Eau d'Orson

[Note: I am by no means a film student or critic, and I certainly am not a Wellesian expert. These are the inexperienced impressions of a fairly new Orson Welles fan.]

Orson Welles [2] has the reputation of being one of the earliest American auteurs known for elevating his films to an artform. It's almost inconceivable that his ultra modern camera techniques, which have retained a startling freshness that hasn't diminished with age, first graced theater screens almost seventy years ago. His innovative camera work stands out as his cinematic signature: endless long-distance shots, daring single-shot pans, and light trickery.

Welles populates his world with smugglers of illegal goods, black mailers, crooked cops, murderers, and immoral men of importance who will stop at nothing to get ahead. His aren't your average b-movie baddies. Even the beautiful women are neither the typical two-faced seductresses nor the helpless dames of the noir genre. There's a fragility that the hardened femme fatale eschews tempered with a worldliness to which truly distressed damsels cannot relate. And, of course, there are the innocent men who collide with these characters, and stumble away, dazed, by the stingle of madness. Welles' characters regularly toe the line between humanity and insanity. Perversity lurks behind many a thin veil of prosthetics, masks, and facial hair, just barely concealing the character's lunacy.