From Citizen Kane to Falstaff, we looked at the dramatic rises and falls of Orson Welles’ career. The guys look back at his incredible screen presence, the scope he was able to achieve with what he was working with and they announce their next Five which will start in 2018. Thank you all for listening to us throughout 2017! You all are fantastic and thank you for taking this cinematic look with us.
It’s Orson Welles and William Shakespeare back again! After a successful team-up with Othello, this time Welles plays a character with the same skin tone as himself with the beloved and tragic fool of Falstaff. With Chimes at Midnight, Welles took elements from Henry IV Part I and Part II and mixed in parts of Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor to give this side character his own starring role. The guys are joined by the brilliant Tara Olivero from Shakespearemachine to provide more context for what Welles was accomplishing.
Orson Welles returns to Hollywood and instead of looking like a dashing knight, he is a very gross overweight racist cop. It wasn’t how the audiences remembered him, but years later Touch of Evil remains one of his most memorable films. It is a noir film set on the Mexican border about the fallout of a bomb explosion. The guys talk about its iconic tracking shot, the fact that Charlton Heston plays a Mexican and how disgusting this world is.
What does Orson Welles do after making perhaps the greatest movie of all time? He gets basically exiled to Europe to make low-budget Shakespeare films. But are they any good? The guys look into his Othello adaptation and how he interprets the Moor of Venice. Without the resources of Hollywood, Welles uses real incredible settings and new tricks to bring gravitas to the leader who is being betrayed by Iago. And yes, they are distracted by the blackface pretty much the entire time.
Orson Welles is known as a man of many hats as seen with his tour-de-force last week. This week, with The Third Man, the guys are just focusing on him as an actor. It’s one of the most beloved noir films of all time as a dimestore novelist travels to Vienna to see an old friend who he learns died under confusing circumstances. As the mystery continues, here enters Welles and he steals the show with perfectly evil charisma.
Citizen Kane keeps coming up as the greatest American film of all time. Due to that, it all seems really intimidating. And yet part of the reason it may have such acclaim is because it’s so much fun to watch. The guys start their Orson Welles Five with his masterpiece about a newsman who keeps thriving to have it all and unfortunately frequently does.
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