A review requested by Mat Daniel, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I would have thought we were past this, but I’ve recently come to find that no, there’s still a seemingly insurmountable gulf in people’s attitudes towards Orson Welles. On one side, there are people who regard […]

A review requested by Robert Lovejoy, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In all the annals of unclassifiable films, I can’t think of anything quite as unclassifiable as 1973’s F for Fake, the penultimate completed feature of Orson Welles’s directorial career (only Filming ‘Othello’ followed it). It’s customarily […]

There are a whole lot of films based on the plays of William Shakespeare – some of them aren’t even Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet – and the great majority of them are bad. Alright, “bad” is a strong word: some of them are bad, such as George Cukor’s stillborn 1936 Romeo and Juliet that […]

In the mid-1950’s, Orson Welles – once the Brightest Young Thing in Hollywood – found himself begging for scraps among the film producers of Europe. This is all well-known, and not worth repeating. What matters is that there came a time when Welles began shopping around an idea for a story about a shadowy man […]