Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
Today, Welles is perhaps best remembered for his thwarted masterpieces which have so often led to conjecture about what might have been-The Magnificent Ambersons, It's All True, Don Quixote. Thomson suggests that Welles's ultimate demise resided in his stout refusal to give credit where it was due or to relinquish control to editors and lesser post-production entities. This, together with his notorious profligacy, cast doubt on his integrity and ability to stay on project. Indeed, Welles's mind and body were so rapacious (he was so often intellectually and physically hungry) that very little maintained his interest for very long, whether professional or personal.
The great conjurer's accomplishments were only surpassed by his failures. For all his precocity and prodigious talent, Welles ended up like most who do not burn out incandescently but rather fade away into a camera dissolve: as a mere celebrity, content to parody himself, reduced to hyperbolic bit parts and voiceovers for television commercials. Now-familiar parallels between Welles and the major characters he portrayed-Charles Foster Kane, Harry Lime, Falstaff-are elaborated upon with insight and framed within a playful narrative that tries to say something new about an iconoclastic figure. The nexus of real life and reel fiction is Thomson's purview.
Perhaps Thomson's is the most aptly titled book on Welles, for "rosebud," that recurrent trope in Citizen Kane, is as elusive and enigmatic as the man himself. The lessons of Kane are learned: no one word can sum up a man's life. The best this, and all other biographies, can do is arrive at it obliquely. Thomson's attempt will intrigue any reader even vaguely interested in this legend at large.
Jayne Plymale-Jackson is a freelance writer in Athens, Georgia.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.