Orson Welles in Italy
"This is a path-breaking study that will be useful both to Welles scholars and to students of Italian cinema." —James O. Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles"Alberto Anile’s Orson Welles In Italy is a key corrective resource for an under-examined portion of Welles’s career and life. Anile’s extended examination of the disjointed production of Othello alone—Welles’s only 'Italian' film—is worth the price, as it relates the frustrating, even maddening chaos in which Welles was obliged to work, and in spite of which he was still able to produce such a fine, inventive film." —PopMatters"Orson Welles in Italy recounts, in detail and with great panache, not the beginnings of the myth of the slipping career but its first full development...The most interesting aspect of the book perhaps is its account of Welles’s critical reputation in Italy, the way he managed to disappoint and annoy authoritative judges on the right and the left, neither side being ready for what were seen as American excesses of visual style. Meanwhile, back home, Welles was increasingly suspected of engaging in un-American activities." —New York Review of Books"[I]t is remarkable that Alberto Anile has managed to spot a niche that previous biographers have neglected. The gap in the record is the six year period between 1947-53, when Welles was based in Italy… It makes for a tale packed with vivid and intriguing vignettes…By focusing exclusively on this interlude in Welles’s career, Anile manages to capture something of the essence of his talent and personality—that mix of preternatural genius, wit and narcissistic, self-defeating excess—and something too of the fizzing glamour of film and celebrity industries of post-war Rome...The book is highly entertaining and at times illuminating, expertly translated and introduced by Marcus Perryman." —Times Literary Supplement"Anile's Orson Welles in Italy (translated from the Italian original of 2006) takes us back to the invention of Welles' independent methods after the Second World War. Anile's research into contemporaneous Italian sources adds degrees of nuance to a largely mythical period in Welles' career." —Matthew Asprey Gear, Senses of Cinema"[T]his is a fine work.... Highly recommended." —Choice"Anile's carefully documented and illustrated chronicle promises to overturn—or at the very least, challenge—certain received ideas about Welles's European reputation by revealing that it was in some ways as checkered and as ambivalent as his reputation in the US." —Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Discovering Orson Welles