Was orson welles gay
Queer & Now & Then: 1942
In this biweekly column, I look back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay.
All images from The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
The word “queer” is at once too big, too meaningful, and too vague to act all the labor it needs to do. The way that “Q” perches at the terminate of “LGBTQ” enjoy a squiggly tiny tail speaks to its general precariousness; it somehow risks overtaking the whole and being forgotten all together. Yet at the introduce moment, the designation feels fully integrated into the overall discourse, richly inclusive, straddling academia and popular culture; the “Gay and Lesbian” Anthologies and Volumes of the ’90s have become the “Queer” Readers of the 21st century. The word, an indicator of how more speculative scholarship gradually filters down into definitive mainstream concepts, has a strange, malleable currency: it has grow a significant shorthand of solidarity, not only for members of the lgbtq+, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities but also for the essential questioners of the dominant heteronormative procreative culture t
Orson’s Prince Hal Opens Up
A beautiful new print of Orson Welles’ seldom seen “Chimes at Midnight” — his stitching together of Shakespeare’s various Henry IV plays, which just might be the greatest filmed Bard ever — in a recent revival at the essential Movie Forum was an unquestioned cultural highlight of the new year. Key to that film’s awe-inspiring success was the performance of the then-31-year-old Keith Baxter, whose charismatic portrait of Prince Hal put him on the route. The handsome, sparklingly witty, and candid actor — today, the very definition of “silver fox” — was recently in town to introduce the film at Film Forum and sat down and chatted with me.
“We never realized during its filming that we were making a masterpiece,” Baxter said. “We knew that it was a great script [chuckles] with wonderful actors and it was such fun to make. Those who never knew Orson have this image of an overwhelming presence, but he was fun. So
Actor, poet, cartoonist and only ten." headlined a story in a Wisconsin sheet with a shot of the cherubic little Orson Welles. Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (640 pages. Viking. 832.95) deals with the "only" part of Welles's life. He was only 18 months old when he startled a family doctor by saying: "The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguishes men from animals." He was only 16 when he walked into the Gate Theatre in Dublin, fibbed that he was a Broadway actor and was hired to participate a major role. He was only 20 when he directed a landmark all-black production of "Macbeth," only 22 when he cofounded the Mercury Theatre, only 23 when his radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" panicked the country into thinking the Martians were coming. And he was only 25 when he directed "Citizen Kane," still considered by many the greatest movie of all time.
Callow wants to "deconstruct" the Welles story, spot the real man who made himself a myth in cahoots with a pushover press. His manual (the first of two volumes) is easily the best Welles biography, orchestrating previous work anti his own six years of research. Callow's expertise as actor
The scripts for almost all films go through a number of drafts. The changes that are made donate an insight into the film-makers' thinking: plots change, themes emerge, characters are developed. Sometimes the film-makers are diverted down blind alleys and this was the case for The Third Man.
Carol Reed's 1949 thriller set in Vienna was produced under the auspices of Alexander Korda and the American David O. Selznick (a renowned Hollywood figure who had been responsible for Gone with the Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939)), with whom Korda had struck a four-picture finance and distribution deal in 1947. As part of their agreement Selznick had the right to be consulted on the scripts, though he had no final control to enforce changes.
Selznick was a domineering workaholic with an amphetamine ('speed') habit: he would chew benzedrine tablets to help him through his hectic schedule. His comments on the script of The Third Man were forceful and sometimes crazy. Many of them were recorded in a series of minutes of meetings held in California in August 1948 between Selznick, Reed and writer Graham Greene; these documents are preserved in the Carol Reed files i