Orson Welles

The prodigy who peaked first

Most careers build toward a masterpiece; Welles opened with one and spent forty years being measured against it. He was twenty-six when Citizen Kane (1941) arrived, and no first film in the medium's history has cast so long a shadow over the work that followed — including its maker's own. The cruel reading is that everything after Kenosha's wonder boy left RKO was decline. The truer one is that Welles simply refused, for the rest of his life, to make the safe career that his talent had earned him, and paid for that refusal in butchered cuts, foreign financing, and unfinished films. He is the great cautionary case of what the studio system did to an artist it could not control.

Kenosha to exile

Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6, 1915, Welles was a theatre and radio phenomenon before Hollywood knew his name — a Harlem Voodoo Macbeth in 1936, the Mercury Theatre founded with John Houseman in 1937, and the War of the Worlds broadcast of October 30, 1938 that reportedly convinced listeners the Martians had landed. RKO signed him in 1939 on what is generally called the most generous contract ever handed a filmmaker, granting final cut. He used it exactly once. Citizen Kane won him a shared Oscar for its original screenplay and made him permanently dangerous. The studio then took The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) away from him, cutting it from 131 minutes to 88 over his opposition. He never held that kind of control again. The rest is a European itinerary of self-financed and interrupted work — Othello (1951), rewarded with the Palme d'Or; a brief, poisoned Hollywood return for Touch of Evil (1958); the Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962); the Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight (1965); the essay-film F for Fake (1973). Hollywood gave him its Honorary Award in 1970 and the AFI's Life Achievement Award in 1975, the industry's way of honouring a man it had spent decades starving.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Welles #21 among all directors, composite 19.65 across 13 films — and that placement is almost entirely one film's doing. Citizen Kane sits at #2 overall (9.21), cited by 15 of our sources, the single most-decorated title in his corpus and the second-highest-ranked film in the entire database. Then the floor drops away: Touch of Evil at #253 (2.41), Othello at #273 (2.33), The Magnificent Ambersons at #573 (1.53), and everything else below #1000 — Chimes at Midnight down at #1842, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), finished decades after his death, at #3762. This is the opposite of a Scorsese, whose #1 rank is built from breadth. Welles's aggregate is a spike and a long tail. The composite is honest about it: the reputation of the whole career is being carried, statistically, by a twenty-six-year-old's debut — which is exactly the tragedy his admirers keep protesting against.

Where to start

Citizen Kane, obviously, and then immediately The Magnificent Ambersons, to feel what the ending should have been. Touch of Evil for the opening tracking shot every film student steals; Chimes at Midnight for the warmest thing he made; F for Fake to watch him turn his whole broken career into a magic trick about forgery.