Orson Welles may have been most popular with American audiences during his radio days.
Stopping by the commemoration of the Todd Theatre Festival in Woodstock, Illinois last weekend, the World Socialist Web Site asked experts about the enduring popularity of Orson Welles.
The site interviewed critics and film scholars Joseph McBride and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who were panel participants; and Wellenet veterans Roger Ryan, best known for his reconstruction of The Magnificent Ambersons, and film critic and historian Tony Williams of Southern Illinois University.
The full interviews can be found on the organization’s website. Here are some highlights:
Tony Williams: I believe he was one of the great artistic talents of the 20th century, whose work transcends so many boundaries — theater, film, radio, etc., and he is someone whose work still speaks to us today. Welles is someone who has never been given his due in American culture… This culture is highly anti-intellectual, both in the past and in the present. The culture does not want to be challenged in terms of politics or any other realm. Welles operates on both the political and artistic level as a particularly strategic genius.
Joseph McBride: Welles was both a high-brow and a low-brow artist. What he didn’t like was the middle brow, which gets you praise from the mainstream media and Academy Awards. He commented in various interviews that the mainstream media never liked his work. He loved low-brow culture like magic, vaudeville, the popular stage of his youth His work on radio was perhaps the one time that he was very successful as a popular artist and entertainer. He would take a classic novel, for example, and condense it into one hour of exciting drama and that worked commercially, at least up to a point.
Roger Ryan: (On his Ambersons reconstruction): It’s not really a restored version. I received [the book] This is Orson Welles for Christmas in 1992. I looked through its appendix and saw all the excised scenes represented by a cutting continuity done for the initial version of The Magnificent Ambersons. The final third of the film was changed the most [by the studio, behind Welles’ back]. I thought I could get some friends together and we could recreate this as a radio play, and I could use some of the frame enlargements as stills to accompany the audio. I wanted to see something closer to the way Welles saw the original film. I worked on it for nine months — I showed it to friends and sat on it for a long time.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: I think part of the problem, and the fascination, results from the fact that his films are scarce. Fundamentally, there is no closure with Welles. It makes him interesting, but it’s precisely what makes him frustrating to the average viewer. There is too much that is squirreled away, or did not get finished, or is unresolved. I think that’s what I find most compelling… Isn’t it strange that the whole issue of closure does not come up with someone like Kafka? People never say, “Oh, we’ll never get to the bottom of Kafka.” There is not the same sense of frustration as with Welles. He was outside the system.
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