Beginning Thursday and continuing through April 4, Oklahoma City Museum of Art celebrates the life of film director extraordinaire Orson Welles on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Birthday cake isn’t exactly appropriate for a guy who’s been dead for 30 years, so the alternative is seven of his incredible masterworks. If you’re any kind of a movie buff — and if you’re even still reading this, chances are you might be — don’t forgo the opportunity to see some of these masterpieces on the big screen.
Citizen Kane
7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 26
5:30 p.m. Friday, March 27
Welles was a 26-year-old figurative toast of Broadway in the early 1940s when movie executives came a-calling. After Welles’ Mercury Theatre had scared the bejesus out of the East Coast with its momentous radio production of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, movie moguls were willing to bet that the boy wonder could do amazing things in the Hollywood dream factory.
They didn’t know how right they would be. RKO Pictures gave Welles an unheard-of proposition: absolute creative control. He didn’t play it safe. In its thinly veiled portrait of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, 1941’s Citizen Kane drew the enmity of the Hearst machine.
It also happened to be a masterpiece, arguably the greatest of all time. It’s no exaggeration that Kane revolutionized the language of cinema, from dazzling deep-focus cinematography and bombastic camerawork to innovations in sound and an ingenious narrative structure. No wonder, then, that Welles had described the movie studio as “the greatest electric train set a boy ever had.”
The Magnificent Ambersons
8 p.m. Friday, March 27
The 1942 follow-up to Citizen Kane is lyrical, elegiac, absorbing and, hell, just about perfect. The qualifier came in post-production. Welles was in South America working on another project when RKO took control of the film, excised nearly an hour of footage and tacked on a different, ostensibly more audience-friendly ending. Even with that handicap, The Magnificent Ambersons is a masterful story of one family, buoyed by a number of Welles regulars — including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Erskine Sanford — giving stellar performances.
The Stranger
5 p.m. Saturday, March 28
The Stranger is probably the most conventional of Welles’ directorial efforts, which was the point at the time. After aggravating the Hollywood establishment with his cockiness, ambitiousness and disappointing box-office, the director needed to show he could deliver more straightforward entertainment. Even so, this remains a solid 1946 thriller featuring Welles himself as a Nazi spy. I don’t know why this flick would be included instead of, say, The Lady from Shanghai, but, then again, life is a mystery.
Othello
7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 2
OK, I haven’t seen this one. Or even read the play. But I have had pizza at Othello’s in Norman, if that counts.
Confidential Report
5:30 p.m. Friday, April 3
Confidential Report is certainly Welles’ weirdest movie, and not coincidentally his least comprehensible. As was so often the case, producers grew tired of the filmmaker’s seemingly endless editing and deprived him of a final cut. But this 1955 oddity, better known as Mr. Arkadin, has its grotesque charms, and it bears the imprimatur of Welles’ customary visual brilliance.
F for Fake
8 p.m. Friday, April 3
5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 4
2 p.m. Sunday, April 5
More of a lavish lark than a serious meditation on forgeries and fakes, this kinda-sorta 1973 documentary provided an irresistible opportunity for the great man to smoke cigars, wax poetic about magic and ogle leggy European babes. It’s also wildly entertaining.
Touch of Evil
5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 4
OKCMOA film curator Michael J. Anderson saved the best for last, at least in my book. 1958’s Touch of Evil (the first film ever shown in the museum’s Samuel Noble Roberts Theater, incidentally) is quintessential noir starring Welles — heavyset, jowly and chewing on candy bars — as a corrupt American police captain along the U.S.-Mexican border. His nemesis: Charlton Heston as the world’s least-convincing Mexican prosecutor.
Orson Welles was as A-list a director as there was, but the man was no slouch walking on the wild side. Touch of Evil is magnificently sleazy, a bit perverse and admirably overstuffed with B-movie goodness. The cast is an embarrassment of riches, at least once you get past the notion of Heston as Latino. Akim Tamiroff is a toupee-sporting worm of a baddie; Dennis Weaver takes nervousness to David Lynchian heights; Janet Leigh disrobes terrifically and Mercedes McCambridge appears as a dope-smoking gang member.
But the greatest performance is by Welles in the director’s chair. Extreme camera angles and at least three virtuoso scenes captured in single traveling shots — including a justly famous opening tracking shot — are among the reasons Touch of Evil can still thrill.
