resurrected the incident for Citizen Kane. After Kane’s second wife makes her opera debut, critic Jed Leland returns to the press room drunk. He passes out over the top of his typewriter after writing the first sentence of his review: “Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur …”

Susan Alexander

It was a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice, and much in the movie was borrowed from that story, but the man was not Hearst. Susan, Kane’s second wife, is not even based on the real-life soprano. Like most fictional characters, Susan’s resemblance to other fictional characters is quite startling. To Marion Davies she bears no resemblance at all.

— Orson Welles[41]

The common assumption that the character of Susan Alexander was based on Marion Davies was a major reason William Randolph Hearst tried to destroy Citizen Kane.[53] In his foreword to Davies’s autobiography, published posthumously in 1975, Orson Welles draws a sharp distinction between the real-life actress and his fictional creation:

That Susan was Kane’s wife and Marion was Hearst’s mistress is a difference more important than might be guessed in today’s changed climate of opinion. The wife was a puppet and a prisoner; the mistress was never less than a princess. Hearst built more than one castle, and Marion was the hostess in all of them: they were pleasure domes indeed, and the Beautiful People of the day fought for invitations. Xanadu was a lonely fortress, and Susan was quite right to escape from it. The mistress was never one of Hearst’s possessions: he was always her suitor, and she was the precious treasure of his heart for more than 30 years, until his last breath of life. Theirs is truly a love story. Love is not the subject of Citizen Kane.[41]

Welles cited Samuel Insull’s building of the Chicago Opera House, and business tycoon Harold Fowler McCormick’s lavish promotion of the opera career of his second wife, as direct influences on the screenplay.[54] McCormick divorced Edith Rockefeller and married aspiring opera singer Ganna Walska as her fourth husband. He spent thousands of dollars on voice lessons for her and even arranged for Walska to take the lead in a production of Zaza at the Chicago Opera in 1920. Contemporaries said Walska had a terrible voice; The New York Times headlines of the day read, “Ganna Walska Fails as Butterfly: Voice Deserts Her Again When She Essays Role of Puccini’s Heroine” (January 29, 1925), and “Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing” (July 14, 1927).

“According to her 1943 memoirs, Always Room at the Top, Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice,” reported The New York Times in 1996. “Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano’s Fedora in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher’s second wife for Citizen Kane.”[55]

Charles Lederer, Marion Davies’s nephew, read a draft of the script before filming began on Citizen Kane. “The script I read didn’t have any flavor of Marion and Hearst,” Lederer said. “Robert McCormick was the man it was about.”[56] (Lederer confuses Walska’s husband Harold F. McCormick with another member of the powerful Chicago family, one who may also have inspired Welles – crusading publisher Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.) Although there were things based on Marion Davies – jigsaw puzzles and drinking – Lederer noted that they were exaggerated in the film to help define the characterization of Susan Alexander.[11]:497–498

“As for Marion,” Orson Welles said, “she was an extraordinary woman – nothing like the character Dorothy Comingore played in the movie.”[11]:49

Film tycoon Jules Brulatour’s second and third wives, Dorothy Gibson and Hope Hampton, both fleeting stars of the silent screen who later had marginal careers in opera, are also believed to have provided inspiration for the Susan Alexander character. [57] The interview with Susan Alexander Kane in the Atlantic City nightclub was based on a contemporary interview with Evelyn Nesbit Thaw in the run-down club where she was performing.[30]:452–453

Jim Gettys

Charles F. Murphy caricatured in Hearst’s New York Journal (November 10, 1905)

The character of political boss Jim Gettys (Ray Collins) is based on Charles F. Murphy, a leader in New York City’s infamous Tammany Hall political machine.[21]:61 William Randolph Hearst and Murphy were political allies in 1902, when Hearst was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but the two fell out in 1905 when Hearst ran for mayor of New York. Hearst turned his muckraking newspapers on Tammany Hall in the person of Murphy, who was called “… the most hungry, selfish and extortionate boss Tammany has ever known.” Murphy ordered that under no condition was Hearst to be elected. Hearst ballots were dumped into the East River, and new ballots were printed favoring his opponent. Hearst was defeated by some 3,000 votes and his newspapers bellowed against the election fraud. A historic cartoon of Murphy in convict stripes appeared November 10, 1905, three days after the vote.[58] The caption read, “Look out, Murphy! It’s a Short Lockstep from Delmonico’s to Sing Sing … Every honest voter in New York wants to see you in this costume.”[59]

In Citizen Kane, Boss Jim Gettys (named Edward Rogers in the shooting script) admonishes Kane for printing a cartoon showing him in prison stripes:

If I owned a newspaper and if I didn’t like the way somebody else was doing things – some politician, say – I’d fight them with everything I had. Only I wouldn’t show him in a convict suit with stripes — so his children could see the picture in the paper. Or his mother.

As he pursues Gettys down the stairs, Kane threatens to send him to Sing Sing.[60]

As an inside joke, Welles named Gettys after the father-in-law of Roger Hill, his headmaster at the Todd School and a lifelong friend.[11]:63

“Rosebud”

In This is Orson Welles, Welles credits the “Rosebud” device – the journalist’s search for the enigmatic meaning of Kane’s last word, the device that frames the film – to screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. “Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could find to get off, as they used to say in vaudeville,” Welles said. “It manages to work, but I’m still not too keen about it, and I don’t think that he was, either.” The dialogue eventually reflects the screenwriters’ desire to diminish the importance of the word’s meaning; “We did everything we could to take the mickey out of it,” Welles said.[11]:53

As he began his first draft of the Citizen Kane screenplay in early 1940, Mankiewicz mentioned “Rosebud” to his secretary. When she asked, “Who is rosebud?” he replied, “It isn’t a who, it’s an it.” The symbol of Mankiewicz’s own damaged childhood was a treasured bicycle, stolen while he visited the public library and, in punishment, never replaced.[61] “He mourned that all his life,” wrote Pauline Kael, who believed Mankiewicz put the emotion of that boyhood loss into the loss that haunted Kane.[21]:60

In his 2002 book Hearst Over Hollywood, Louis Pizzitola reports one historian’s statement that “Rosebud” was a nickname given to William Randolph Hearst’s mother by portrait and landscape painter Orrin Peck. The Peck family were intimates of the Hearsts, and Orrin Peck was said to be nearer to Phoebe Apperson Hearst than her own son.[62][63] Another theory of the origin of “Rosebud” is the similarity with the dying wish of Basil Zaharoff (who is one of the inspirations for the central character), to be wheeled “by the rosebush”.[64]

In 1989 author Gore Vidal stated that “Rosebud” was a nickname which Hearst had used for the clitoris of his mistress, Marion Davies. Vidal said that Davies had told this intimate detail to his close nephew, Charles Lederer, who had mentioned it to him years later.[65][66] The claim was repeated in the 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane and again in the 1999 dramatic film RKO 281. Film critic Roger Ebert said, “Some people have fallen in love with the story that Herman Mankiewicz, the co-author with Welles of the screenplay, happened to know that ‘Rosebud’ was William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for an intimate part of Marion Davies’ anatomy.”[67][68]

Welles biographer Frank Brady traces the story to the popular press in the late 1970s:

How Orson (or Mankiewicz) could have ever discovered this most private utterance is unexplained and why it took over 35 years for such a suggestive rationale to emerge, although the origins of everything to do with Citizen Kane had continually been placed under literary and cinematic microscopes for decades, is also unknown. If this highly unlikely story is even partially true … Hearst may have become upset at the implied connotation, although any such connection seems to have been innocent on Welles’s part. In any event, this bizarre explanation for the origin of one of the most famous words ever spoken on the screen has now made its way into serious studies of Welles and Citizen Kane.[69]

British film critic Philip French asked Welles’s associate John Houseman, who worked on the Citizen Kane script with Mankiewicz, whether there was any truth to the story:

“Absolutely none,” he said, pointing out that it was inconceivable that he would not have heard of something so provocative at the time, or that Welles could have kept such a secret for over 40 years.[70]

In 1991, Edward Castle, a reporter for The Las Vegas Sun, contended that Welles may have borrowed the name of Native American folklorist, educator and author Rosebud Yellow Robe for “Rosebud”. Castle claimed to have found both of their signatures on the same sign-in sheets at CBS Radio studios in New York, where they both worked on different shows in the late 1930s.[71] The word “Rosebud” appears, however, in the first draft script written by Herman Mankiewicz, not Welles.[72]:82

“Rosebud is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain,” summarized Roger Ebert. “It is the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in 2001.”[73]

Filmmaking innovations

Orson Welles said that his preparation before making Citizen Kane was to watch John Ford’s Stagecoach 40 times.[74]

A lot of people ought to study Stagecoach. I wanted to learn how to make movies, and that’s such a classically perfect one — don’t you think so? … As it turned out, the first day I ever walked onto a set was my first day as a director. I’d learned whatever I knew in the projection room — from Ford. After dinner every night for about a month, I’d run Stagecoach, often with some different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions. “How was this done?” “Why was this done?” It was like going to school.[11]:28–29

Cinematography

A deep focus shot: everything, including the hat in the foreground and the boy (young Kane) in the distance, is in sharp focus.

Film scholars and historians view Citizen Kane as Welles’s attempt to create a new style of filmmaking by studying various forms of film making, and combining them all into one. However, in an interview in March 1960 with the BBC’s Huw Wheldon, Welles stated that his love for cinema began only when he started the work on Citizen Kane, and when asked where he got the confidence as a first-time director to direct a film so radically different from contemporary cinema, he responded, “[From] ignorance … sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.”[75][76]

The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the extended use of deep focus.[77] In nearly every scene in the film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all in sharp focus. This was done by cinematographer Gregg Toland through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Toland described the achievement, made possible by the sensitivity of modern speed film, in an article for Theatre Arts magazine:

New developments in the science of motion picture photography are not abundant at this advanced stage of the game but periodically one is perfected to make this a greater art. Of these I am in an excellent position to discuss what is termed “Pan-focus”, as I have been active for two years in its development and used it for the first time in Citizen Kane. Through its use, it is possible to photograph action from a range of eighteen inches from the camera lens to over two hundred feet away, with extreme foreground and background figures and action both recorded in sharp relief. Hitherto, the camera had to be focused either for a close or a distant shot, all efforts to encompass both at the same time resulting in one or the other being out of focus. This handicap necessitated the breaking up of a scene into long and short angles, with much consequent loss of realism. With pan-focus, the camera, like the human eye, sees an entire panorama at once, with everything clear and lifelike.[78]

Any time deep focus was impossible – for example in the scene when Kane finishes a bad review of Alexander’s opera while at the same time firing the person who started the review – an optical printer was used to make the whole screen appear in focus (visually layering one piece of film onto another). However, some apparently deep-focus shots were the result of in-camera effects, as in the famous scene where Kane breaks into Susan Alexander’s room after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene re-shot with the background action.

Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle shots were used to display a point of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the background of several scenes.[79] Since films were primarily filmed on sound stages and not on location during the era of the Hollywood studio system, it was impossible to film at an angle that showed ceilings because the stages had none. In some instances, Welles’s crew used muslin draped above the set to produce the illusion of a regular room with a ceiling. The boom microphones were hidden above the cloth, or in a trench dug into the floor, as in the scene where Kane meets Leland after his election loss.[80]

Toland had approached Welles in 1940 to work on Citizen Kane. Welles’s reputation for experimentation in the theatre appealed to Toland and he found a sympathetic partner to “… test and prove several ideas generally being accepted as radical in Hollywood”.[4] Welles credited Toland on the same card as himself. “It’s impossible to say how much I owe to Gregg. He was superb,” Welles said.[81]

Storytelling techniques

Citizen Kane eschews the traditional linear, chronological narrative, and tells Kane’s story entirely in flashback using different points of view, many of them from Kane’s aged and forgetful associates, the cinematic equivalent of the unreliable narrator in literature.[82] Welles also dispenses with the idea of a single storyteller and uses multiple narrators to recount Kane’s life. The use of multiple narrators was unheard of in Hollywood films.[82] Each narrator recounts a different part of Kane’s life, with each story partly overlapping.[83] The film depicts Kane as an enigma, a complicated man who, in the end, leaves viewers with more questions than answers as to his character, such as the newsreel footage where he is attacked for being both a communist and a fascist.[82] The technique of using flashbacks had been used in earlier films such as Wuthering Heights in 1939 and The Power and the Glory in 1933, but no film was as immersed in this technique as Citizen Kane. The use of the reporter Thompson acts as a surrogate for the audience, questioning Kane’s associates and piecing together his life.[83]

One of the narrative voices is the News on the March segment.[82] Its stilted dialogue and portentous voiceover is a parody of The March of Time newsreel series[84] which itself references an earlier newsreel which showed the 85-year-old arms czar Sir Basil Zaharoff getting wheeled to his train. Welles had earlier provided voiceovers for the March of Time radio show. Citizen Kane makes extensive use of stock footage to create the newsreel.

One of the story-telling techniques used in Citizen Kane was the use of montage to collapse time and space, using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In the breakfast montage, Welles chronicles the breakdown of Kane’s first marriage in five vignettes that condense 16 years of story time into two minutes of screen time.[85] Welles said that the idea for the breakfast scene “… was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder … a one-act play, which is a long Christmas dinner that takes you through something like 60 years of a family’s life.”[11]:51

Special effects

Welles also pioneered several visual effects in order to cheaply shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For example, the scene where the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for Susan Alexander Kane’s performance, was shot by a camera craning upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu. A loud, full-screen closeup of a typewriter typing a single word (weak), magnifies the review for the Chicago Inquirer.[86]

Makeup

The make-up artist Maurice Seiderman created the make-up for the film.[18] RKO wanted the young Kane to look handsome and dashing, and Seiderman transformed the overweight Welles, beginning with his nose, which Welles always disliked. For the old Kane, Seiderman created a red plastic compound which he applied to Welles, allowing the wrinkles to move naturally.[18] Kane’s mustache was made of several hair tufts. Transforming Welles into the old Kane required six to seven hours, meaning he had to start at two in the morning to begin filming at nine. He would hold conferences while sitting in the make-up chair; sometimes working 16 hours a day. Even breaking a leg during filming could not stop him from directing around the clock, and he quickly returned to acting, using a steel leg brace.[18]

Soundtrack

“Before Kane, nobody in Hollywood knew how to set music properly in movies,” wrote filmmaker François Truffaut in a 1967 essay. “Kane was the first, in fact the only, great film that uses radio techniques.”

Behind each scene, there is a resonance which gives it its color: the rain on the windows of the cabaret, “El Rancho,” when the investigator goes to visit the down-and-out female singer who can only “work” Atlantic City; the echoes in the marble-lined Thatcher library; the overlapping voices whenever there are several characters. A lot of filmmakers know enough to follow Auguste Renoir’s advice to fill the eyes with images at all costs, but only Orson Welles understood that the sound track had to be filled in the same way.[87]

In addition to expanding on the potential of sound as a creator of moods and emotions, Welles pioneered a new aural technique, known as the “lightning-mix”. Welles used this technique to link complex montage sequences via a series of related sounds or phrases. In offering a continuous sound track, Welles was able to join what would otherwise be extremely rough cuts together into a smooth narrative. For example, the audience witnesses Kane grow from a child into a young man in just two shots. As Kane’s guardian hands him his sled, Kane begrudgingly wishes him a “Merry Christmas”. Suddenly we are taken to a shot of his guardian fifteen years later, only to have the phrase completed for us: “and a Happy New Year”. In this case, the continuity of the soundtrack, not the image, is what makes for a seamless narrative structure.[88]

Welles also carried over techniques from radio not yet popular in films (though they would become staples). Using a number of voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession, the result gave the impression of a whole town talking – and, equally important, what the town was talking about. Welles also favored the overlapping of dialogue, considering it more realistic than the stage and film tradition of characters not stepping on each other’s sentences. He also pioneered the technique of putting the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions (a J-cut); as a scene would come to a close, the audio would transition to the next scene before the visuals did.

Music

In common with using personnel he had previously worked with in the Mercury Theatre, Welles recruited his close friend Bernard Herrmann to score Citizen Kane.[89] Herrmann was a longtime collaborator with Welles, providing music for almost all his radio broadcasts, including The Fall of the City (1937) and the War of the Worlds (1938) broadcast.[90] The film was Herrmann’s first motion picture score,[89] and would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, but would lose out to his own score for the film All That Money Can Buy.[89]

Herrmann’s score for Citizen Kane was a watershed in film soundtrack composition and proved as influential as any of the film’s other innovations, establishing him as an important voice in film soundtrack composition.[9][90] The score eschewed the typical Hollywood practice of scoring a film with virtually non-stop music. Instead Herrmann used what he later described as ‘”radio scoring”, musical cues which typically lasted between five and fifteen seconds to bridge the action or suggest a different emotional response. One of the most effective musical cues was the “Breakfast Montage.” The scene begins with a graceful waltz theme and gets darker with each variation on that theme as the passage of time leads to the hardening of Kane’s personality and the breakup of his marriage to Emily.[91]

Herrmann realized that musicians slated to play his music were hired for individual unique sessions; there was no need to write for existing ensembles. This meant that he was free to score for unusual combinations of instruments, even instruments that are not commonly heard. In the opening sequence, for example, the tour of Kane’s estate Xanadu, Herrmann introduces a recurring leitmotiv played by low woodwinds, including a quartet of alto flutes.[92] Much of the music used in the newsreel was taken from other sources; examples include the News on the March music which was taken from RKO’s music library, Belgian March by Anthony Collins, and accompanies the newsreel titles; and an excerpt from Alfred Newman’s score for Gunga Din which is used as the background for the exploration of Xanadu.[90] In the final sequence of the film, which shows the destruction of Rosebud in the fireplace of Kane’s castle, Welles choreographed the scene while he had Herrmann’s cue playing on the set.[93]

For the operatic sequence which exposed Kane’s protege Susan Alexander for the amateur she was, Herrmann composed a quasi-romantic scene, Aria from Salammbô.[9] There did exist two treatments of this 1862 novel by Gustave Flaubert: an opera by Ernest Reyer and an incomplete treatment by Modeste Mussorgsky. However, Herrmann made no reference to existing music. Herrmann put the aria in a key that would force the singer to strain to reach the high notes, culminating in a high D, well outside the range of Susan Alexander.[9][90] Herrmann said he wanted to convey the impression of “… a terrified girl floundering in the quicksand of a powerful orchestra”.[9] On the soundtrack it was soprano Jean Forward who actually sang the vocal part for actress Dorothy Comingore.[9]

In 1972 Herrmann said “I was fortunate to start my career with a film like Citizen Kane, it’s been a downhill run ever since!”[90] Shortly before his death in 1985, Welles told director Henry Jaglom that the score was fifty percent responsible for the film’s artistic success.[90]

Herrmann was vocal in his criticism of Pauline Kael’s claim that it was Mankiewicz, not Welles, who made the main thrust of the film, and also her assertions about the use of music in the film without consulting him:

Pauline Kael has written in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), that the production wanted to use Massenet’s “Thais” but could not afford the fee. But Miss Kael never wrote or approached me to ask about the music. We could easily have afforded the fee. The point is that its lovely little strings would not have served the emotional purpose of the film.[94]

Opera lovers are frequently amused by the parody of vocal coaching that appears in a singing lesson given to Susan Alexander by Signor Matiste. The character attempts to sing the famous cavatina “Una voce poco fa” from Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini, but the lesson is interrupted when Alexander sings a high note flat.

At the beginning of Thompson’s second interview of Susan Kane at her nightclub, the tune heard in the background is “In a Mizz”, a 1939 jazz song by Charlie Barnet and Haven Johnson.[19]:108 “I kind of based the whole scene around that song,” Orson Welles said. “The music is by Nat Cole — it’s his trio.”[11]:56 Later — beginning with the lyrics, “It can’t be love” — “In a Mizz” is performed at the Everglades picnic, framing the fight in the tent between Susan and Kane.[19]:108 Musicians including bandleader Cee Pee Johnson (drums), Alton Redd (vocals), Raymond Tate (trumpet), Buddy Collette (alto sax) and Buddy Banks (tenor sax) are featured.[95]

Reception

Pre-release controversy

Welles ran a closed set, limited access to dailies, and managed the publicity of Kane, to ensure that its influence from Hearst’s life was a secret.[19]:111 Publicity materials stated the film’s inspiration was Faust.[20] RKO hoped to release the film in mid-February 1941. Writers for national magazines had early deadlines and so a rough cut was previewed for a select few on January 3, 1941. Friday magazine ran an article drawing point-by-point comparisons between Kane and Hearst and documented how Welles had led on Louella Parsons, Hollywood correspondent for Hearst papers, and made a fool of her in public. Reportedly, she was furious and demanded an immediate preview of the film. James G. Stewart, who was present at the screening, said that she walked out of the film. Soon after, Parsons called George Schaefer and threatened RKO with a lawsuit if they released Kane.[19]:111 The next day, the front page headline in Daily Variety read, “HEARST BANS RKO FROM PAPERS.”[96] In two weeks, the ban was lifted for everything except Kane.[19]:111

The Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page story on January 13 that Hearst papers were about to run a series of editorials attacking Hollywood’s practice of hiring refugees and immigrants for jobs that could be done by Americans. The goal was to put pressure on the other studios in order to force RKO to shelve Kane.[19]:111 Soon afterwards, Schaefer was approached by Nicholas Schenck, head of MGM’s parent company, with an offer on the behalf of Louis B. Mayer and other Hollywood executives to reimburse RKO if it would destroy the film.[19]:111–112 Once RKO’s legal team reassured Schaefer, the studio announced on January 21 that Kane would be released as scheduled, and with one of the largest promotional campaigns in the studio’s history. Schaefer brought Welles to New York City for a private screening of the film with the New York corporate heads of the studios and their lawyers.[19]:112 There was no objection to its release provided that certain changes, including the removal or softening of specific references that might offend Hearst, were made.[19]:112–113 Welles agreed, and editor Robert Wise (who became a celebrated film director in the 1950s and 60s) was brought in to cut the running time from two hours, two minutes, and 40 seconds to one hour, 59 minutes, and 16 seconds. That cut satisfied the corporate lawyers.[19]:113

Hearst’s response

Hearing about the film enraged Hearst so much that he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles. Following lobbying from Hearst, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Louis B. Mayer, acting on behalf of the whole film industry, made an offer to RKO Pictures of $805,000 to destroy all prints of the film and burn the negative.[97] Welles used Hearst’s opposition to Citizen Kane as a pretext for previewing the film in several opinion-making screenings in Los Angeles, lobbying for its artistic worth against the hostile campaign that Hearst was waging.[97]

When George Schaefer of RKO rejected Hearst’s offer to suppress the film, Hearst banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing – or even mentioning – the film. He also had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire.[98] The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for Citizen Kane’s relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. The film did decent business at the box office; it went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, a modest success its backers found acceptable. Nevertheless, the film’s commercial performance fell short of its creators’ expectations. In The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, David Nasaw points out that Hearst’s actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits.[42]:572–573

In a pair of Arena documentaries about Welles’s career produced and broadcast domestically by the BBC in 1982, Welles claimed that during opening week, a policeman approached him one night and told him: “Do not go to your hotel room tonight; Hearst has set up an undressed, underage girl to leap into your arms when you enter and a photographer to take pictures of you. Hearst is planning to publish it in all of his papers.” Welles thanked the man and stayed out all night. However, it is not confirmed whether this was true. Welles also described how he accidentally bumped into Hearst in an elevator at the Fairmont Hotel when Kane was opening in San Francisco. Welles’s father had been friends with Hearst, so Welles tried to comfortably ask if Hearst would see the film. Hearst ignored him. “As he was getting off at his floor, I said ‘Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.’ No reply”, recalled the director. “And Kane would have you know. That was his style.”[20]

Although Hearst tried to suppress the film and limit its success, his efforts backfired in the long run, for now almost every reference to Hearst’s life and career includes a reference to the parallels in the film. The irony of Hearst’s attempts is that the film is now inexorably connected to him. This connection is reinforced by W. A. Swanberg’s extensive biography entitled Citizen Hearst.

Release and contemporary responses

Citizen Kane was to open at RKO’s flagship theatre, Radio City Music Hall, but did not; a possible factor was Louella Parsons’s threat that The American Weekly would run a defamatory story on the grandfather of major RKO stockholder Nelson Rockefeller.[19]:115 Other exhibitors feared retaliation and refused to handle the film. Schaefer lined up a few theaters but Welles grew impatient and threatened RKO with a lawsuit. Hearst papers refused to accept advertising for the film. Kane opened at the RKO Palace on Broadway in New York on May 1, 1941, in Chicago on May 6, and in Los Angeles on May 8.[19]:115 Kane did well in cities and larger towns but fared poorly in more remote areas. RKO still had problems getting exhibitors to show the film. For example, one chain controlling more than 500 theaters got Welles’s film as part of a package but refused to play it, reportedly out of fear of Hearst.[19]:117 The Hearst newspapers’s disruption of the film’s release damaged its box office performance and, as a result, Citizen Kane lost $160,000 during its initial run.[99]:164[100]

The reviews for the film were overwhelmingly positive, although some reviewers were challenged by Welles’s break with Hollywood traditions.[101] Kate Cameron, in her review for the New York Daily-News, said that Kane was “… one of the most interesting and technically superior films that has ever come out of a Hollywood studio”.[102] In his review for the New World Telegram, William Boehnel said that the film was “… staggering and belongs at once among the greatest screen achievements”.[103] Otis Ferguson, in his review for The New Republic, said that Kane was “… the boldest free-hand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild to unshackle the camera”.[104] John O’Hara, in Newsweek, called it “… the best picture he’d ever seen”[97]

The day following the premiere of Citizen Kane, The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that “… it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.”

Count on Mr. Welles: he doesn’t do things by halves. … Upon the screen he discovered an area large enough for his expansive whims to have free play. And the consequence is that he has made a picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts. Mr. Welles has put upon the screen a motion picture that really moves.[105]

Critic James Agate was decidedly negative in an October 1941 review, countering the superlatives given Citizen Kane by critics C. A. Lejeune and Dilys Powell. “Now imagine my horror, which includes self-distrust, at seeing no more in this film than the well-intentioned, muddled, amateurish thing one expects from high-brows. (Mr. Orson Welles’s height of brow is enormous.) … I thought the photography quite good, but nothing to write to Moscow about, the acting middling, and the whole thing a little dull.”[106]

Agate continued his review two weeks later:

Citizen Kane has entirely ousted the war as conversation fodder. Waiters ask me what I think of it, and the post is full of it. … You know now that all the vulgar beef, beer and tobacco barons are vulgar because when they were about seven years of age somebody came and took away their skates. That is one explanation of this alleged world-shaking masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Another point of view is that Citizen Kane is so great a masterpiece that it doesn’t need explaining. … In the meantime I continue to steer a middle course. I regard Citizen Kane as a quite good film which tries to run the psychological essay in harness with your detective thriller, and doesn’t quite succeed.[107]

In a 1941 review, Jorge Luis Borges called Citizen Kane a “metaphysical detective story”, in that “… [its] subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined ….” Borges noted that “Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him.” As well, “Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum.” Borges points out, “At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances.”[108]

Accolades

14th Academy Awards  – 1941

Citizen Kane, with nine nominations, was the sixteenth film to get more than six Academy Award nominations.[109][110] It was nominated for the following awards:[111]

Outstanding Motion Picture – RKO Radio Pictures (Orson Welles, Producer)

Best Director – Orson Welles

Best Actor – Orson Welles

Best Writing (Original Screenplay) – Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration (Black-and-White) – Perry Ferguson, Van Nest Polglase, A. Roland Fields, Darrell Silvera

Best Film Editing – Robert Wise

Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) – Gregg Toland

Best Music (Score of a Dramatic Picture) – Bernard Herrmann

Best Sound Recording – John O. Aalberg

It was widely thought the film would win most of the awards it was nominated for, but it only won the Best Writing (Original Screenplay) Oscar.[19]:117

Film editor Robert Wise recalled each time Citizen Kane’s name was called out as a nominee, the crowd booed.[7] Most of Hollywood did not want the film to see the light of day, considering the threats that William Randolph Hearst had made if it did. According to Variety, bloc voting against Welles by screen extras denied him Best Picture and Actor awards.[112] British film critic Barry Norman attributed this to Hearst’s wrath.[18]

Other awards

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures gave 1941 “Best Acting” awards to Orson Welles and George Coulouris, and the film itself “Best Picture.” That same year, The New York Times named it one of the Ten Best Films of the year, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for “Best Picture” also went to Citizen Kane.[113]

Subsequent re-evaluation and recognition

By 1942 Citizen Kane had run its course theatrically and, apart from a few showings at big city arthouse cinemas, it largely vanished from America until 1956. In that period, Kane’s and Welles’ reputation fell among American critics. In 1949 critic Richard Griffith in his overview of cinema, The Film Till Now, dismissed Kane as “… tinpot if not crackpot Freud.”[19]:117–118

Due to World War II, Citizen Kane was little seen in Europe. It was not until 1946 that it was shown in France, where it gained considerable acclaim, particularly from film critics such as André Bazin and from Cahiers du cinéma writers, including future film directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. In his 1950 essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”, Bazin placed Citizen Kane centre stage as a work which ushered in a new period in cinema.[114]

In the United States, it was neglected and forgotten until its revival on television in the mid-1950s. Three key events in 1956 led to its re-evaluation in the United States: first, RKO was one of the first studios to sell its library to television, and early that year Citizen Kane started to appear on television; second, the film was re-released theatrically to coincide with Welles’s return to the New York stage, where he played King Lear; and third, American film critic Andrew Sarris wrote “Citizen Kane: The American Baroque” for Film Culture, and described it as “the great American film.”[115] During Expo 58, a poll of over 100 film historians named Kane one of the top ten greatest films ever made (the group gave first-place honors to The Battleship Potemkin). When a group of young film directors announced their vote for the top six, they were booed for not including the film.[20]

In the decades since, its critical status as one of the greatest films ever made has grown, with numerous essays and books on it including Peter Cowie’s The Cinema of Orson Welles, Ronald Gottesman’s Focus on Citizen Kane, a collection of significant reviews and background pieces, and most notably Kael’s essay, “Raising Kane”, which promoted the value of the film to a much wider audience than it had reached before.[19]:120 Despite its criticism of Welles, it further popularized the notion of Citizen Kane as the great American film. The rise of art house and film society circuits also aided in the film’s rediscovery.[19]:119

The British magazine Sight & Sound has produced a Top Ten list surveying film critics every decade since 1952, and is regarded as one of the most respected barometers of critical taste.[116] Citizen Kane was a runner up to the top 10 in its 1952 poll but was voted as the greatest film ever made in its 1962 poll,[117] retaining the top spot in every subsequent poll[118][119] until 2012, when Vertigo displaced it.

The film has also ranked number one in the following film “best of” lists: Editorial Jaguar, FIAF Centenary List, France Critics Top 10, Cahiers du cinéma 100 films pour une cinémathèque idéale,[120] Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Russia Top 10, Romanian Critics Top 10, Time Out Magazine Greatest Films, and Village Voice 100 Greatest Films. Roger Ebert called Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made: “But people don’t always ask about the greatest film. They ask, ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ Again, I always answer with Citizen Kane.”[121]

In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.[122] Citizen Kane was one of the first 25 movies designated as national treasures. The legislation creating the registry was enacted in 1988, growing out of the debate over a movie director’s right to block film colorization.[123]

On February 18, 1999, the United States Postal Service honored Citizen Kane by including it in its Celebrate the Century series.[124] The film was honored again February 25, 2003, in a series of U.S. postage stamps marking the 75th anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Art director Perry Ferguson represents the behind-the-scenes craftsmen of filmmaking in the series; he is depicted completing a sketch for Citizen Kane.[125]

Citizen Kane was ranked number one in the American Film Institute’s polls of film industry artists and leaders in 1998[126] and 2007.[127] “Rosebud” was chosen the 17th most memorable movie quotation in a 2005 AFI poll.[128] The film’s score was one of 250 nominees for the top 25 film scores in American cinema in another 2005 AFI poll.[129]

The film currently has a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 66 reviews by approved critics.[130]

Legacy

Despite the critical success of Citizen Kane it nevertheless marked a decline in Welles’s fortunes. In the book Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, Joseph McBride argues that the problems in making Citizen Kane caused lasting damage to his career. The damage started with RKO violating its contract with him by taking his next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, away from him and adding a happy ending against his will.[20] Hollywood’s treatment of Welles and his work ultimately led to his self-imposed exile in Europe for much of the rest of his career, where he found a more sympathetic audience.

The documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane posits that Welles’s own life story resembled that of Kane far more than Hearst’s: an overreaching wunderkind who ended up mournful and lonely in his old age. Citizen Kane’s editor, Robert Wise, summarized: “Well, I thought often afterwards, only in recent years when I saw the film again two or three years ago when they had the fiftieth anniversary, and I suddenly thought to myself, well, Orson was doing an autobiographical film and didn’t realize it, because it’s rather much the same, you know. You start here, and you have a big rise and tremendous prominence and fame and success and whatnot, and then tail off and tail off and tail off. And at least the arc of the two lives were very much the same ….”[7]

Peter Bogdanovich, who was friends with Welles in his later years, disagreed with this on his own commentary on the Citizen Kane DVD, saying that Kane was nothing like Welles. Kane, he said, “… had none of the qualities of an artist, Orson had all the qualities of an artist.” Bogdanovich also noted that Welles was never bitter “… about all the bad things that happened to him …,” and was a man who enjoyed life in his final years. In addition, critics have reassessed Welles’ career after his death, saying that he wasn’t a failed Hollywood filmmaker, but a successful independent filmmaker.[131]

Film critic Kim Newman believed the film’s influence was visible in the film noir that followed, as well as the 1942 Hepburn-Tracy film Keeper of the Flame. Martin Scorsese ranks it as one of his favorite films of all time.[132]

The film’s structure influenced the biographical films Lawrence of Arabia and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – which begin with the subject’s death and show their life in flashbacks – as well as Welles’s thriller Mr. Arkadin.[20]

The film, for its topic of mass media manipulation of public opinion, is also famous for having been frequently presented as the perfect example to demonstrate the power that media has on influencing the democratic process. This exemplary citation of the film lasted till the end of the 20th century, when the paradigm of mass media depicted in Citizen Kane needed to be updated to take into account more globalized and more internet-based media scenarios. Since the film was based on William Randolph Hearst’s actions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that model of media influence lasted for almost a century.[133] Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is sometimes labeled as a latter-day Citizen Kane.[134][135]

Film memorabilia

Pine sled used in Citizen Kane, won by a 12-year-old boy in an RKO Pictures publicity contest in 1942, sold at auction through Christie’s for $233,500 in 1996

In June 1982, Steven Spielberg spent $60,500 to buy a Rosebud sled, one of three balsa sleds used in the closing scenes and the only one that was not burned.[136][137] Spielberg had paid homage to Citizen Kane in the final shot of the government warehouse in his 1981 film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg commented, “Rosebud will go over my typewriter to remind me that quality in movies comes first.”[138][139]

After the Spielberg purchase, news outlets began reporting the claim of Arthur Bauer, a retired helicopter pilot in New York, that he owned another Rosebud, the hardwood sled used in Buddy Swan’s scenes as the young Charles Foster Kane at the beginning of Citizen Kane. “I’m sure it could be true,” Welles said when asked for comment.[140] In early 1942, Bauer was a 12-year-old student in Brooklyn and a member of his school’s film club. He entered and won an RKO Pictures publicity contest and selected Rosebud as his prize. In 1996, Bauer’s estate offered the painted pine sled at auction through Christie’s.[141] Bauer’s son told CBS News that his mother had once wanted to paint the sled and use it as a plant stand; “Instead, my dad said, ‘No, just save it and put it in the closet.'”[142] On December 15, 1996, the hardwood sled was sold to an anonymous bidder in Los Angeles for $233,500.[143]

In December 2007, Welles’s personal copy of the last revised draft of Citizen Kane before the shooting script was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $97,000.[144] Welles’s Oscar for best original screenplay was offered for sale at the same auction, but failed to reach its estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million.[144] The Oscar, believed to have been lost by Welles, was rediscovered in 1994. Owned by the Dax Foundation, a Los Angeles based charity,[144] it was sold at auction in 2011 by an anonymous seller to an anonymous buyer for $861,542.[145]

A working draft script for Citizen Kane — with its original title, American — was sold at auction by Sotheby’s, March 5–6, 2014. A second-draft script marked “Mr. Welles’ working copy” in pencil on the manilla cover, it was expected to bring between $25,080 and $33,440; it sold for $164,692.[146] The same item had been sold by Christie’s in December 1991, together with a working script from The Magnificent Ambersons, for $11,000.[147]

A collection of 24 pages from a script of Citizen Kane was sold at auction April 26, 2014, for $15,000.[148] A collection of approximately 235 stills and production photos sold for $7,812.[149]The materials were among those found in boxes and trunks of Welles’s personal possessions by his daughter Beatrice Welles.[150]

Distribution rights

In 1955, RKO sold the American television rights to its film library, including Citizen Kane, to C&C Television Corp.[151] Television rights to the pre-1956 RKO library were acquired by United Artists in 1960. RKO kept the non-broadcast television rights to its library and formed RKO Home Video in 1984.[152] RKO, which had licensed the film to other home video companies, reissued the film in 1985 on VHS and Beta,[153] while the laserdisc video rights to Citizen Kane were carried over to The Criterion Collection for its inaugural release in 1984. Turner Broadcasting System acquired broadcast television rights to the library when it acquired MGM/UA in 1986.[154] Unable to sustain the debt load, Turner split up MGM/UA and kept the MGM film library, including American television rights to the RKO library.[155] Turner acquired full worldwide rights to the RKO library in 1987.[156] The RKO Home Video unit was reorganized into Turner Home Entertainment that year.[157] For the film’s 50th anniversary in 1991, Turner Entertainment utilized Paramount Pictures as its distributor for the film’s re-release to theaters.[158] In 1996, Time Warner acquired Turner and Warner Home Video absorbed Turner Home Entertainment.[159] Today, Time Warner’s Warner Bros. unit has distribution rights for Citizen Kane.[1]

Prints

The composited camera negative of Citizen Kane was destroyed in a New Jersey film laboratory fire in the 1970s. Subsequent prints were ultimately derived from a master positive (a fine-grain preservation element) made in the 1940s and originally intended for use in overseas distribution.[160] The soundtrack had not been lost.

Modern techniques were used to produce a pristine print for a 50th Anniversary theatrical revival reissue in 1991 (released by Paramount Pictures). The 2003 British DVD edition is taken from a master positive held by the British Film Institute. The current US DVD version (released by Warner Home Video) is taken from another digital restoration, supervised by Turner’s company. The transfer to Region 1 DVD has been criticized by some film experts for being too bright. Also, in the scene in Bernstein’s office (chapter 10), rain falling outside the window has been digitally erased, probably because it was thought to be excessive film grain. These alterations are not present in the UK Region 2, which is also considered to be more accurate in terms of contrast and brightness.

In 2003, Welles’s daughter Beatrice sued Turner Entertainment and RKO Pictures, claiming the Welles estate is the legal copyright holder of the film. Her attorney said Orson Welles had left RKO with an exit deal terminating his contracts with the studio, meaning Welles still had an interest in the film, and his previous contract giving the studio the copyright of the film was null and void. Beatrice Welles also claimed, if the courts did not uphold her claim of copyright, RKO nevertheless owed the estate 20% of the profits, from a previous contract which has not been lived up to. On May 30, 2007, the appeals panel agreed Welles could proceed with the lawsuit against Turner Entertainment; the opinion partially overturning the 2004 decision by a lower court judge who had found in favor of Turner Entertainment on the issue of video rights.[161]

Colorization controversy

In the 1980s, Citizen Kane became a catalyst in the controversy over the colorization of black-and-white films. In November 1986, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “It’s something of an irony that at a time when concerned movie makers are trying to raise funds for the preservation of films originally shot in color (and which are now fading fast), other people have come along with grandiose plans to ‘colorize’ all black-and-white films, including, so help me, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.”[162]

One high-profile proponent of film colorization was Ted Turner,[163] whose Turner Entertainment Co. acquired exclusive rights for the RKO library.[164] A Turner Entertainment spokesperson initially stated that Citizen Kane would not be colorized: “We don’t think it’s appropriate. We think it’s fine as it is”.[165] But at a July 1988 news conference called to unveil the newly colored Casablanca, Ted Turner said, “Citizen Kane? I’m thinking of colorizing it.”[166]

In January 1989 the Associated Press reported that two companies were producing color tests of Citizen Kane for Turner Entertainment. Criticism increased with the AP’s report that filmmaker Henry Jaglom remembered that shortly before his death Orson Welles had implored him to protect Kane from being colorized.[167]

On February 14, 1989, Turner Entertainment president Roger Mayer announced that work to colorize Citizen Kane had been stopped:

Our attorneys looked at the contract between RKO Pictures Inc. and Orson Welles and his production company, Mercury Productions Inc., and, on the basis of their review, we have decided not to proceed with colorization of the movie. … While a court test might uphold our legal right to colorize the film, provisions of the contract could be read to prohibit colorization without permission of the Welles estate. We have completed restoration of a printing negative which now enables us to show first-rate black-and-white prints of this masterpiece.[168]

“It was rather well known that Welles had very, very complete controls. His contract is quite unusual,” Mayer said. “What we are saying is that when a director has final cut, it is the ultimate in creative control. The other contracts we have checked out are not like this at all.”[169]

One minute of the colorized test footage of Citizen Kane was included in a special Arena documentary, The Complete Citizen Kane, produced by the BBC in 1991.[170][171]

In December 1989, Turner Home Entertainment released a colorized version of The Magnificent Ambersons on VHS.[172]

The colorization controversy was a factor in the passage of the National Film Preservation Act of 1988. The legislation created the National Film Registry that in September 1989 inducted its first 25 films, including Citizen Kane and Casablanca. “One major reason for doing this is to require people like the broadcaster Ted Turner who’ve been adding color to some movies and reediting others for television to put notices on those versions saying that the movies have been altered,” reported ABC News anchor Peter Jennings.[173]

Home media

Blu-ray

On September 13, 2011, Citizen Kane was released on Blu-ray disc and DVD in a 70th anniversary box set called The Ultimate Collectors Edition. “This, quite simply, is the Blu-ray release of the year,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. “Anyone who thinks Blu-ray doesn’t make much of a difference to an older, B&W movie hasn’t seen this reference-quality work by Warner Home Video.”[174] “Citizen Kane is a film whose visual scintillation is ageless, and you have never seen it look as good as it does here, in Warner’s newly restored, 1080p, AVC/MPEG-4 transfer,” wrote DVD Talk. Supplements include separate commentary tracks by Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich, carried forward from Warner’s 60th anniversary edition DVD release; two additional films, The Battle Over Citizen Kane and RKO 281; and packaging extras that include a hardcover booklet and a folio containing a reproduction of the original souvenir program, miniature lobby cards and other memorabilia.[175]

2011: Warner Home Video, September 13, 2011, Blu-ray and DVD. 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collectors Edition, UPC 883929184804 (Blu-ray), 883929184811 (DVD)

Other home video releases

1978: The Nostalgia Merchant, Media Home Entertainment, VHS and Beta. In 1976, when home video was in its infancy, entrepreneur Snuff Garrett bought cassette rights to the old RKO and Republic films for what United Press International termed “a pittance.” By 1980, the 800-title library of The Nostalgia Merchant was earning $2.3 million a year. “Nobody wanted cassettes four years ago,” Garrett told UPI. “It wasn’t the first time people called me crazy. It was a hobby with me which became big business.”[176]

1982: VidAmerica, Inc., VHS and Beta. UPC 082087109036

1984: The Criterion Collection, December 1, videodisc, spine 001. The Criterion Collection began with the laserdisc release of Citizen Kane, from a fine grain master positive provided by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.[177]

1985: RKO Home Video, VHS and Beta

1991: Turner Home Entertainment, August, VHS. 50th Anniversary Edition. Also available in gift pack with film, documentary Reflections On Citizen Kane and Harlan Lebo’s 50th anniversary album; and in a collector’s edition that includes the film, documentary, album, poster and a copy of the original script.[178]

1992: The Criterion Collection, February 26, videodisc, spine 142. 50th Anniversary Edition. This version had an improved transfer and several special features not on the original 1984 laserdisc, including the documentary The Legacy of Citizen Kane (incorporating interviews with 35 filmmakers) and Welles’s early short The Hearts of Age.[179]

2001: Warner Home Video, September 25, DVD. 60th Anniversary Collectors Edition. Two-disc special edition DVD including feature-length commentaries by film critic Roger Ebert and director Peter Bogdanovich and the PBS documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane. ISBN 0-7806-3520-5

2001: Warner Home Video, September 25, VHS. 60th Anniversary Collectors Edition.

See also

Beyond Citizen Kane

List of films considered the best

Twist ending

Bibliography

Bogdanovich, Peter and Welles, Orson. This is Orson Welles, HarperPerennial 1992, ISBN 0-06-092439-X

Bogdanovich, Peter “The Kane Mutiny”, in Esquire, October 1972. – This piece, which demolishes Pauline Kael’s claim that Welles did not write Citizen Kane, was credited to Bogdanovich. While Bogdanovich extensively helped with the background research, it was actually written by Welles himself.[180]

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu London: Johnathon Cape, 1995. ISBN 0-224-03852-4

Carringer, Robert L., The Making of Citizen Kane. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985 ISBN 0-520-05367-2 hardcover; 1996 revised and updated edition ISBN 0-520-20567-7 paperback

Carringer, Robert L., “The Scripts of Citizen Kane”, in Critical Inquiry No. 5 (1978), subsequently reprinted in the below 1996 volume by Gottesman.

Cook, David A. Orson Welles and the modern sound film. A History of Narrative Film. W.W. Norton Company, Inc, 2004, ISBN 0-393-97868-0

Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Focus on Citizen Kane. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971, ISBN 0-13-134742-X

Gottesman, Ronald. Perspectives on Citizen Kane. G.K. Hall & Co., New York, 1996, ISBN 978-0-8161-1616-4

Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Chicago Review Press, 2005, ISBN 1-55652-547-8

Kael, Pauline (ed.). The Citizen Kane Book Little and Brown, Boston, 1971 – contains Kael’s controversial and much-derided article Raising Kane, as well as the full script by Mankiewicz and Welles.

Mulvey, Laura. Citizen Kane British Film Institute, London, 1992, ISBN 0-85170-339-9

Naremore, James (ed.). Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook in Criticism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, ISBN 978-0-19-515892-2

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, ISBN 978-0-618-15446-3

Rippy, Marguerite H. Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective, Southern Illinois University Press, Illinois, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8093-2912-0

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “I missed it at the movies: objections to Raising Kane” (1971), in Rosenbaum, Jonathan (ed.). Discovering Orson Welles, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25123-6

Par Yves Lafontaine 21 août 2014

Magazine Fugues

 

Moins d’une semaine après la tenue à Montréal, des célébrations de la Fierté LGBT, l’un de nos distributeurs nous a fait savoir que le Groupe Jean Coutu désirait interdire dorénavant la distribution du magazine Fugues dans les présentoirs du distributeur, placés dans dix-huit pharmacies de la chaîne. Le prétexte évoqué par Patrice Caron, directeur principal des Opérations détail du Groupe Jean Coutu, est que Fugues serait un magazine sexuel… voire érotique. En discutant avec ce dernier, j’ai constaté, malgré la politesse de nos échanges, que l’entreprise avait une vision très (très) conservatrice — voire passéiste — de la réalité d’aujourd’hui ainsi que de sa clientèle. M. Caron et son employeur semblent oublier qu’environ dix pour cent de leurs clients sont des gais, des lesbiennes, des bisexuels ou des trans (LGBT) et que près de 2000 d’entre eux se procuraient Fugues à chaque mois, via Jean Coutu depuis plus de douze ans.

Sans doute la haute direction de Jean Coutu l’ignore, mais Fugues existe depuis 30 ans cette année. C’est le média d’information principal de la communauté LGBT au Québec. Fugues a été de tous les combats et de toutes les revendications depuis 30 ans pour une plus grande acceptation sociale de l’homosexualité. Il a été un acteur important lors des débats sur la reconnaissance des conjoints de fait de même sexe et du mariage gai. Le contenu du magazine, fort varié, va de l’actualité communautaire, sociale et politique (abordant régulièrement les questions de discrimination et d’homophobie), en passant par les arts et la culture, la vie de nuit, les conseils consommation et bien vivre. On y trouve également, une quinzaine de chroniques et des entrevues majeures avec des personnalités qui font l’événement, tels que, ce mois-ci, le militant des droits Peter Tatchell, la championne mondiale de basketball Cynthia Ouellet et le comédien Benoit McGinnis.

Avec plus de 575 points de distribution à travers le Québec et un tirage de plus de 42 000 exemplaires papier et près de 10 000 téléchargements de ses versions numériques, Fugues rejoint environ 250 000 personnes chaque mois. Inutile de dire qu’avec un lectorat si ciblé et si intéressant économiquement, plusieurs entreprises, dont les principales institutions financières (Desjardins, Groupe TD, Banque Royale et Banque Nationale), plusieurs grands groupes pharmaceutiques, des concessionnaires automobiles, des cliniques médicales, des centres d’esthétisme, des promoteurs d’événements de toutes sortes et de projets immobiliers, des hébergements, des restos et des bars, sont présents régulièrement dans nos pages et sur notre site web, à la fois pour rejoindre une clientèle de choix, mais aussi pour soutenir un média essentiel à une communauté, encore aujourd’hui trop souvent victime de discrimination ou d’intimidation.

En plein mois des célébrations de la Fierté LGBT de Montréal et de Québec, on peut se demander ce qui a justifié la décision de Jean Coutu, sachant que Fugues était déjà distribué depuis plus d’une décennie dans environ une vingtaine de ses pharmacies (deux d’entre elles le distribuaient même depuis près de 20 ans). Au fil des ans, le contenu du magazine a évidemment évolué, mais pas vers un contenu plus sexuel, bien au contraire…

Mais au fond, peut-être ne devrais-je pas être surpris de cette décision. En effet, en 30 ans, JAMAIS le Groupe Jean Coutu n’a daigné annoncer dans nos pages (ou sur le site web de Fugues), malgré les nombreux contacts et sollicitations de notre équipe de vente, et ce, même lors d’éditions spéciales consacrées à la santé et au bien être, à la question de la diversité sexuelle en milieu du travail ou lors des éditions de la Fierté. Comme entreprise, Jean Coutu a évidemment la liberté de choisir ses stratégies de communication comme elle l’entend, mais L’INTERDICTION de distribuer le magazine Fugues dans ses pharmacies va plus loin. L’entreprise envoie maintenant un MESSAGE CLAIR et évident DE REJET, qui sera interprété par «n’ayez pas trop l’air gais», «on ne veut pas de magazines comme ça, ici» «vous n’êtes plus les bienvenus» et «on veut votre argent, mais n’exprimez surtout pas votre réalité»...

Cela dit, aussi désolante soit-elle, cette décision n’est pas dramatique pour autant pour Fugues. En quelques heures notre distributeur aura trouvé d’autres lieux bien plus ouverts (dont évidemment des pharmacies concurrentes) pour distribuer les 1800 exemplaires du magazine Fugues qui étaient disponibles jusqu’à tout récemment dans les entrées de dix-huit pharmacies Jean Coutu. Mais, par le geste posé, il semble évident que les personnes LGBT créent un malaise auprès des employés, de la direction et des partenaires d’affaires de Jean Coutu.

Par principe, suite à la récente décision, que Patrice Caron m’a décrite au téléphone comme «finale et sans appel», et afin de protéger nos lecteurs, nous les encourageons fortement à se procurer Fugues ailleurs et à choisir pour leurs achats des commerces et établissements qui ont démontré très clairement une RÉELLE ouverture. La décision de Jean Coutu est très mal avisée. Sans doute, s’agit-il d’un réflexe du passé, motivé par une ou quelques plaintes de clients ou d’employés rétrogrades à l’esprit fermé, inconscients que le Québec est une société ouverte et diversifiée. «Vivre et laisser vivre», ne dit-on pas? À ce que je sache, personne n’est obligé de prendre un exemplaire de Fugues (ou d’en visiter son site web) si le contenu ne l’intéresse pas ou s’il ne correspond pas à ses valeurs.

Lors des nombreuses entrevues que j’ai accordées cet été, dans le cadre du 30e anniversaire de Fugues et de l’exposition présentée jusqu’au 31 août à l’Écomusée du Fier Monde («Fugues se souvient»), j’ai souvent rappelé combien l’ouverture à la différence s’est faite rapidement au Québec, en particulier au niveau des droits. Mais j’ai également émis mes craintes d’un retour en arrière, d’une possible résurgence de l’intolérance. Et qu’il fallait à ce sujet rester très vigilant. La décision corporative du Groupe Jean Coutu est la preuve tangible que rien n’est acquis et que l’intolérance peut prendre bien des visages, même celui d’une institution québécoise respectée comme Jean Coutu. Une institution qui, au fil des ans, a tout fait pour qu’on croie qu’on y trouvera «de tout, même un ami»…

Yves LAFONTAINE

Washington Post

More than 80 percent of women diagnosed with HIV contract the virus through heterosexual sex. A condom provides the best protection against HIV — but men aren’t always willing to wear them.

The female condom has been on the market since 1993. Unfortunately, it’s less familiar and more expensive than the male condom — and can make a rustling noise, prompting unfortunate comparisons to a wastepaper basket.

But researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have come up with a new way for women to protect themselves against HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The method is not unlike a technology familiar to many women: the tampon.

Here’s how it works: An anti-HIV microbicide — a substance that can kill microbes as well as prevent HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections — is woven into fabric that can be inserted like a tampon before intercourse. Once inserted, the material dissolves, and the microbicide is absorbed into the vagina within six minutes.

It’s a vast improvement over gel and cream microbicides that leak, are messy or take too long to work.

“That means women don’t have to apply it far in advance of having sex,” bioengineer Cameron Ball told NPR. “There’s a race between the anti-HIV microbicide to get to the tissue before the virus does. So the more quickly it dissolves, the better.”

Ball and fellow bioengineer Kim Woodrow published a paper about the new delivery mechanism in June in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Ball and Woodrow told NPR the key innovation is the fabric. Made using nanotechnology, it’s incredibly thin.

“It’s way better than any Egyptian cotton, high-count fabric that you could find,” Ball says. “Each thread is about 200 times smaller than a human hair.”

The fabric has been approved by the FDA, but some microbicides that could be used with it are still in clinical trials. It will be 10 years before the technology is commercially available.

In the meantime, researchers are studying possible shapes for the delivery mechanism. “It’s a matter of giving women enough choices and options of what products are available and how they are used,” Ball told NPR. “So you meet the needs of as many women as possible.”

While tampons are familiar to many women, some studies suggest populations at the highest risk of HIV infection don’t use them.

Twenty-seven percent of all women in the United States are black or Hispanic, but these women account for 79 percent of HIV cases among women. Poverty can also increase risk factors for HIV transmission.

A 2012 study of low-income women aged 18 to 35 published in the journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology found that black and Latina women were less likely to use tampons than white women. The sample size of the study was small – only 165 women – but the results revealed stark differences. While 71 percent of white women used tampons, only 29 percent of black women, 22 percent of English-speaking Latina women and 5 percent of Spanish-speaking Latina women did.

Moscow Times

Olesya asks if her glittery hair clips are in place, if her hot pink lipstick needs reapplication.

It’s all she can do to detract attention from the stump where her arm used to be, the price she paid for injecting drugs even after the site became gangrenous.

People walking past the pharmacy where volunteers chat with Olesya — an intravenous drug user with HIV — glare at the young woman, quickening their pace as they go. Others, many of them also young women, stop to accept the clean syringes, HIV tests and pregnancy tests being handed out as part of an outreach program to do the things that many specialists say authorities are not: acknowledge the fact that a full-blown HIV epidemic is becoming more and more of a reality each day.

Behind the pharmacy in northern Moscow is a field where some drug users go to shoot up. This one, in stark contrast with many others, is mostly free from used syringes.

“There is one other field that is just a carpet of used syringes,” one of the volunteers says.

The same group running the outreach program, the Andrei Rylkov Foundation, a grassroots organization in Moscow that seeks to promote awareness of drug addiction and develop a humane drug policy, conducts periodic cleanup operations in public places to dispose of used syringes. These are often the same parks where families take their children to play, an alarming reminder of how close the epidemic is to spreading to non-drug users.

Olesya pulls up her pants to reveal another festering injection wound.

“Maybe you should go to the hospital,” the volunteers tell her.

“Will they take me?”

“You’re officially registered as a Moscow resident, right? Then they’ll take you.”

“Last time they refused because of my leg. They said gangrene is for drug addicts.”

See No Evil

“It’s obvious that we need to work with drug users; they have always been around and always will be. For more than 1,000 years there has been a culture of drug use. … Neither you nor I, nor [former public health official Gennady] Onishchenko, nor [Health Minister Veronika] Skvortsova, nor [President Vladimir] Putin have a magic cure to stop them being drug addicts. There isn’t one,” says Ilya Lapin, an HIV activist who works with patients on behalf of Esvero, a non-profit partnership that conducts preventative programs among members of the population especially vulnerable to HIV in more than 30 Russian cities.

Last year, there were an estimated 8.5 million drug users in the country, according to the Federal Drug Control Service. That number had skyrocketed from 2.5 million in 2010.

Activists have long warned authorities that the rise in HIV infections in recent years is a direct result of this spike in the number of drug users, but many say the problem is mostly being ignored.

“It’s always the same thing: We say there is a problem, the government says there is not,” Lapin said.

Pavel Aksyonov, the general director of Esvero, said the government had conducted preventative measures across the entire spectrum of the population except for the one group that is most vulnerable to HIV infection: drug users.

“Sure, it’s hard to supervise their treatment, hard to catch them. They are wrongdoers and all that, but they are not martians, they are part of our society … and as long as society ignores their problems, they won’t go away, they just go underground,” Aksyonov told The Moscow Times.

Too Little, Too Late

Even the most zealous activists in Russia’s fight against the spread of HIV agree that, compared to several years ago, there has been progress  — but not enough to stave off the epidemic that they say is undoubtedly coming if the government does not take more drastic measures to confront the problem.

Last year, the country’s health watchdog recorded nearly 78,000 new cases of HIV infection, compared to 69,000 in 2012 and 62,000 in 2011.

As of Jan. 1 of this year, there were 798,122 Russians registered as HIV-positive, more than 7,500 of them children.

“Even if the Russian government wakes up and finally begins to really actively fight the epidemic, the effect of preventative measures will not begin to show until two or three years later, and by that time Russia will need to cure up to 1 million HIV-positive people, which requires huge resources: not only money, but also infrastructure, doctors, etc.,” said Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the Federal AIDS Center.

Andrei Skvortsov, coordinator of the grassroots organization Patients’ Watchdog, which monitors the government’s treatment of HIV-positive people, echoed that sentiment.

“If 18 billion rubles ($500 million) is continued to be allocated each year for the epidemic that keeps growing, rather than the 40 billion called for in the state program, a catastrophe awaits us. … Maybe the ministers will start to actually think about these things when they begin to bury their own children, and not just ours,” Skvortsov said.

Aksyonov of Esvero said that the government had improved its efforts in the fight against HIV in the past several years — setting up a coordination council within the Health Ministry in February 2013 to handle HIV issues, and improving diagnostics and treatment — but the situation has nonetheless deteriorated in the past couple of years, he said.

Both he and Lapin cited the government’s often hostile attitude to NGOs as a factor.

“Unfortunately, in Russia, once again this negative attitude to Western technology, to the Western understanding of the problem is making a comeback. This has a negative effect on both the epidemic and the treatment of patients,” Lapin said.

“With everything we achieved with the help of NGOs in Russia, unfortunately, right now we are moving backwards. Why? Because the government does not support the programs implemented by NGOs that are recognized all over the world: harm-reduction programs, safe-sex programs.”

Lapin said his group had once asked the government for funds that had been promised earlier only to be “told that we are foreign agents, that we promote pedophilia, homosexuality and drug addiction. It all comes back to that.”

“That’s why, unfortunately, these programs that, in my view and in the view of the international community, are effective, are retreating if not to the underground, to the shadows,” Lapin said.

Funding Crisis

The warnings voiced by activists and specialists come at a particularly critical time in the country’s fight against the illness: Russia is now classified in the international effort as a donor country, not a recipient, meaning it contributes funds to help other countries fight the disease and as such is not afforded the same privileges from international organizations like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

“The problem is that Russia helps the Global Fund but does not increase funds for the fight against HIV/AIDS within the country,” Pokrovsky said.

Financing from the Global Fund, which has provided the bulk of HIV/AIDS funding to Russia for nearly a decade,  is set to be drastically reduced by 2015 and phased out by 2017 in connection with Russia’s new classification.

Russia’s decision to become a donor country was met with cautious optimism by the international community, but activists say it is not ready.

“Russia has become a developed country in the eyes of the World Bank, and thus we can provide things for ourselves, and more than that we have even become a donor country for various international organizations, so we finance harm-reduction programs in other countries that we forbid here at home,” Lapin said.

“That’s why when we appeal to international organizations, they say ‘Wait, you yourselves are giving us money for this.’ It’s a stupid situation. But the government is nevertheless closing its eyes to that as well.”

Not the Russian Way

Drug substitution therapies are financed by Russia in other countries but outlawed domestically. The same is true for clean needle programs and needle disposal programs.

Clean needle programs are conducted exclusively by nongovernmental organizations like the Andrei Rylkov Foundation, as the official line on such programs is that they promote unhealthy lifestyles and do nothing to curb the rate of infection.

Maria Preobrazhenskaya, one of the activists from the Andrei Rylkov Foundation who distributes syringes, HIV and pregnancy tests and other medications to drug users each week, said police sometimes stop to scold her or other volunteers for what they see as promoting drug use.

Outside the pharmacy in northern Moscow, nearly a dozen people in two hours stopped to accept HIV tests and brochures with information on the disease from Preobrazhenskaya: a dozen people who activists say, at the very least, have more awareness than they did before.

According to Pokrovsky of the Federal AIDS Center, the programs outlawed in Russia have proven to be effective in Europe, U.S. and Canada, and they could work just as well here.

“The problem is that it has not been analyzed in depth in Russia. The bias against methadone in Russia is based entirely on the opinions of certain experts who may have their own motives for being against the drug,” he said.

According to Anya Sarang, president of the Andrei Rylkov Foundation, the use of methadone in treating heroin users would solve more than just the problem of infection.

“You’re hooked on heroin: Switch to methadone. Then you will not need to steal from your grandmother or wife every day. You’ll get methadone for free. Of course it will no solve the problem of addiction, but it will solve a bunch of other problems: crime, health and more. But we don’t even have [this practice], although in Iran, China and India — everywhere else they do this. But with us, this simple solution just evokes idiotic opposition from the government,” Sarang said in comments published on the foundation’s website late last month.

No Access to Medication

Worst of all for Russia’s existing HIV patients, the medication they desperately need to stave off their development of their illness is not always available to them.

Up until mid-2013, the Health Ministry had run a centralized system for medicating HIV-positive people. But last year, the ministry decided to hand over responsibility for the procurement of medications to regional authorities.

As a result, patients in regions including Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Ivanovo, Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Rostov-on-Don have complained about a lack of access to life-sustaining medications throughout much of 2014.

The website Pereboi.ru, which tracks shortages of medications for HIV-positive patients, has been inundated with warnings and complaints of deficits.

“For the third month in a row now, I am unable to get my full set of medications,” wrote one patient from Murmansk in late July.

Activists say the decision to delegate medications procurement to regional authorities only muddied the waters in an already overly bureaucratic system.

“They put all responsibility on the regions. Now there is no one to make demands to,” said Skvortsov of Patients’ Watchdog. “The ministry says they are allocating the money to the regions, and they in turn are supposed to buy everything,” but then the regional bureaucrats respond by “citing resolutions and decrees of the Health Ministry or playing ping-pong with the patients,” he said.

Skvortsov said that even if officials wanted to help patients, the move created so much red tape that it made it virtually impossible.

Although the work of Skvortsov’s group prompted prosecutors in Murmansk to look into these shortages and ensured early supplies of medications in some cities, he said it was a sad but undeniable truth that the patients who survive in today’s Russia are those who are prepared to fight for the state medical care to which they are entitled.

Lack of Political Will

The main method for receiving funding from the Health Ministry for preventative programs — which all specialists agreed is the most crucial part of the fight — is tenders run by the ministry.

But according to Aksyonov of Esvero, there is no mechanism in place to check the effectiveness of the projects implemented by the tender winners: Funding is being funneled into programs that have not been properly vetted, and nobody bothers to check whether these programs have any result at all.

Lapin said such problems were symptomatic of an overall lack of political will to fight the epidemic. “Nothing changes [in the fight against HIV]. … People constantly appear before the government, offering the latest charitable programs that suck up billions of rubles, then no one can find these people. And the government says, ‘You know, we already gave these funds to an NGO.’ But who was that person? Where did they come from? No one knows. But they got the money.”

“If there is no political will, we probably won’t be able to change anything,” he said. “We’ll try, we’ll make temporary changes. But financing will run dry, programs will end. Yeah, we’ll save some lives, which is very, very important, but at some point people will just get tired of running in circles,” he said.

China Times

A total of 436,800 people were living with HIV or AIDS in China by the end of 2013, while 136,300 had died from the disease, according to figures from health authorities.

Mortality for the disease dropped to 6.6% last year from 17.9% in 2005, Wu Zunyou, head of the HIV/AIDS division of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Friday.

The decline in mortality was attributed to policies such as free HIV tests for all and free treatment for rural and poor urban citizens, according to Wu.

Wu said 95% of confirmed HIV/AIDS patients are under follow-up care.

Sex remains the major transmission channel for HIV, according to Wu.

Nearly 91% of the newly reported HIV/AIDS patients in China in 2013 were infected through sexual contact.

About 21.4% of all new cases resulted from same-sex contact, compared with 2.5% in 2006, Wu noted.

cri.cn

Three passengers have sued China’s Spring Airlines for denying them flights because they have HIV/AIDS, according to media reports.

The three passengers were to take a Spring Airlines flight from Shenyang, northeast China’s Liaoning province to Shijiazhuang, north China’s Hebei province o July 28. Two of them informed the airlines’ staff at the airport they are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus before boarding and the three were not allowed on board.

The passenger among the three who was not infected asked for a certificate to take the flight. Doctors at the airport’s medical center said even when carrying the HIV/AIDS virus, they did not need a certificate to fly.

All three passengers missed the flight after their ticket information was removed. They are demanding an apology and compensations.

Spring Airlines has responded that according to regulations on passengers and luggage issued by China’s Civil Aviation Administration, they reserve the rights not to carry “passengers with infectious diseases”.

Liu Wei, the attorney representing the passengers, says the regulations stipulate that airlines can deny such passengers “only if their conditions pose potential threats to other passengers on board”.

A member of staff from the Civil Aviation Administration says the regulations are not specific about the kinds of infectious diseases, and airline companies can decide for themselves whether to take passengers on board.

Nine airline companies in China have said they do not discriminate against passengers with HIV/AIDS.

sfbay.ca

Four eight-foot tall, 15-year-old tree ferns and five trees were vandalized last Friday night in Golden Gate Park’s AIDS Memorial Grove, according to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.

Vandals also damaged a park bench just above the Fern Grotto at the western end of the grove, one 15-galloon “Loderi King George” rhododendron and 725 feet of a post and bamboo rail fence, according to Connie Chan, deputy director of public affairs for the Recreation and Park Department.

The AIDS Memorial Grove was also targeted by vandals in March, as was the area near the Shakespeare Garden, Chan said.

Vandalism is an ongoing problem in Golden Gate Park. Police last summer arrested 65-year-old Ken Frisch after he allegedly tore the branches off trees on several occasions.

Police said at the time, however, that Frisch was not a suspect in a series of more serious vandalism attacks that had damaged more than 200 trees in the park over the previous year.

npr.org

Electromagnetism can detect AIDS. The “Complete Cure Device” can wipe out the virus.

The Egyptian military made those claims earlier this year, but now they have backtracked after the announcement was widely denounced by scientists, including Egypt’s own science adviser.

Nonetheless, people are still eager to believe the unbelievable. Egypt’s announcement prompted 70,000 people to send emails asking to try the new treatment.

The Complete Cure Device is just one more false promise in the ongoing fight against AIDS. It is a reminder, too, that for 15 years, beginning in the early 1980s, AIDS was a slaughter, shrouded in mystery, of people in the prime of their lives.

Then came a breakthrough in 1996: A combination of drugs could control the virus, allowing infected people to live long and productive lives. Today, antiretroviral treatment for HIV and AIDS is widely available. An outright cure still eludes scientists, but the once deadly disease has become manageable.

So any claim for an unproven cure, offering hope that could deter patients from effective treatment, is cruel. But myths, false claims and outright fraud have persisted in the AIDS epidemic.

The bogus theories of Peter Duesberg, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, were responsible for a global setback to HIV treatment. Duesberg argued that combinations of drug use and promiscuous behavior caused the virus, and passed his advice on to South African health officials in 2000.

“The biggest disaster imposed on us was Duesberg with his statements that HIV did not cause AIDS,” says Max Essex, chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative. Essex has been conducting research on AIDS since 1983, including field research in Botswana and Southern Africa.

Between 2000 and 2005, as neighboring African countries were ramping up HIV prevention programs, South Africa stubbornly stuck to the notion that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. “I think Duesberg played the biggest role in giving [former South African President Thabo Mbeki] a convenient excuse to avoid supplying drugs,” says Essex.

Researchers including Essex examined the human toll of those lost years of treatment. Their , published in 2008 in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, estimated that 330,000 South African adults died because of lack of treatment, and 35,000 infants were born with HIV.

If that was the biggest disaster, no doubt the cruelest of the AIDS false cure claims was the virgin cleansing myth that took hold in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as parts of India and Thailand. Some men believed they could be cured of AIDS by having sex with a virgin. That reportedly led to the rape of younger and younger girls — even babies, by some accounts.

Other unproven AIDS “cures” have kept people from seeking life-saving treatments: herbal remedies, potions to rub into the skin, chemicals like Virodene (derived from an industrial solvent), oxygen therapy and electronic zappers.

There is still much work to be done to prevent HIV infection, to develop a vaccine, to further improve drug treatment and to prevent other chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease in people with AIDS who are living longer.

And despite the spectacular scams, there have also been spectacular successes in hard-hit areas. For example, in the 1990s, Botswana had the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. Today, almost all of the country’s patients seek treatment; by contrast only half of Americans infected with HIV get treatment, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Today, the number of people in Botswana on successful therapy who will live almost normal lives is 90 percent of HIV-infected people,” says Essex. In that respect, Botswana is No. 1 in the world.

smh.com.au

A judge who compared incest and paedophilia to homosexuality when he rejected evidence of sexual abuse by a man against his sister was “clearly in error” and the trial should be heard by a different judge, an appeals court has found.

Separately, this month, District Court Judge Garry Neilson was referred to the NSW Judicial Commission and stood down from new criminal trials after the Herald revealed he said the community may no longer see sexual contact between siblings, as well as between adults and children, as “unnatural” or “taboo”.

Judge Neilson made the comments in April during the case of a 58-year-old man, known for legal reasons as MRM, who is charged with repeatedly raping his younger sister in the family’s western Sydney home in 1981.

MRM has pleaded not guilty to the charge of sexual intercourse without consent and an alternative charge of incest.

The Director of Public Prosecutions stepped in after Judge Neilson refused to allow the jury to know the man had earlier pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his sister when she was 10 or 11 years old in 1973 or 1974.

Judge Neilson also denied the Crown prosecutor’s request to admit into evidence a telephone conversation between the siblings in July 2011, recorded by police, in which MRM admitted to having sexual contact with her when she was “a kid” to “get his rocks off”.

In making his decision to exclude the evidence, Judge Neilson made a series of comments, including that, just as gay sex was socially unacceptable and criminal in the 1950s and 1960s but was now widely accepted, “a jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having [a] sexual partner”.

He also said the “only reason” that incest was still a crime was because of the high risk of genetic abnormalities in children born from consanguineous relationships “but even that falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and readily access to abortion”.

The jury was discharged.

On Wednesday, the Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the Crown’s appeal, setting aside Judge Neilson’s ruling and ordering a different judge preside at the trial, due to be held in Parramatta District Court in September. A new jury will be empanelled.

Justices Arthur Emmett, Derek Price and Elizabeth Fullerton said Judge Neilson’s “discretion miscarried” because, without evidence of the years of unwanted sexual conduct, “it would inevitably appear surprising to a jury that [MRM] would, out of the blue, enter his sister’s bedroom and attempt to have intercourse with her while she was asleep”.

The history of sexual abuse and MRM’s threats that their parents’ marriage would be destroyed if she told them what he was doing to her would also help the jury explain why she didn’t scream or shout or complain to their parents or the police.

The appeal judges also questioned Judge Neilson’s reasoning that the sexual abuse that had occurred when the girl was 10 or 11 and MRM was 17 occurred in a different context to the sex that later happened when she was 18 and he was 26.

By 1981, she had had sexual relationships with two men and had a young child.

“By that stage, they are both mature adults. The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become ‘free’ when the second relationship broke down,” Judge Neilson said.

“His Honour gave no reasoned explanation, or any proper analysis, as to why these facts, either in isolation or combination, dimished the probative value of the evidence,” the appeal judges said.

Following public outcry over Judge Neilson’s comments, Attorney-General Brad Hazzard referred him to the NSW Judicial Commission, which examines complaints against judicial officers and makes a report to the Governor.

A judge can only be removed by the Governor on an address from both houses of the NSW Parliament on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity.

Pinknews

A Fox pundit who claims equal marriage is a “Marxist plot” has revealed that he is considering running for President.

Neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson, who has made a series of homophobic comments, told the Washington Times he is likely to run as a candidate in 2016.

He claimed in June at a National Organisation for Marriage event: “If you look in a lot of writings of the Neo-Marxists when they talk about the New World Order, they say there’s only one stick in the mud: how do you get [Americans] out of the way and how do you change them?

“They said there were two things: their Judeo-Christian faith, and their strong families. Those were the things that had to be attacked, and those things have been systematically attacked.”

He was also was forced to apologise last year, after comparing gay people to paedophiles.

Speaking to the newspaper today, Carson announced the appointment of businessman Terry Giles as his campaign chairman, and has formed a ‘One Nation’ political action committee to raise funds.

He said: “Now is the time to start all of the appropriate exploration and investigation, and put down the structure that is necessary,

“I would say we are definitely a step or two closer [to running] than we were a year ago.”

thedailybeast.com

Well, this is certainly a new perspective on the Glasgow kiss.

The gay Scottish-American actor John Barrowman kissed another man on live TV last night during the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games as the Queen looked on.

Mr Barrowman, who married his partner, the architect Scott Gill, last year in California, made his gesture at the opening of the games in Glasgow which are open to all members of the Commonwealth, the voluntary grouping of former British empire dominions, which includes Canada and Australia (but not America).

Homosexual activity remains a criminal offence, often with draconian punishment, in 40 of the 53 countries within the Commonwealth, including Uganda, Nigeria, and Jamaica.

Millions of citizens and politicians in those countries were watching last night’s event.

During the first few minutes of the opening ceremony, Barrowman kissed a man waiting at the aisle for him before the pair skipped away hand in hand, in tribute to Scottish wedding venue Gretna Green.

The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but we’ll let the tweets speak for themselves…

Tags: gay, kiss
Posted in Spot / International News Wire | Comments Off on John Barrowman’s Gay Kiss To Countries That Criminalise Homosexuality