(Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection)
Orson Welles Movies Ranked by Tomatometer
Orson Welles made the greatest directorial debut ever with 1941’s Citizen Kane, the story of the life and death of media magnate Charles Foster Kane. It’s a drama epic in dramatic and temporal scope, awash in narrative and moral ambiguity, and groundbreaking camerawork that expanded the cinematic language. Welles, who rose to fame through radio and theater (his 1938 adaptation broadcast of The War of the Worlds is mythologized for creating an actual Martian invasion panic), followed up with 1942’s family drama The Magnificent Ambersons. The film, which is celebrating its 80th anniversary, was taken away from Welles during editing. Studio financer RKO destroyed roughly a third of the footage, yet the 88-minute final film is still a masterpiece.
Welles closed out the ’40s with noir The Lady from Shanghai, which he co-starred in with Rita Hayworth. He made the final great classic noir Touch of Evil, though he was also forced out of the edit room there by Universal. Welles’ revolutionary methods and uncompromising perfectionism led to frequent wrestling with external forces and powers, with multiple films released posthumously, including 1993’s It’s All True (a documentary on his unfinished three-part South American epic), Hopper/Welles (a conversation with Dennis Hopper), and The Other Side of the Wind, completed and released in 2018.
Welles slowed down as a director in the decade before his death in 1985, but had released major works in 1970s (the intricate meta-documentary F for Fake) and the 1960s (adaptations of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Shakespeare’s Falstaff, released in America as Chimes at Midnight). —Alex Vo
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