Orson Welles, Volume 3, One-Man Band by Simon Callow

We must distinguish between realism and reality.  People who talk about the neo-realism of my films must be joking.... Eisenstein and I are children of the same father -- Griffith.  But we've taken different paths and are no longer related -- except insofar as we've both turned our backs on realism.  Realism has no existence for me, it doesn't  interest me at all."
--Orson Welles, interviewed by Jean Desternes, 1950


Orson Welles, One-Man Band (Viking, 2015) is the third volume of Callow's  detailed and fascinating biography, One-Man Band starting in 1947 when Welles left America for Europe and ending with his last completed film, Chimes at Midnight, in 1965 (which I wrote about on June 22,2015) and is an appropriate companion book to Patrick McGilligan's Young Orson (which I wrote about on Feb. 18 of this year).  Most of the period covered by Callow's third volume Welles spent in the theatre in Europe and as an actor in the films of other directors in order to raise money for his own films:  Othello(1952), Mr. Arkadin(1955), The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight, as well as his brief return to America for Touch of Evil (1958).  Callow is a stage and film actor who shows a detailed knowledge of Welles's stage work, right through to the end, directing Olivier in Ionesco's Rhinoceros in 1960. 

Callow demonstrates clearly how Welles's biggest problem in filmmaking was his inability to conceive a work in his head; he had to be inspired by what was in front of him and then largely created the film in the editing.  After Citizen Kane no one was willing to pick up the tab for this kind of essentially non-commercial filmmaking.  Fortunately Welles was able to keep going, more or less, by acting in the films of other directors, the less-talented the better so he could direct and write his own parts.  A notable exception was Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) where Reed put his foot down and kept Welles's part limited, though Reed and writer Graham Greene did let Welles write some of his own dialogue, including the famous cuckoo clock speech.

Welles was driven by many things, including his appetite and his insecurities.  When he directed he usually had stand-ins for his parts and then rehearsed or filmed himself later and, often, alone.  He was fortunate that many people stayed devoted to him, even when he behaved badly (as he often did), because he offered them opportunities not available elsewhere to do their best work and not have to descend to the meretricious.