The Orson Welles Marathon

Sometime four years ago, I decided to visit and revisit an entire filmography of one director and I landed at Steven Soderbergh, whose works I had mostly not seen and the movies I had seen I liked.  I lost interest in the project until quarantine, and then I continued what the little I had started.  While in the midst of working on the Soderbergh marathon, I was already working on who to do next.

It didn't take long for me to land on Orson Welles.  Few directors have the resume of an Orson Welles and few actors have the resume of an Orson Welles, and it just so happens that I have seen exactly one Orson Welles movie before this.  It would be hard to find a better choice, since I have seen at least a few movies from people with similar resumes. 

By choosing Orson Welles, I'll be accomplishing several goals of mine.  The first is that I'll be watching Citizen Kane.  That's the big one.  I have actually watched a fair amount of movies that land on the best movies of all time, and this was a big blind spot for many years.  The second is that it covers another blind spot for me, which is movies from the 1940s and 1950s.  Third, I have a few sources that I look to to pick movies, from the Ebert Great Movies to the NYT 1000 to even a critic who has picked a top 10 every year since movies existed, and a decently large amount of Welles movies fall on these lists, even aside from Citizen Kane.

But also, on more general terms, it's Orson Welles.  Few filmmakers have the larger than life persona that he does.  Few filmmakers have a mystery and aura that he does.  He also has a manageable filmography, something that really isn't true of, say, Alfred Hitchcock.  I've seen a decent number of Hitchcock movies, the obvious ones probably, but he's directed a truly ridiculous amount of movies.  

Despite the fact that Orson Welles directed his first movie at 25, he simply didn't direct that many movies, because he never had any money to make the movies.  He also seemed to have little interest in acting, aside from boosting his own movies, which meant that he didn't take roles if he didn't need to, and a decent amount of the roles were purely for the money, which wouldn't necessarily lend itself to being a good movie.  So I get the combination of classic movies, but a manageable amount of them.

And I would by lying if I said I didn't like that he also acted in movies where he didn't direct them.  The fear with doing a director marathon is that you might feel like you're watching a lot of the same movies.  His acting career should break up the sameness that might be brought, since I know Welles has a very distinctive style.

So I'll be covering Orson Welles, starting next week.  Thursday, I'll be posting my rankings of the Mission: Impossible Series movies, but starting next week, expect two Orson Welles movies per week.  Soderbergh had his fair share of obscure movies, and I was worried about the audience on those, but he also had extremely popular movies.  Welles, in 2020, pretty much has Citizen Kane, and maybe Touch of Evil, and besides that, I wouldn't expect most of the people reading this, unless you've sought this out I suppose, to have seen any of his other movies.