Canongate £14.99 pp400

Painters paint. Writers write. Composers compose. But who are the movers behind the movies? It’s easy to talk of Monet’s Waterlilies or Mahler’s Ninth, but does it make sense to call, say, The Third Man a Carol Reed film? Reed was a passable journeyman who could sometimes push a story along, but nowhere else in his work do you find The Third Man’s expressively baroque sets, much less its portentous deep-focus camera work. It’s commonplace to say the movie is stolen by Orson Welles’s 10-minute walk-on, truer to say that the look and feel of the whole picture — those angular, claustrophobic compositions, that ironic, pleased-with-itself narration — derives from Welles’s example. Like Harry Lime, the penicillin-diluting racketeer he plays in the film, Welles infects The Third Man from opening titles to closing credits.

If he had had as much influence on the films that he directed, his place at the head of the Hollywood queue would be assured. Nobody could deny that the handful of pictures Welles masterminded — among them Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil — are made up of many great moments. Only in Citizen Kane, though, are the great moments uninterrupted by slipshod longueurs.

Welles rarely had the final say over how his movies looked and flowed. Too often, they were taken out of his hands and worked on by others. The Magnificent Ambersons was butchered so badly that, 40 years after its release, Welles was to be found weeping as it played on his motel television.

But don’t feel too sorry for him. If Welles was the author of his triumphs, he also engineered his own trials. Titian painted many of his pictures only in part, but he oversaw those sections that he didn’t paint to ensure that standards were maintained. Welles was never so sedulous. Although he loved barking orders on set, he was absent from the cutting room of many of his movies — too many for it to look like happenstance and not habit. Welles, as countless chat-show hosts would attest, was multifariously entertaining; he was never not performing. But the guy with the sticky tape aside, there is nobody to see you perform at the editing bench. A school report would have said he liked starting things but was less good at finishing them. Welles all but said it himself. Like Brutus, the character he thought himself born to play, Welles had learnt that the fault was not with the stars but with himself. Disaster had struck him so often, he told one biographer, it “look(s) like a character failing of mine”.

Try telling that to Clinton Heylin, Orson. The Welles bodied forth in this book is a Tinseltown Othello, an innocent dupe who falls victim to intrigues, deceptions and malignant envy. Welles, argues Heylin, “was undone by real people, with real motives, and by circumstances found in a single time and place — Hollywood at the end of its golden era”. Why so? Because Welles’s romantic individualism “represented the greatest threat to Hollywood’s way of making movies”.

Well, maybe. Welles did indeed have enemies, although he had done his best to earn their enmity. Mightily talented, he was also mightily arrogant. Many people dreamt of bringing him down a peg or two. But the idea that the Hollywood honchos tried to engineer his fall by tampering with his pictures is sweet nonsense. Making money was reason enough for them to meddle with any film. When they saw the first cut of The Magnificent Ambersons they didn’t believe audiences would like it. It may be that they were wrong in this. It may be that, had Welles been given his head — and all the time he needed — Ambersons as he conceived it would have made more money than the version that was actually released. But the fact remains that nobody cut Welles’s movie to ribbons in the hope of cutting him down to size. They cut the film because Welles himself was nowhere to be found.

Where was he? In Brazil, supposedly shooting a documentary, though he spent most of his time there fooling around on the radio. His crew knew nothing of his whereabouts. Heylin knows this story because he several times quotes approvingly from the bio-graphy that relates it. He also knows — and tells us he knows — that Welles was a depressive with a habit of disappearing for days at a time, especially after a shoot. But he cannot countenance the idea that Welles’s nature was essentially — perhaps necessarily, for a man whose achievements ranged so wide — dilatory, nor that such a nature was bound to drive Hollywood’s number-crunchers wild.

Alas, Welles never knew when to pick his fights. Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, the executive producer on Chimes at Midnight, marvelled at his director’s ability to misread situations: “Sometimes, when he could have asserted himself, he didn’t; and other times, for no good reason, he behaved like a bull in a china shop, smashing everything.” Charlton Heston, the lead in Touch of Evil, believed Welles suffered from “some kind of perverse, suicidal refusal to deal with the people . . . who are going to give him the money to make the movies”.

The simple fact is that Welles was too much of a one-man show ever to have achieved much in Hollywood’s collective environment. His enormous imagination was limited by its failure to see that the world outside it set limits of its own, that where art and money collide money will always win out. The director’s job, he once said, is to preside over accidents. Welles was responsible for some of Hollywood’s finest accidents. Whatever Heylin says, though, he was also responsible for some of its biggest mistakes. And he wouldn’t be half as lovable if he hadn’t been.

ON THE CHEAP

In the latter part of his career, Welles — cast adrift from Hollywood — was forced to adopt elaborate ruses to save money. In The Trial, for instance, he made use of relatively cheap long takes early in the film, and in Chimes at Midnight he worked on sets that were meant for another film entirely, Treasure Island.

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