![]() ![]() ![]() Pauline Kael’s long essay “Raising Kane,” which appeared in this magazine, in 1971, propagated that view: she praised “Kane” effusively but attributed many of its best features to the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and other collaborators. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, the author of the 2007 book “Discovering Orson Welles,” observes that commentary tends to fall into “partisan” and “adversarial” categories-adversarial meaning a tendency to celebrate the early work while detecting portents of disaster. The video points to a decades-old fissure in the reputation of Welles, whose centennial fell on May 6th. ![]() This is largely how today’s culture has chosen to remember Welles: as a pompous wreck, a man who peaked early and then devolved into hackwork and bloated fiascos. What’s striking about the video is its popularity. The most popular Orson Welles video on YouTube, edging out the trailer for “Citizen Kane” and “The War of the Worlds” broadcast of 1938, is called “Orson Welles Drunk Outtake.” It shows him slurring his way through one of those ads in which he intoned, “Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time.” Whether he was drunk, experiencing the effects of medication (he suffered from diabetes and other ailments), or simply very tired is immaterial. ![]() Welles causes endless trouble because of his unstable place in the American cultural hierarchy of high and low. ![]()
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