The boy wonder who became the great, wandering titan of international cinema, writer-director-actor and all-around force of nature Orson Welles began his filmmaking career with some of the most dazzling and innovative opuses ever made within the Hollywood studio system—but his vision was always too iconoclastic, too grand to be constrained by the limitations of commercial moviemaking. Roaming the world—from South America to Europe—in search of the financial and artistic freedom to realize his often quixotic ambitions, Welles let his boundless visual imagination run riot in defiantly personal dream projects like the byzantine thriller Mr. Arkadin, the monumental Shakespeare adaptation Chimes at Midnight, and the trickster meta-documentary F for Fake. Relentlessly fascinated by questions of free will, human fallibility, and the line between illusion and truth, many of Welles’s lofty, brilliant films have, like the man himself, passed into the realm of myth.
Directed by Orson Welles • 1946 • United States
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles
Following the back-to-back masterpieces of CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, Orson Welles next applied his once-in-a-generation genius to the suspense film, crafting an unsettling p...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1955 • United States
Starring Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden
Orson Welles’s MR. ARKADIN (a.k.a. CONFIDENTIAL REPORT) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a cold-war ...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1955 • United States
Starring Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden
Orson Welles’s MR. ARKADIN (a.k.a. CONFIDENTIAL REPORT) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a cold-war ...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1955 • United States
Starring Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden
Orson Welles’s MR. ARKADIN (a.k.a. CONFIDENTIAL REPORT) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a cold-war ...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1966 • Spain, Switzerland
Starring Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, Jeanne Moreau
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s extraordinary cinematic career, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was the culmination of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s ultimate rapscallion,...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1968 • France
Starring Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, Roger Coggio
Orson Welles' first color film and final completed fictional feature, THE IMMORTAL STORY is a moving and wistful adaptation of a tale by Isak Dinesen. Welles stars as a wealthy merchant in nineteenth-cent...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1975 • France, Iran, Germany
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illu...
