McBride on Orson's "acting only" career

[Le Chiffre]

Just checked out Joseph McBride's ORSON WELLES - ACTOR AND DIRECTOR, a neat little 150-page book that covers every film Welles appeared in as actor, including the directorial efforts. Of the 60-odd films that Welles appeared in only as an actor tho, McBride has praise for only about six of them, including, besides THE THIRD MAN of course, THREE CASES OF MURDER, THE LONG HOT SUMMER, COMPULSION, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, and TEN DAYS WONDER. Personally, I would not include Ten Day's Wonder among the good movies. Jane Eyre, Journey Into Fear, and Black Magic are all much more entertaining, although Ten Days Wonder does have interest as an hommage to the mysterious image of Orson Welles (Claude Chabrol delayed production on the film until he could get Welles). The film is lackluster, however, with Welles almost as blase as he was in Treasure Island.

Some of the abuse McBride levies against the other films is pretty funny, such as when he describes the "ludicrous" battle finale from The Tartars: "Welles wields a sword like an old maid hitting a garden snake with a rake". Or when he describes Marco The Magnificent as "unspeakably inept junk". Overall, McBride is surprisingly hard on Welles' career as actor, panning even what I would consider pretty good movies like I'll Never Forget What's His Name, and Malpertuis. Pretty entertaining book tho, with interesting insights, like this one:
"Television had become Welles' principal source of income by 1972. In his private life, Welles had become a nearly obsessive TV watcher (he interrupted the shooting of The Other Side of the Wind one night in 1973 to watch an episode of his then-favorite series, Shaft)".

[Le Chiffre]

Some more brief notes from the McBride book:

BLACK MAGIC, PRINCE OF FOXES, and THE BLACK ROSE-
Hokey medieval costume dramas, besotted with purple prose and overweighted with sterile pageantry- the kind of films that give Hollywood a bad name (all were made by American companies abroad)

TRENT'S LAST CASE - Workmanlike, but plodding

MAN IN THE SHADOW - Routine program picture, but Welles wrote his dialogue

ROOTS OF HEAVEN - Windy, Welles has brief cameo

FERRY TO HONG KONG - A new low in bufoonery. Fey and babylike, Welles looks like Porky Pig. A truly grotesque concoction.

CRACK IN THE MIRROR - An interesting storytelling stunt that doesn't quite come off.

DAVID AND GOLIATH, THE TARTARS, and MARCO THE MAGNIFICENT - The only challenge for Welles was to see how quickly he could bull his way through the roles and get out of town. His performances in these low-grade spectacles can best be described as minimal. In David and Goliath Welles changes his costumes more frequently then he changes his expression. In The Tartars, Welles never blinks his eyes, giving him a strangely mesmerising look. Welles told Geoffrey Land to use the same trick while playing a movie studio executive in TOSOTW, which tells you what Welles thinks of movie studio executives. Marco is probably the worst film with which Welles was ever associated.

THE V.I.P.s - pretty tedious stuff, except for the hamming by Welles, Margret Rutherford, and a few other character actors.

Two negligible walk-ons:
IS PARIS BURNING? - Atrociously bungled WWII spectacle
SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR - Fetid melodrama

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHAT'S HIS NAME - Obnoxiously trendy. Welles did not want to do the dream sequence because he hated them ("I never read dream sequences in scripts. And I never watch them in films. When I see them coming, I walk out for a drink")

OEDIPUS THE KING - Lifeless pagaent just sits there as dead weight on the screen. Welles hardly moves a muscle, perhaps out of boredom.

THE SOUTHERN STAR - Amiable lightweight adventure film.

THE LAST ROMAN - A tired piece of cardboard hokum about warfare among the various segments of the fallen Roman Empire. Welles has disapointingly little to do.

START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME - A foolish lampoon, with a cartoonish plot feebly imitative of The Corsican Brothers.

TWELVE PLUS ONE - A lackluster cameo by Welles, only vaguely connected with the rest of the film.

WATERLOO - Rod Stieger's hamming as Napoleon makes this film much funnier, unintentionally, then Start The Revolution Without Me labored so hard to be. Welles' performance is uninteresting.

THE KREMLIN LETTER - A bizarre film, elliptically plotted to the point of absurdity.

CATCH-22 - One of the most disappointingly botched screen adaptations of a major literary work, with disjointed sitcom skits amidst pretntiously hallucinatory action sequences. Welles wanted to direct the film, but was unable to obtain the rights.

A SAFE PLACE - Brought in domestic rentals of just $3,842 in it's first five years of release, making it the least-seen of all Welles' films.

TREASURE ISLAND - Probably the worst performance of his career, scarcely a word he says is intelligible.

NECROMANCY - Incoherent and silly

MALPERTUIS - Too long, repititious, and silly. Director Kumel seems quite serious about all this, but cannot quite bring it off.

VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED - Laborious, cameo-studded spectacle

[Harvey Chartrand]

What does McBride have to say about Crack in the Mirror? I always liked this film, even though it is admittedly flawed. But the atmosphere of Paris in 1960 is so perfectly captured, and Welles is at his most fascinatingly grotesque as a brutal, slobby construction worker, that I find this picture hard to resist. I've seen it time and again. Crack in the Mirror also boasts a startling score by Maurice Jarre.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Mr. Teal,
That should have read "what else does McBride have to say about Crack in the Mirror?"
Also, does McBride have any comments about Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)? I've been looking for this early Brian De Palma flick for years, mainly to see Welles' cameo as a conjurer, as well as a gallery of great character actors like John Astin, Charles Lane, Timothy Carey, Allen Garfield, M. Emmet Walsh, Larry D. Mann and even Bob (Super Dave) Einstein as a cop.

[Jeff Wilson]

Since I have the book right at hand, I'll fill in here; about CRACK IN THE MIRROR, he doesn't have a whole lot more to say, although he writes that Welles, "as the lawyer Lamorciere, radiates a sleek and callous brilliance." McBride also praises Welles' acting on the stand in the courtroom scene.

As for the DePalma, he says "Welles' most ignominious moment on screen came in GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972) when he and Tom Smothers had to roll around the floor inside a gold-colored bag. A magician -- again-- Welles is supposed to be incompetent in this one, and it's a truly embarrassing experience to hear his voice coming out of that bag, even if, as it seems, he may not have been physically present inside it. Lamely spoofing the generation gap from both ends of the spectrum, director Brian DePalma cast Welles as a faded old hack who bungles magic tricks while trying to teach them to Smothers, a drop-out businessman. DePalma has borrowed so heavily from Welles' work in his highly imitative career that this perverse and insulting casting can only be explained as a case of the jealous pupil trying to destroy his master."

[Harvey Chartrand]

Is there no end to the humiliation that Welles had to endure?
I just read in Split Image, Charles Winecoff's biography of Anthony Perkins, that Welles was quite obstreperous on the set of Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (1970). He interrupted takes and lectured Nichols, of all people, on the art of comedy. No doubt Welles was jealous of Nichols' success. Thirty years after Citizen Kane, Welles was a hired gun, while Nichols had a contract giving him complete creative control and the right of final cut on this lavish production of Joseph Heller's war satire. Too bad Nichols screwed up this opportunity. Catch-22 is a complete misfire, a terrible and unlikeable film, even with all that talent on- and offscreen.