Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band’ by Simon Callow

‘Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band’, by Simon Callow
Review by Christopher Silvester

One-Man Band shares its title with that of an unfinished Welles documentary film, a series of comic segments about life in Britain filmed between 1968 and 1971, and aptly evokes his career-long battle for freedom from studio control. This battle brought chaos, but a chaos that for his biographer “was often invigorating, life-affirming, liberating — even necessary”. Welles is best understood, Callow argues, not as a frustrated director who worked in that role far too infrequently but as a Romantic artist, “a force of nature, ablaze with energy”, unceasingly experimental, “always trying to storm the citadel of creativity” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee00d138-990e-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html