Orson Welles tribute to take place at Jerusalem Cinematheque

By HANNAH BROWN

JANUARY 31, 2024 04:40

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (photo credit: YES) — Orson Welles in Citizen Kane

(photo credit: YES)

Several of Welles’s works will be the subject of a tribute at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, starting on February 5 and running throughout the month.

Many consider Orson Welles’s movie, Citizen Kane, to be the greatest film of all time. It and several of Welles’s other works will be the subject of a tribute at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, starting on February 5 and running throughout the month.

Welles was all of 25 when he wrote (with Herman J. Mankiewicz, whom some film scholars believe deserved the lion’s share of the credit), directed, produced, and starred in the 1941 Citizen Kane, a complex story that was a fictionalized version of the life of media mogul William Randolph Hearst. If you’ve only seen it on television, you haven’t really seen it, so now’s the chance to catch it on the big screen.

Welles's notable films

Welles’s subsequent career never rose again to the heights of Kane, but he directed and starred in a number of notable films that will be included in the tribute. These include The Stranger (1946), in which Welles portrays an escaped Nazi posing as a small-town US schoolteacher, and it is one of the only US films of the period to discuss the Holocaust.

The Third Man, which was directed by Carol Reed and based on a novel by Graham Greene, is a fascinating mystery set in post-World War II Vienna, and features Welles in one of his greatest acting roles.

Still from Orson Welles's 'The Third Man' (credit: Flickr.com/Stowe Boyd)

Also on the program are The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an ambitious misfire; Lady from Shanghai, a twisty film noir starring Welles’s then-wife, Rita Hayworth; Touch of Evil (1958), which features Charlton Heston as a Mexican police investigator, Janet Leigh as his American bride, and Welles as a corrupt US police captain; Mr. Arkadin (1955), in which Welles plays an eccentric billionaire; The Trial (1962), an underrated adaptation of Kafka’s masterpiece; and his last film, F is for Fake (1973), a documentary about fraud.