This defines how Biskind in his introduction frames the discussion of Welles’ career which is the lazy and standard rise and fall of the Great Man, the usual cliché of Welles-as-Kane(when Welles-as-Falstaff is more apropos). It is not enough, not for Peter Biskind, editor of My Lunches With Orson, that he made an immortal film at the age of 25 and changed film-making forever, Welles must be a success to. It is not for nothing that Joseph McBride titled his seminal biography on Frank Capra, The Catastrophe of Success a critical look at another supremely talented film-maker who proved, finally, to be far more self-destructive than Orson Welles. The desire to bask in reflected glory and the urge to feed that to several generations of readers. Success is the main narrative that revolves around the celebrity gossip industry. With Welles this is the shadow of success. Escaping that shadow, however, leads us to confront an even larger one. One possible result of Citizen Kane losing some of the dust it gathered from being placed on a pedestal is an opportunity to look at Welles outside the shadow of that epochal film debut. In 2012, it was eclipsed in favor of Tokyo Story on the director’s list and Vertigo on the Critic’s list. Ĭitizen Kane formerly occupied top spot for four decades on both critics and director’s lists on the Sight and Sound poll. Either a saint or martyr for united auteurs of the world or a cautionary story with the same pro/con arguments repeated ad infinitum. The same tired dead arguments are thrown around periodically as and when Welles is exhumed. If Orson Welles was granted this ability, he would undoubtedly arrive at the same conclusion.
IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Luis Buñuel noted that while he didn’t fear death and had no great belief or need for an afterlife, he did nurture a desire to return from the grave every ten years or so, read the papers, and then go back to his eternal slumber satisfied that there was nothing he was missing. ‘I think all movies are better than we think they are…’
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