The Man Did Make Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

"There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 a few miles from the Hollywood editing table where Orson Welles was giving birth to his own screen legend with Citizen Kane. The sin of Welles' life was that it had two complementary, all-American acts: heroic tragedy, then celebrity farce. By the time he was 25, Welles had traveled the world, appeared at the Gate Theater in Dublin, stormed Broadway with crackling, sepulchral productions of Shakespeare and The Cradle Will Rock, scared America out of its wits with his War of the Worlds radio caprice, and served as producer, director, co-author and star of the most influential work in film history. Praised and vilified as a boy genius, Welles was now condemned, or condemned himself, to live out the myth. It finally has outlived him. Last week the Magnificent Cumbersome died in his Los Angeles home from complications of cardiovascular disease.

Wicked irony dogged every turn of his career. If his theater magic had been preserved on film, Welles might be known today as a great actor-manager who also dabbled in movies. If the films had not been preserved, Welles' trim exuberance would not have so cuttingly mocked the Falstaffian corpulence of his maturity. One generation knows him as the brilliant light that Hollywood failed and as the guy Rita Hayworth married before Aly Khan. Another generation thinks of him as a wine salesman, ballast at a Dean Martin Roast table and butt of Johnny Carson's "fat" jokes, all of which he bore with wounded dignity. Welles' premature burial in the flesh of his profligacy and self-destruction needs to be mourned. But it is helpful to recall that his life was not simply a cautionary fable. The man did make movies.

To a Hollywood that capered through the Depression, Welles introduced the cinema of melancholy. With Citizen Kane--a tale of power and love, and the loss of both--American film found the dark, seductive side of its own success story. For the next decade, domestic dramas, spy pictures and detective thrillers would be shrouded in expressionist shadows and shot with oblique camera angles. Kane's multiple-narrator format announced that no one was to be trusted with the whole truth; the camera could lie too, and we would have to decide whether to believe it. Welles dragged the movies into modernism, with sequences that keep playing in any film lover's imaginary screening room: the three-story family squabble in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); the hall-of- mirrors gunfight in The Lady from Shanghai (1948); the sinuous tracking shot that opens Touch of Evil (1958) with a bang; the magnificent pacifist battle scene in Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff (1966); and the Chinese-box structure of F for Fake (1975). The last title was appropriate, for Welles ended his directorial film career as he began it, with elegant sleight of hand at 24 frames per second.

He directed a dozen features in 45 years, made up-in-smoke deals for dozens more, started an additional four films that remain out there, tantalizingly unfinished. None of his post-Kane Hollywood pictures was made to his specifications; studio bosses cut Ambersons by 43 minutes. To finance his own pictures he became a successful strolling player: something of a matinee idol in Jane Eyre (1944), the wry incarnation of postwar evil in The Third Man (1949) and any number of lowing hierarchs and potentates in his nearly 30- year exile from another chance to astonish Hollywood. Now that he is dead, the industry that discarded him will nominate him for sainthood. It may also realize that in his life it has a surefire biopic: Citizen Welles. But who, now that he is dead, would play the title role? More important, who could direct it?