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“... doted on young Gore), his serio-comic encounters with Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Orson Welles, and his holidays in the sinister sunlight of Hollywood as a hired hand (there’s still controversy about how much homoeroticism he snuck into the screenplay of Ben-Hur – ‘I suspect that Heston does not know to this day what luridness we ...”

“... come from acting to directing’. Thereby erasing at a stroke D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. To say nothing of Chaplin. But, as Gareth Evans told the faithful few at the London College of Communication, performance spaces kindly disposed towards historic films were disappearing fast in the swinish rush to inflate ...”

“... of being involved in a bank robbery,’ the voiceover began. The voice sounded like a bad Orson Welles imitation and the cinematography was pretty rudimentary, but the over-the-shoulder point of view worked uncannily well, and even at the back of the room I felt instantly present in the situation. Through the windscreen, you watch the suspicious ...”

“... would use to conclude his own film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic ...”

“... on him, from the radical Huey Long of Louisiana to the conservative Joe Robinson of Arkansas. ‘Orson, you and I are the two greatest actors in America,’ he told Orson Welles. FDR’s acting talents were very soon challenged by events. The sense of paralysis that gripped the Hoover administration during its last ...”

“... 2012, the Sight & Sound poll was urged on by a feeling that we’d all had enough of Citizen Kane. Welles’s film had been voted the best ever from 1962 to 2002. Few felt that the verdict had been unjust, but in a young medium was it proper for the champ to be a pensioner? Didn’t cinephiles deserve a more mercurial model, made in their lifetime? But the new ...”

“... war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema. Politics was not an all-encompassing consideration, for the Occupation was over, and the Cold War had not quite begun. In the short space of time since the Liberation, Beauvoir had established herself as a writer and ...”

“... first book, He That Plays the King, written when he was 23 and tapped for glory with a foreword by Orson Welles. His triumphant stint as theatre columnist for the Observer. His championing of Look Back in Anger, the play that blew the tea cosies off the English stage and became the rude manifesto of the Angry Young Men. His rock-’em, sock-’em first ...”

“... within which photographed people can be something more than mere shapes in front of a camera. Orson Welles said that if Eastwood had not directed The Outlaw Josey Wales, everyone would have called it a classic. Everyone would probably have been right. The film hangs in the mind for all kinds of reasons, and it gathers, as only the best movies do, its ...”

“... The Third Man (1949), Anna (Alida Valli) and Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) wait for Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in the Café Marc Aurel. An empty booth glows faintly behind Anna, in the depth of the shot, as she paces restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with ...”

“... which Shakespeare would be a virtual stranger. The talkies’ Macbeth was played by the art-house Orson Welles rather than the barnstorming John Wayne, and Denzel Washington’s film-star Brutus is the exception rather than the rule. The Americanisation of Shakespeare took other routes: in the definitively national genre of the conspiracy theory, for ...”

“... to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.’Keaton’s comic outline was as carefully judged as his pratfalls. On his first day in front of a camera, to separate himself from the ...”

“... own right, notorious for the insolence with which he treated such fellow performers as Al Jolson, Orson Welles and W.C. Fields. When, late in life, Bergen became the father of a flesh and blood child called Candice, he whimsically brought her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen ...”

“... Who, now, watches The Long, Hot Summer, a clunking melodrama from 1958 notable only for a cameo by Orson Welles? They were no Bogart and Bacall: all of Newman’s most successful films – Cool Hand Luke, The Verdict, Hud, The Sting – were made without Woodward.One of the documentary’s recurring themes is that although Woodward had more dramatic ...”

“... as Penman puts it, an ‘amalgam of Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sid Vicious and Orson Welles’. By 1978, when he made his contribution to Germany in Autumn, a portmanteau film about the crisis caused by the Red Army Faction’s final, suicidal actions, he was famous enough to appear simply as himself, to argue cruelly with his ...”