Orson Welles, Volume 3 Vol. 3

In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic and all-inclusive survey of Orson Welles' life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex, contradictory artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the glorious triumphs and the spectacular failures of an almost impossibly ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another - theatre, radio, film, television - even, at one point, ballet - in each of which (except, perhaps ballet) his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed possibilities. The book begins with Welles' self-exile from America, and his realisation that he could only function to his own satisfaction as an independent film-maker, a one-man band, in fact, which committed him to a perpetual cycle of money-raising; by 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete, Mr Arkadin, the biggest conundrum in his output, and his masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, which enshrined his lifelong passion for the character of Sir John Falstaff and his creator, as well as his masterpiece in another genre, Touch of Evil, his one return to Hollywood, like all too many of