What Is The Best Film Directed By Orson Welles?

(where his career is considered a failure after Citizen Kane), Orson Welles represents one of the

few american directors with a literary culture and an european sensibility.

What is his best film?

Allow multiple votes. Choose one or two or three film.

Citizen Kane, is likely to run away with this, however, most of his films did not even get a wide release and a lot of it is kinda lost.

I do not think his Macbeth or Othello are that great ... and he is not as good about his "diction" as someone like John Gielgud, or Ian MacKellen have gotten in their days ... check out John Gielgud in Peter Greenaway's film about The Tempest ... his reading is so clear, and you can see everything almost to the point that any illustration that PG makes is out of sorts ... which in many cases, PG steers completely clear of.

For me, the best Orson Welles is one of his least known works ... CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT ... taking a couple of Shakespearean plays and putting together a story for FALSTAFF ... and of course, the academic folks trashed this senselessly, and Falstaff gets a complete story, instead of just being a drunk walk on in a couple of plays.

But Orson Welles, even though his opus is CITIZEN KANE, his grand entrance was not in film ... it was on the air in radio, and the one event that scared most broadcasting companies into immediately censoring and controlling the content that was put on the air, to ensure that people would get completely desensitized and become stupid from all the commercials and (now) visuals! 

The work? WAR OF THE WORLDS, the 1938 Broadcast that had a lot of people scared and paranoid. Same reaction some 30 years earlier when someone used a film camera on a pistol firing at the lens ... it had people running from the theater.

(... weird ... people didn't run out of the theater when they saw their first "nudie"!!!)

 

I had originally said Third Man (which is IMHO even better than Kane), but it's not Orson directing it

I know this next comment is a bit of a stretch, but in my view, Orson Welles was a very good director when it came to defining some camera angles and styles ... in the case of Falstaff, for example, he was right in the middle of the battle, totally drunk ... and one of the comments that a lot of Shakespearean idiots made was that Shakespeare made use of allegory and other literary examples, to show us how things were with words and rhyme that pretty much cleared up our doubts, and it could be very visceral, when it came to Macbeth, for example. (Never mind that Shakespeare also had to make fun of things once or twice in a play or his drunk audience would fall asleep ... ex: Ros and Guil in Hamlet!)

To put those words, into a visual context, specially in the 50's in film, was not easy ... and someone like Hitchcock, found a way to get clever and even show how ridiculous camera angles gave people the idea that there was more here on the film than we thought. 

I have always thought that Orson's greatest desire was to break the 4th wall, as it is known in theater, where the audience hides behind the "meaning" and then walks away talking about the costumes and the acting, and the this and that ... and ignore the point and intent of the work altogether, which was what a lot of work in the late 60's became a lot more pointed and valuable, even if it had to blow it up on the screen for you to get its immense strength. Nowadays, we don't even care. But all of a sudden APOCALYPSE NOW is a very savage example ... but it wasn't any more savage than some of the pictures that Walter Cronkite was showing you from VietNam, that had presidents wanting to shut him up!

In radio, the ability to translate words into meaning is the most important thing, that helped define and create so much of the incredible radio stories, that probably got its start with things like THE WAR OF THE WORLDS ... only for its incredible strength to get surpassed by the stories comeing out of Europe in WW2, which the main networks were trying hard to hide ... but the sick and tired soldiers hurt from it, had a much more carnal story that their bodies showed! 

I think, that Orson was very well aware of the media's effect on people, even after the war, and I'm pretty sure that his directing style was influenced by radio and its "wording", before the days where words became meaningless and no one paid attention anymore because the music and everything else around it, was meaningless. His directing has a way to be centered "inside" the moment, not "outside", and this is something that might not make sense, unless you are a writer, and a person doing the acting, or directing ... do you do what your "character" feels, or what the director tells you to do ... which likely has nothing to do with your own inner feeling and understanding of things ... a lot of the acting in the 50's and 60's in both America and England is about this ... heavy duty!!!! 

I have to see CITIZEN KANE again ... because it seemed to me, that it was shot, almost entirely as if it was a TV/Radio documentary, with it all "over there" and we get to see the size of it, and even feel it to a point. The awareness of that ability, ends up making sure that the film rarely enters into a literary third person of view ... and for Orson Welles, this is important ... it's what made RADIO what it was ... you made those characters come alive and scare the sh*t out of everyone ... specially those that lack an imagination!