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was plucked from the vine, exactly ripe, by Hollywood.
Welles was ready for Hollywood, but Hollywood was not ready for Welles. Today, lesser men than he regularly cause more turmoil in the studios with their independent productions, without producing works of comparable stature. But Hollywood then was completely dominated by the studio system and was unused to dealing with a man of the Gargantuan talents and appetites of Welles. He brought Citizen Kane in on time and at reasonable cost. He did the same with The Magnificent Ambersons. He was not, except in manner and talent, a profligate like Von Stroheim, and he made films that reputable critics believed to be utterly unique. It was a measure of Hollywood's lack of imagination that they still seem avant-garde when viewed today, though more than twenty years have intervened. He made other films after these masterpieces, and not one of them failed to be interesting. Some critics said his films were too selfconscious. In a way that is true. He insisted on calling attention to the fact that they were, indeed, movies, that is to say, art objects. This ran counter to common film practice, which
is to be artless in its realism. Only now is the European avant-garde beginning to follow the Wellesian aesthetic.
Eventually, he left America for good, plagued by tax troubles, more deeply plagued by mediocrities who insisted on judging him either by a balance sheet or by standards of art too ordinary for applicability to his bursting talent. He said recently, "The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream." More than any American since Griffith, he stretched that ribbon — almost to the breaking point.
Welles is a star, not because of any single part he played, but because he was a total movie maker who stamped his personality on entire films, because he insisted on using a medium of group creation as a means for a uniquely individual expression — which expression, we tend to forget (because of the artistic excitement they caused), was profoundly related to the new political and social values of New Deal America. Many film makers have made interesting social comments; a few have made great personal statements. Only Welles has combined both in our time.
Later Welles. Left, as Harry Lime in Sir Carol Reed's fine thriller, The Third Man. Above, as he appeared in Touch of Evil, the last movie he directed for Hollywood. It was a wonderful study of bottom-of-the-barrel corruption.
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