The Magic World of Orson Welles

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Book: The Magic World of Orson Welles Read Online Free PDF
Author: James Naremore
a copy of
Julius Caesar
, given to me as a gift. On the inside of the front cover is a stamp saying it belongs to “Miss Burke’s School.” Below the stamp are the signatures of eight children—all girls—who checked it out from the school library in the 1950s and ’60s.
    It is a shame no publisher has thought to reissue these books; they remain excellent introductions to Shakespeare, written in an unpretentious, often amusing style that can inspire kids to put on a show. In 1939, after the successful run of the Mercury
Julius Caesar
in New York, Welles persuaded Harper and Brothers to publish Mercury editions of the original three books, plus a fourth on
Macbeth
; he also persuaded Columbia Records to issue long-playing, 78-rpm recordings of full-length Mercury performances of the four plays (these excellent recordings are still widely available). The Mercury Text Records, as they were called, were the first full-length recordings of Shakespeare’s playsever produced. Michael Anderegg, who has written a fine study of them, observes that they were “the most obviously pedagogical of Welles’s Shakespearian activities, and . . . can fairly be considered a distinctive contribution to the teaching and general appreciation of Shakespeare in America” (
Orson Welles, Shakespeare
, 46). Welles and Hill wrote a brief article about them for the National Council of Teachers of English; the recordings were widely used in schools and were favorably discussed as teaching aids in the first issue of
College English
.
    After World War II, Welles was interested in making 16mm educational films, but nothing came of the idea. In the early 1980s, when he was having regular lunches with Henry Jaglom at Ma Maison in Los Angeles, he told Jaglom, “At one point I decided that the best thing I could do, the most use I could get out of what I was born with . . . would be in education. I spent five months going to every big foundation, saying, ‘I’m going to give up my entire career.’ I was then very famous and successful. . . . Nobody wanted it. . . . But I would have been very happy to do it” (Biskind,
My Lunches with Orson
, 70). There was, however, a pedagogical quality to most of his career, especially in his radio shows of the war years; his postwar newspaper column and radio commentaries for ABC and the Blue Network; and his two BBC television series,
Orson Welles’s Sketchbook
and
Around the World with Orson Welles
. Much of his later film work, such as
In the Land of Don Quixote
(1961),
Orson Welles’s Vienna
(1969), and
Orson Welles’s Moby Dick
(1971), takes the form of lectures, guided tours, and readings.
    The pedagogical tendency also had an influence on Welles’s fiction films, where the impulse toward lecturing and instruction blends with an impulse toward oral storytelling—as with the omniscient narrator of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, or with such characters as Michael O’Hara in
The Lady from Shanghai
, who tells a long, illustrative story about sharks; Harry Lime in
The Third Man
, who gives Holly Martins a lesson about the Borgias versus the Swiss clockmakers; or Mr. Arkadin, who tells his guests a parable about the scorpion and the frog. As I’ve argued elsewhere (
Invention without a Future
, 187–97), one of Welles’s distinctive accomplishments in these moments was to synthesize two apparently contradictory forms of theatricality. He was indebted to a romantic or gothic tradition of Shakespearian drama, grand opera, and stage illusionism, but he was also a didactic, somewhat Brechtian storyteller whose acting technique was visibly rhetorical, dependent upon various forms of direct address to the viewing audience or to an audience within the film. “The thing I do best in the world,” he told Bill Krohn in a 1982 interview, “is talk to audiences. And that’s really
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