Amherst Cinema to host Orson Welles film festival this summerDate: 6/24/2016 AMHERST – Orson Welles, the writer, director and actor whose first film “Citizen Kane” is on most of the best films ever made lists, will be featured in a five film retrospective at the Amherst Cinema during July and August.
For this writer and film buff, seeing Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane” was a revelation. After a whirlwind and well publicized career in theater and radio, the youthful Welles was given carte blanche at RKO and produced what many people assumed was a thinly veiled biographical film about media baron William Randolph Hearst. Much of the story had nothing to do with Hearst, who none-the-less did what he could to suppress the film.
What remains so vivid today is how Welles collaborated with cinematographer Stanley Cortez to achieve the look of the film as well as its narrative structure as a detective story. Welles stars in the film, which also introduced performers Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, among others.
“Citizen Kane” (1941) will be screened July 17 at 2 p.m. and July 19 at 7 p.m.
Hearst’s interference didn’t help the box office of “Citizen Kane” and Welles’ second feature “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) suffered at the hands of studio politics. Based on a book by Booth Tarkington, the film tells the story of the changes that one upper middle class family in Indiana experiences. There is both a sweetness and sadness to the film and it is well worth watching, but the end is not the one Welles planned. Out of the country and onto his next project, RKO management instructed editor Robert Wise to reshoot and re-edit the picture’s conclusion to give it a happy ending of sorts. It was not a happy ending for Welles, though, who was bounced from the studio.
It will be shown July 24 at 2 p.m. and July 26 at 7 p.m.
In 1948, Welles returned to the director’s chair, only at Columbia Pictures, in “The Lady from Shanghai,” a film noir starring his former wife Rita Hayworth. Welles plays an Irish sailor who gets caught up in a web of intrigue. Reportedly Columbia boss Harry Cohn was livid that Welles convinced his biggest star to cut and dye her hair for the role of the femme fatale. The concluding sequence set in a funhouse remains a triumph in editing and conception.
It will be presented July 31 at 2 p.m. and August 2 at 7 p.m.
“The Third Man” (1949) is a film Welles didn’t direct, but he dominates through his role of the villain Harry Lime. Director Carol Reed set the film in post-war Vienna and it stars Joseph Cotten as an American writer trying to find his long-time friend played by Welles. He slowly discovers the truth about Lime, who is initially thought to be dead. Part thriller and part reaction to the realities of post-war Europe, the film remains dynamic.
It will be seen Aug. 7 at 2 p.m. and Aug. 9 at 7 p.m.
Welles reported thought his 1958 film “Touch of Evil” would be a path back to directing films in Hollywood after spending years in Europe. He partnered with producer Albert Zugsmith, a man known for low-budget movies destined for drive-ins. The result was perhaps the most artful drive-in movie ever made.
Studio politics marred Welles’ vision for this dark police story of a corrupted cop in a border town. The film has been restored to be in line closer to his intention and has an outstanding cast that includes Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, who did the film as a favor to Welles.
Welles did many other films of interest, including “The Stranger,” “Macbeth,” “Chimes at Midnight” and “F for Fake,” that are also well worth discovering.
For more information log onto http://amherstcinema.org.
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