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Citizen Kane

Film in the United States

Film noir

Films about World War II

Flying saucers

Hayworth, Rita

Radio in the United States

Theater in the United States

The 1940s in America

Welles, Orson

by Charles L. P. Silet

Identification American film director, actor, writer, and producer

During the 1940’s, Orson Welles established himself as one of America’s premier filmmakers, although he stood outside the typical Hollywood mold. His film Citizen Kane is considered to be one of world cinema’s most important works.

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood with an enviable contract with RKO Pictures that gave him the freedom to make Citizen Kane (1941). The film, which he directed and starred in, demonstrated a creativity and innovation that challenged the conventions of the American studio system. Welles’s next film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which he directed and narrated, appeared on track to become equally important, but the director was asked to go to Brazil to shoot a film for the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. That project was intended to strengthen relationships among Western Hemisphere countries and to weaken Nazi influence in South America. Although Welles shot miles of film for the project, his film titled It’s All True was never completed. Meanwhile, during Welles’s absence in South America, the studio severely changed The Magnificent Ambersons and released it with little fanfare.

Orson Welles directing a scene in Citizen Kane.

ph_1940-Welles_Orson.jpg

(AP/Wide World Photos)

After The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles acted in the modest thriller Journey into Fear (1943). The film’s credits list Norman Foster as director, but Welles often is noted for performing some roles as codirector, and he cowrote the screenplay with Joseph Cotten. In 1946, he completed, as director, costar, and coscenarist, the melodrama The Stranger (1946), a film about a German war criminal hiding in an American small town. Again as both star and director, he made the film Macbeth (1948) for Republic Pictures, finishing it on a small budget in only twenty-one days, to prove that classic stories could be filmed cheaply and made accessible to the average filmgoer. Welles featured his wife, Rita Hayworth, in his next project, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), another crime film featuring the director’s signature stylistics and also starring Welles himself.

During the postwar years, Welles worked at a frantic pace as an actor both on the radio and in films, directing and producing for both stage and screen, and giving speeches, making radio broadcasts, and writing editorials and newspaper columns in support of progressive political causes. He moved to Europe in 1947 and for years acted in films while seeking money to finance his independent productions. He would eventually die without ever again achieving the success of Citizen Kane.

Impact

The Welles of the early 1940’s was young, confident, and a bit arrogant. Eventually he proved to be too independent, and after initial support from RKO he ran afoul of the bosses who ran the studios. The studio system was under various stresses by the end of the 1940’s, and Welles’s behavior within it became increasingly self-destructive. He became a legend with Citizen Kane, a film that was vital in establishing an independent voice within the American studio-controlled movie industry, but his achievement was not fully realized until years after the film’s release. His films contributed to the film movement later known as film noir and helped to shape its style and mood. Citizen Kane came at the beginning and Touch of Evil (1958) near the end of the classic noir period. Although most of Welles’s films do not directly address World War II, his political proclivities were strongly antifascist.

Further Reading

1 

Benamou, Catherine L. It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

2 

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Hello America. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.

3 

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Silet, Charles L. P. "Welles, Orson." The 1940s in America, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1940_162640701626.
APA 7th
Silet, C. L. (2010). Welles, Orson. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The 1940s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Silet, Charles L. P. "Welles, Orson." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The 1940s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.