Last weekend I went to see the Orson Welles expo at the cinematheque. The show traces Welles’ entire cinematic career, from Hollywood wunderkind to itinerant filmmaker and advertiser of wine and cameras. I loved it.

There are many good artefacts in there from his career. A series of funhouse mirrors setting up the shootout in Lady From Shanghai; the microphone used for the famous War of The Worlds radio broadcast. There is a big poster of that famous photograph of Welles as Harry Lime from The Third Man looking down the through the Viennese sewers. The movie is set in post-war Vienna, and I was lucky enough to see it for the first time actually in Vienna, when I travelled there as a student in the early 1990s. And many little things that I didn’t know; for instance, Welles had lined up a complete production of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ but it was cancelled at the last minute by RKO. He loved costumes and make-up; one of his earliest roles he played an extravagantly aged old man.

Wonderfully, at the exit just as you leave the show is a screen showing clips from Welles’ films, including the immortal final sequence from Touch of Evil where Marlene Dietrich intones in her smoky German baritone that he was “Some kind of a man”.

An excellent show!