Orson Welles is synonymous with 1940s Hollywood cinema. His first movie, Citizen Kane, made when he was just 27 years old, is still acclaimed as the greatest movie ever made. Yet Welles’s subsequent career has baffled fans and critics. This day event will explore the rise of Welles to the pinnacle of 1940s Hollywood cinema, and his subsequent fall from grace.
Starting as an artistic child prodigy, Welles rose through an early career on the stage in Dublin and New York, to become a famous radio voice, notorious for frightening America into a panic with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds in 1938.
This set the stage for his entry into Hollywood. Granted carte blanche, he made Citizen Kane, the story of a man who rises to political heights before being destroyed in a public scandal. The movie was a brazen attack on William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful media mogul in America at the time. Through this, Welles told a quintessentially American tragedy and anticipated his own downfall.
Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted a Booke Tarkington novel and told a story of social change in the turn of the century that echoed with Welles’s own Midwestern upbringing. But it was butchered by the studio and released in a truncated form. In the late 1940s, he attempted to please the studios by coming a director-for-hire, scripting, acting and directing in popular thrillers like The Stranger and The Lady of Shanghai. But Welles’s instincts were out of kilter with a post-war Hollywood and McCarthyism. Abandoned by the studios, he turned from Hollywood to Europe. But his fusion of social dramas and pulp thrillers with anti-fascist politics and modernist artistry went on to influence many filmmakers, up to the present.
This day school will serve as an introduction to Welles and some of his defining films.
Please note: this event will close to enrolments at 23:59 UTC on 26 March 2024.