Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans Review

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Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans ReviewCinema mavens and simple movie fans can rejoice: the second volume of Simon Callow's scrupulously researched biography of Orson Welles has been published. The first volume, The Road to Xanadu, took Welles from his birth through the release of his first film, Citizen Kane (1941). This volume takes up immediately after Kane, and traces the arc of Welles' career until 1947, when he went into self-imposed exile in Europe for more than 20 years. Not only does the volume cover films--The Magnificent Ambersons (sliced to a shadow of Welles' intention); the Brazilian epic, It's All True, aborted and never really completed; the spectacular The Lady from Shanghai, again destroyed by the studio with inept editing and awful soundtrack and the half-baked, yet fascinating Macbeth--but it also covers Welles' career as a political pundit, a fuzzy leftist, just before the horrors of the House Un-American Activities Committee . . . an event that contributed to his flight from the United States.
Callow is really magnificent biographer. His work on Charles Laughton (Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor) really set the benchmark for both scholarship and humanity in dealing with a public figure in the arts. That Callow is primarily known as an actor and director proves renaissance men really do exist. (For those of you fuzzy on his looks, he was the hirsute gay man in Four Weddings and a Funeral.) This massive, 400+ page volume on the middle period of Welles' life is day-to-day detailed beyond one's wildest wish, yet fully captures both Welles' humanity and his follies. Callow is not quick to judge any of his subject's foibles, yet doesn't shrink from reporting Welles' sometimes callous and outre' work habits. Apparently, Welles suffered from a chronic inability to finish something, perhaps less it be judged. As a result, films were edited after he left a project to work on another, then never edited as well as the only film he ever really completed, Citizen Kane.
That Welles may have been an American tragedy--destroyed by the potential engendered in his youth, and never able to come up to the standard he himself had set--is left unspoken by Callow, but Welles' genius is keenly illustrated. Simon Callow is a man who clearly knows the
entertainment business better than most, and this biography is illuminating, touching, and, ultimately, heartbreaking.
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