I would still rank Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made, even if in 2012 the Sight and Sound poll of critics replaced at as no. 1(after fifty years of polls) with Hitchcock's Vertigo, certainly a great film but not at quite the level of Orson Welles's film. There should be a new Sight and Sound poll soon and it is of some (marginal) interest if there will be changes. Regardless of what any critics or directors say there will continue to be arguments about Welles's work in everything from theatre and radio to films, especially the ones he was still working on when he died in 1985. I have dozens of books about Welles and his life and each of them has a different view of him, as I wait for the fourth and final volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles.
Meanwhile, we have Mark Cousins's film The Eyes of Orson Welles, from 2018 and shown recently on Turner Classic Movies (which has also shown the fifteen-part Cousins film The Story of Film: An Odyssey). Cousins had the cooperation of Welles's daughter Beatrice in assembling the incredible number of drawings and paintings that Welles prepared for all the plays and movies he made as well as many he wanted to make but never did, for a considerable number of reasons. Cousins draws some intelligent and some far-fetched relationships between the lines of Welles's drawings and the movement of, for instance, a cigarette between Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai; at one point Beatrice shows Mark an impressively dark painting that was Orson' s response to having the editing of Touch of Evil taken away from him. Cousins is Irish and takes us to Ireland where Welles performed Shakespeare as a teen-ager, as well to the Moroccan sites where Welles's Othello was shot and other locations around the world used by Welles, in his life and his marriages as well as his films.
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