Orson Welles
Description
Five separate stories are dramatized, woven out of a series of theoretical, island-hopping voyages that start en route to Hawaii, and after traversing the South Seas as far as Australia, end up flying back home from Honolulu. In between, through both an adventurous shipboard passenger, a returning American WWII veteran, and the enthused narration, we're taken island hopping to stops in places lush, tranquil, and inviting, like Tahiti, Tonga and Fiji,...
Author
Description
"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateurThere have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain. Here...
8) The stranger
Description
Having directed two undisputed masterpieces - Citizen Kane and The magnificent Ambersons - Orson Welles delved into the suspense film, crafting a baroque postwar thriller that drew upon the style of his previous work, while laying the groundwork for his later film noir classics The lady from Shanghai and Touch of evil. Edward G. Robinson stars as Wilson, a government agent who tracks down a high-ranking Nazi officer (Welles) who has managed to craft...
11) Ten days' wonder
Description
Divided into 10 days, the story focuses on the wealthy Van Horns. Orson Welles plays the eccentric tycoon who lives in an Alsatian chateau with his young wife and his adopted son, a sculptor given to hallucinatory fits that cause him to fear he has unknowingly committed murder. Of course, wife and son are having a passionate affair and being blackmailed, which sets in dizzying motion the complex plot.
13) The stranger
Description
Orson Welles directs and stars in this thriller about a monstrous Nazi official who's hiding out as a small-town American college professor. A war crimes detective turns up determined to expose him -- even if it means endangering the Nazi's innocent wife.
16) The third man
Appears on list
Description
A pulp fiction writer arrives in post-WWII Vienna at the invitation of a friend who has offered him a job. Once there, he discovers that a shortage of supplies has led to a flourishing black market and his friend has recently died in a mysterious traffic accident. As he begins to unravel the story behind his friend's death, he finds himself entangled in the black market, the police, and his friend's Czech girlfriend. Includes commentary, interviews,...
Description
Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, is placed in a difficult position when Henry VIII breaks with the Catholic Church over its refusal to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he can marry Anne Boleyn. Henry demands More's endorsement of this act. Torn between his conscience and duty to the crown, Sir Thomas chooses to say nothing.
Description
Ben Quick, an industrious con artist who's known throughout the country as a barn burner, gets run out of a Mississippi town. He meets up with Clara Varner, whose father is pressuring her to get married and provide him with grandchildren. It isn't long before he decides Ben and Clara should marry, and when she resists, it sets up a dramatically escalating clash of wills.
19) Citizen Kane
Description
An all-powerful press magnate, Kane, dies in his fabulous castle Xanadu, his last word being "Rosebud", which leads a reporter to seek the meaning behind the word and find the meaning of Kane. Prominant publisher, William Randolph Hearst, saw the film as a thinly disguised version of his career and attempted to suppress it.
Description
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles's extraordinary film career that was the culmination of the filmmaker's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff; the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV's wayward son Prince Hal, here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace.




