Citizen Rogers
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Now this is pleasant. I'm sitting in the kitchen, waiting while the dinner I'm cooking the kids readies itself in the oven. There's a freshly-poured Oranjeboom maintaining a creamy head by my side and Bob Harris is playing some great country music on Radio 2.
In the latest TLS that was waiting for me when I came home this evening there is a review by Peter Lambert of a couple of recent books on Orson Welles, a director - nay, man - now almost more famous for his failures than for the products of his genius. As always in the TLS the reviews pack a lot of opinion and information into a small space but these sentences had me trying to spray Oranjeboom across the kitchen work surface.
The books reviewed were:
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: A Casebook edited by James Naremore
Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood studios by Clinton Heylin
In the latest TLS that was waiting for me when I came home this evening there is a review by Peter Lambert of a couple of recent books on Orson Welles, a director - nay, man - now almost more famous for his failures than for the products of his genius. As always in the TLS the reviews pack a lot of opinion and information into a small space but these sentences had me trying to spray Oranjeboom across the kitchen work surface.
Some of this material will be familiar to Welles afficianados, but there are surprises, among them the fact that his protagonist was originally called Charles Foster Rogers. Readers can only speculate what sort of film Citizen Rogers would have been, and indeed what type of audience it might have attracted.
The books reviewed were:
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: A Casebook edited by James Naremore
Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood studios by Clinton Heylin
