Rogue and genius Orson Welles at the Brattle BY STEVE VINEBERG
	"Orson Welles: Rogue Genius" At the Brattle Theatre through August 16.

The two greatest pioneers in the history of American movies, D.W. Griffith in the silent era and Orson Welles in the age of the talkies, were profoundly divided artists who sat on the cusp between romanticism and modernism. Griffith virtually invented the movies, bringing the theater into the technological age and revolutionizing the way in which audiences read the meaning of drama. But his gods were Dickens, Hardy, and Whitman, his theatrical experience was the melodramas of the 19th century, and his stories were old-fashioned and sententious, though — like those of Dickens — they were brought to throbbing life by a combination of technique and feeling. Welles, the subject of a summer-long retrospective at the Brattle, forged a new vocabulary for sound film, though it had been in existence for a decade and a half by the time he entered it, in 1941. He was young enough (26) and prodigious enough (he’d already had daring triumphs on Broadway and on the radio) to believe he could make up new rules, both for how the camera captured a story and how the soundtrack filtered it, and he was right. Most famously, he and his first cinematographers, Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez, adapted the deep-focus lens Renoir and William Wyler had experimented with — that great breakthrough for realists — to create unprecedented expressionist images, distorting the foreground while elongating the perspective.

Yet the material Welles yearned most fervently to bring to the screen was classical: Shakespeare, whom he returned to again and again, and Don Quixote, which he tried unsuccessfully for decades to complete a movie of. And he was drawn to eulogies for the old ways. The hero of his most famous film — Citizen Kane (July 9-11), the work that put him on the map, the debut picture no one has ever surpassed — is a newspaper magnate who helps to shape America’s entrée into the 20th century but winds up a recluse in a Gothic mansion on an estate named after a great romantic poem (Xanadu, from Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan"). His second — and, I think, greatest — movie, The Magnificent Ambersons (July 9-11), is the story of an aristocratic family first rendered irrelevant and then crushed by the advent of the automobile age, and the film’s attitude toward the march of progress is deeply ambivalent. The heroes of his other masterpieces, Touch of Evil (July 12) and Chimes at Midnight (an amalgam of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, shaped around Falstaff), are flawed, foolish men who cling to the old ways and are brought low in the end. It’s no coincidence that both characters are played — magnificently — by Welles himself.

Chimes at Midnight is conspicuously absent from the Brattle series, which includes every other major film Welles directed, as well as Carol Reed’s 1949 The Third Man (August 13-16), in which he played the captivating, conscienceless Harry Lime. (It’s the most celebrated performance he ever gave for another filmmaker.) Most of the films, including that one, are being presented either in restored 35mm prints or in prints that have been refurbished within the last several years, so the tribute is felicitously timed. The sharpened black-and-white contrasts remind us both of how much Welles owed visually to the legacy of the German expressionists and of how truly eccentric he was. Take his most conventional picture, The Stranger (August 13 and 14), which he released in 1946. A melodrama about the pursuit of a Nazi war criminal (Welles) who’s managed to camouflage himself as a high-school teacher in a cozy Connecticut town, it’s the only one of his movies that he had no hand in writing, and it bears a strong narrative resemblance to a number of other thrillers of its era, most notably Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. But its feverish final scenes, where both the Nazi and his innocent wife (Loretta Young), who is suddenly confronted with the truth about his past, begin to come apart, have a haunted, jagged quality. And even Hitchcock wouldn’t have had the nerve to stage the Nazi’s death in so wildly gothic a style.

The other films are much, much weirder. Both Touch of Evil and Confidential Report (a/k/a Mr. Arkadin, August 2), released in 1955 and 1958, respectively, in the days when Welles found it increasingly difficult to get hired, put oddball ensembles to work on labyrinthine mysteries that are also journeys into nightmarish realms. Confidential Report, in which Welles plays a man of unimaginable wealth and power who hires a young adventurer (Robert Arden) to uncover his clandestine history, is a baffling failure. But it does have memorable cameos by Mischa Auer as the proprietor of a flea circus who feeds his performing fleas on his own blood and Michael Redgrave playing a Polish antiquarian as if he were Fagin in Oliver Twist. Set in a shady enclave encompassing both sides of the California-Mexico border, Touch of Evil features Mercedes McCambridge as a menacing lesbian, Dennis Weaver as a spacy motel clerk, and Marlene Dietrich as a Gypsy brothel keeper famous for her chili. It works in all the ways Confidential Report doesn’t: it’s a layered, unresolved character study — of a corrupt cop named Hank Quinlan (Welles) — and it really creeps you out. McCambridge and her gang dope the wife (Janet Leigh) of the federal agent (Charlton Heston) investigating a pair of murders, and when she wakes up, stoned out of her head, she sees a corpse hanging upside down over her bed. It’s the most terrifying sequence Welles ever shot.

It would be tough to choose the quirkiest. Most aficionados would probably go with the hall-of-mirrors shoot-out at the end of The Lady from Shanghai (August 15-16), a movie made with so much temperament and florid visual imagination that you can enjoy it thoroughly without believing a word of it, from Welles’s Irish brogue to Rita Hayworth’s gleaming blonde femme fatale. You retain more of it than you do of many much better pictures, though: Everett Sloane with his twin canes, arching his back as he slithers across the screen and hissing his pet name for Hayworth, "lover," as if it were a curse; Glenn Anders with his sweaty face and diseased cackle; the secret lovers’ meeting in the San Francisco aquarium, where bloated fish glide silently behind Welles and Hayworth. But there’s also the scene in The Trial (July 26) where Anthony Perkins as Joseph K. races through a corridor where slats narrow the light so it comes through ghostly and tubular and screeching schoolgirls try to poke at him. The Trial doesn’t work overall, but it’s an audacious attempt at finding a Cold War–era visual equivalent to Kafka’s text. Immense, deserted apartment complexes define the urban landscape, and aging men in overcoats with lost expressions on their faces, the remnants of their bourgeois respectability slipping away, line the courtrooms and law offices, awaiting some turn in their impenetrable cases.

Nothing Welles made is more unconventional than his two Shakespeare tragedies, the 1948 Macbeth (August 9) and the 1952 Othello (July 19). I’m not wild about the first, a kind of pre-civilized, Braveheart version where everyone speaks with a Scots accent. But it has its glories — Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane (not quite in a class with Kurosawa’s in Throne of Blood, but splendid nonetheless), Banquo and Fleance dwarfed by a sky pebbled with stars, and handsome, forthright Dan O’Herlihy, with his poetic command of the language, as Macduff. Welles adores the Bard, but he’s no respecter of orthodoxies, literary or theatrical. He carves up the text, throwing hunks of it out and stitching the rest back together, sometimes altering the order of sequences or breaking up famous soliloquies or addressing lines to characters who aren’t normally in the scenes where those lines occur. It would drive a purist mad. But in Othello, which begins at the end, with the deaths of Othello (Welles) and Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), and boils the play down to 90 minutes, the retooling is inspired. Only three or four Shakespeare movies (they include Chimes at Midnight) are as great as this one, with its Baroque-Expressionist use of shadow and strange camera angles, its lush, waterlogged look, and its intricate entrapment motif — suggested, one presumes, by the venomous promise of Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) that he will "ensnare" Cassio (Michael Lawrence) and out of Desdemona’s virtue "make the net that shall enmesh them all." The offer of Othello on the big screen is sufficient excuse for a Welles festival. As it happens, though, there are at least half a dozen other reasons.