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13 posts tagged Orson Welles
Orson Welles’ Last Interview, 2 Hours Before His Death
only the morbidly curious need apply. actually, i take that back, this is pretty fascinating stuff even when divorced from its context — orson welles could always elevate an interview into the realm of high entertainment, and that held true until the very end. here, Welles chats about being 70, loving Rita Hayworth, and disparages the soap operas of the 1980s. it was 9 days before my 1st birthday.
- “old age is a shipwreck.”
“but you feel wonderful, don’t you?”
- “oh, sure.”
Orson Welles’ last interview, two hours before passed away.
(submitted by theesps)
THE THIRD MAN Artwork by The Silver Screen Society
earlier in the week i posted some MON ONCLE designs by a collective of super-talented graphic designers who call themselves The Silver Screen Society. and prettiness ruled the land. now i’m digging back a few months into their small archives to highlight just a few of their amazing interpretations of this Carol Reed classic (the Criterion releases of which are tragically OOP). now if you’ll excuse me, i need to go rock out with my zither.
…that’s not a euphemism.
Orson Welles directing THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947)
Orson Welles looked this badass when he was at work. that’s just not fair.
in other news, this picture epitomizes the attitude i’m trying to take during Hurricane Irene. like… hey Hurricane Irene, just say your lines, and get the hell off my set.
(via Charlie Parker…)
Fake Criterion Cover: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (dir. Orson Welles) 1947
Artist: Maurader
this would be so… something i would want.
Criterion Cover for Orson Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai”
THE THIRD MAN: perfect rainy day cinema.
In the great scene on the Big Wheel in Vienna, where Orson Welles as Harry Lime clearly contemplates killing his old schoolfriend and says as much, the small movements of Welles’s face tell a very complicated story. Smiling, charming, easy, he makes cynicism sound like everybody’s favourite option. The smile goes momentarily, and you see sheer ruthlessness in the face, even something like hatred. Then the smile is back, and you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.
From At the Movies: Carol Reed by Michael Wood
“[Jean-Luc Godard’s] gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”
Orson Welles on Godard.
burn. Flavorwire recently published a collection of the most harsh director-on-director insults ever committed to record, and… well, it’s a damn fun read. because when Kevin Smith tries to take Paul Thomas Anderson down a peg or two, everyone wins.
Photo: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and daughter Rebecca Welles
this looks like my kind of saturday afternoon. but i don’t have a boat or a pool or a rita hayworth, so i’m off to the astoria beer gardens.
“[Orson Welles] had a habit of leaving words hanging in the air, pregnant yet not quite born - rosebuds, indeed. Put it this way: he talked like a man who was forever uttering grave last words and leaving us to wonder over them so that we could not be sure whether rosebud was the promise of color, sweetness and flowering or a knob of youthful hardness, a bullet that refuses to grow old or die.”
David Thomson
excerpted from his biography Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (my reading material for the next 6 hours as i fly home from Oakland to JFK… at least whenever i’m not speed-watching Breaking Bad)
“What all of Orson Welles’ films have in common is a liberalism, the assertion that belief in conservatism is an error. The fragile giants that are at the center of his cruel fables discover that you cannot conserve anything — not youth, not power, not love. Charles Foster Kane, George Minafer Amberson, Michael O’Hara, Gregory Arkadin come to understand that life is made up of terrible tears and wrenches.”
Francois Truffaut.
The concluding sentence from an unpublished 1967 essay called “Citizen Kane: The Fragile Giant.”
Trailer: CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (dir. Orson Welles) 1965
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT — supposedly Orson Welles’ favorite film amongst his own work — has long been extremely difficult to see, both due to the scarcity of prints and the pitiful state of those known. but it seems as if that’s all about to change, as after years of legal squabbles a brand new, fully restored print of the film will premiere at Picturehouse Cinema’s “Screen Arts Festival” next month.
Here’s Wikipedia’s take on the film, which played at the dead of night at last year’s Butt Numb a Thon: “Focused on William Shakespeare’s recurring character Sir John Falstaff, the film stars Welles himself as Falstaff, Keith Baxter plays Prince Hal (who will later become Henry V), and John Gielgud plays Henry IV. Jeanne Moreau appears as Doll Tearsheet and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly.
The script contains text from five Shakespeare plays: primarily Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, but also Richard II, Henry V, andThe Merry Wives of Windsor. It was based on Welles’s play Five Kings, an adaptation of four Shakespeare plays which he produced in 1939 and again in 1960. The film’s narration, spoken by Ralph Richardson, is taken from the chronicler Raphael Holinshed.”
