Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective.

By Marguerite H. Rippy.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, April 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0-8093-2912-0, $35. 248 pages.

Review by Chris Pallant, Bangor University, United Kingdom

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective proves a useful addition to film scholarship, particularly in its dissection of the Wellesian star persona. Divided into four chapters, Rippy’s study details the unfinished Life of Christ, Heart of Darkness, and It’s All True RKO projects, while also spending time discussing Welles’s early radio work, his First Person Singular performances, and the completed Citizen Kane (1941).

Welles’s name commonly features in debates concerning the film auteur, yet Rippy argues that the maverick figure be reconceived as a “star director,” in order “to emphasise the director’s commercial connection to a work while avoiding the tendency to assign the director sole artistic authority” (3). Early in the study, Rippy illustrates how, in addition to being one of the first star directors, Welles, by revealing specific artistic constants, which RKO then publicized, anticipates many of the strategies of contemporary branding. The postmodern nature of the Welles brand is most visible in its malleability. Rippy writes: “The essence of the Welles creation tale is that he is a cosmopolitan genius. The specifics of the tale vary according to the audience (or potential consumer)” (23-24). Ultimately, the decentered nature of the Welles brand, which included a proclivity towards both commercial and commercially unpalatable ventures, led not only to the abandonment of projects such as Life of Christ, but also his break with RKO.

Later in the study, Rippy discusses the unfinished It’s All True, arguing that, because of its well documented incompletion, the project provides a rare insight into the politics of national identity and Hollywood commerce in the mid 1900s. Welles was, albeit unintentionally, central in orchestrating one of the most damaging exploitations of South America during this period. In a typically uncompromising attempt to fuse truth and fiction during the production of It’s All True, Welles sought to recreate a famous civil rights event, where four jangadeiros (impoverished Brazilian sea fishermen) sailed to Rio de Janeiro to meet President Vargas. As Rippy observes, while Welles’s decision to hire the four original jangadeiros would have undoubtedly have been part of a scheme to romanticize their plight, it “still held the potential to let poverty speak for itself, a revolutionary concept for mainstream Hollywood” (119). However, during an ocean shoot, the boat carrying the four capsized, resulting in the death of Manoel Olimpio Meira—known as Jacaré to the jangadeiros.

Welles has been the subject of much scholarly interest. The Films of Orson Welles, (Robert Garis, 2004), Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios (Clinton Heylin, 2005), and Discovering Orson Welles (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2007), have recently added to earlier editions such as Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Simon Callow, 1996) and This is Orson Welles (Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1998). The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952 (Paul Heyer, 2005) and and It's all True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey (Catherine L. Benamou, 2007), partially anticipate Rippy’s study, yet neither offers such a consistently postmodern revision of the star director. In addition to demonstrating an awareness of current research, Rippy also makes good use of archival material. Ultimately, despite Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects suffering from some minor editorial lapses (resulting in occasional repetition), Rippy’s text provides a good starting point for those wishing to learn more about Welles’s unconventional early career.

Interestingly, Rippy discusses how recent projects, such as The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004), War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005), and The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996-present), reveal artistic and ideological debts to Welles’s work. There is room, perhaps, to extend this debate to include figures such as Sacha Baron Cohen, who, at times, also exhibits a strong inclination towards Wellesian “truthiness”—the negotiation of the line between news and entertainment. Rippy closes by identifying how contemporary media have provided viewers with the means to return to Welles’s unfinished texts, and, rather than seek ways to “complete” them, enjoy their hermeneutic freedom. Welles’s unfinished projects are, as Rippy concludes, ideally suited for “interactive presentation as a series of fragmentary texts, audio files, correspondence, photographs, interviews, blogs, storyboards, and media ephemera” (169).