In partnership with The Film Foundation, iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese's exclusive monthly contribution to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in May, 2015.
It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Orson Welles for my generation of directors. François Truffaut encapsulated it perfectly in Day for Night, in which the director of the film within the film (played, of course, by Truffaut) dreams of a little boy walking up to a closed movie theater, reaching through the locked gate, and pulling down lobby cards of Citizen Kane. Welles arrived in Hollywood as an artist, the man who had come to rethink the movies from the ground up, and for that reason, he was viewed with skepticism, disbelief, envy and outright derision by many. What did a 25-year-old radio and theatre prodigy do to deserve all this? When was he going to pay his dues like the rest of us? The fact that Citizen Kane really did reshape the medium made things even worse. The story of Orson Welles is usually told as a cautionary tale–too much too soon. But really, it's a story of resentment. When I was starting out as a director, it seemed like people were always making fun of Welles, his weight, his performances in substandard movies, his commercials for Paul Masson wine. Some insisted that Citizen Kane was really the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz (the co-writer) and Gregg Toland (the cinematographer). And they all kept wondering: when will Welles grow up? That was a common sentiment. It still is, I think.
Citizen Kane really is one of the greatest films ever made, for many reasons. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible without Mankiewicz or Toland, as Welles himself acknowledged (he gave Toland a very special credit), but you could say the same of any great movie by anyone. And the fact that Welles was so young gives it an added power: it's chilling, even frightening, that such a young man would make a first film about time and aging and death. I love many of Welles' pictures, and if he never made another one as great as Kane, that's not saying very much: the bar couldn't be set much higher. Many of his subsequent pictures are imperfect in one way or another for various reasons–studio re-cutting, limited resources, financial backers who suddenly ran out of funds–but it hardly matters: every picture, every fragment of a picture, bearing his name is the work of a great artist.
TCM is paying him a month-long tribute in the month of his centenary (he was born on May 6). Nineteen of his films will be shown throughout the month, 14 of which he directed or co-directed. Right before the 1944 version of Jane Eyre, TCM will be showing Too Much Johnson, a series of silent vignettes that Welles staged and shot in 1938, which he had intended to use in a theatrical production of the William Gillette farce. The scenes, mostly shot around an old marketplace in Manhattan's West Village, now long gone, consist of an amazingly inventive series of sight gags in homage to Keaton and Chaplin and Lloyd, featuring the young Joseph Cotten. The footage was thought to be lost for many years, and it was miraculously rediscovered a couple of years ago. This is a highlight in a tribute to one of the artists who inspired us to make movies.
