Orson Welles' Directed Films Ranked Worst To Best

Surveying Welles' filmography as a whole, some trends emerge. It's easy to see that Welles was a fan of Shakespeare, particularly the Bard's characters who author their own undoing. Whenever Welles portrays relationships, his characters evince betrayal, hypocrisy, and deception. He returns to the turn of the 19th into the 20th century repeatedly, an unexpectedly early era for a man born in 1915.

He was also remarkably prolific. Even after winnowing his filmography down to the projects he directed, this article doesn't have room to consider all the short films and television productions Welles made, nor all the feature films he directed that never saw completion. In addition, while it might seem ironic given Welles' conflicted feelings about authorial attribution, I've separated out films directed by Welles that were decisively completed by other hands (to a larger degree than regular studio interference) by placing them lower on this list.

Nearly half a dozen edits of "Mr. Arkadin" were released during Welles' lifetime, but the Criterion edit of 2006 arguably comes closest to capturing his intent. It was worth the effort, because "Mr. Arkadin" spins a world-spanning mystery about a self-made man's need to conceal the nefarious backstory behind his fortune, with every step closer to the truth plunging our point-of-view investigator that much deeper into trouble.

As much as revealing Gregory Arkadin's disreputable connections and misdeeds might inconvenience his mutually beneficial dealings with polite society, Arkadin is driven more fiercely by his fears of losing the love of his good-hearted daughter Raina. Welles crafts both a compellingly overpowering persona in the globe-bestriding titan of industry and a precisely paced plot that allows both the film's narrator and audiences to realize the existential level of peril our protagonist is in.

Credit to Welles' former protégé, "The Last Picture Show" director Peter Bogdanovich, for contributing to the cohesion of the Criterion edit.

Welles was originally set to direct "Journey into Fear," and contributed to both its script and its casting, but his work on "The Magnificent Ambersons" forced him to step aside for Norman Foster to assume directing duties. The end result is a nifty Hitchcock-esque World War II-era espionage caper that's more clever than meaningful, with a tendency to telegraph its plot twists, except when employing questionably-merited tropes such as a misleading framing sequence.

Joseph Cotten again earns audiences' sympathies by playing one of fate's patsies, and the film rolls forward with the terrible, relentless momentum of that one bad day that never ends. It's solidly okay as Welles-lite fare, but it's hard not to notice that Orson as Col. Haki, head of the Turkish secret police, resembles a Joseph Stalin impression by way of Zsa Zsa Gábor, complete with silly hat; similarly, Dolores del Río's stage outfit appears to be lifted straight from the Cheetah in the Golden Age Wonder Woman comics.

In adapting Franz Kafka's early 20th-century novel of the same name, Welles' revisions of the source text result in a film that feels ironically more authentic to the writing that inspired it. While Kafka wrote "The Trial" between 1914 and 1915, Welles reflects two major developments of the post-war 20th century by adding a room-sized UNIVAC-style computer to the workplace of accused office worker Josef K., who's executed not by a knife, as in the novel, but with a dynamite blast that forms a mushroom cloud, echoing a nuclear explosion.

Even as Welles retained the wrong-side-of-the-Iron-Curtain political flavor of Kafka's novel by filming much of it in Yugoslavia, he made the tale's setting nebulous by casting the all-American Anthony Perkins as our persecuted protagonist Josef K. Having actors with New York and California accents deliver lines from absurdist eastern European literature makes their gaslighting dialogue sound a lot like the laugh-track exchanges of "Seinfeld." Welles even told Perkins to treat "The Trial" like a black comedy, although the extended scenes of Josef K. seeking to escape the halls of government, whose ill-defined boundaries seem ever-present, are stifling enough to make me physically queasy.

Given Welles' empathy for oppressed minorities, it's no surprise that he performed Shylock's monologue from "The Merchant of Venice" on "The Dean Martin Show" in 1968, nor that his 1951 film adaptation of "Othello" showed such sympathy for its title character, whom Welles portrayed as an outsider in Venetian society even beyond his Moorish heritage.

"Filming Othello" was recorded roughly a quarter-century after "Othello," but it's worth watching both films, not only for Welles' insights into the characters and their dynamics, but also to appreciate how Welles (unlike Jesús Franco) weaved together footage filmed years apart so well that the edited film plays as a seamless whole.

Welles achieved authenticity in "Othello" by using whatever settings were available, leading to Roderigo's murder unfolding in a Turkish bathhouse, a departure from Shakespeare's text, while also reflecting the deterioration of Othello's outlook by shooting the film's settings as progressively more encroaching and claustrophobic. And Welles invited his "Othello" costars Micheál Mac Liammóir (Iago) and Hilton Edwards (Brabantio) to dialogue over dinner in "Finding Othello," as they considered the intersections of tragedy and gender roles, with interpretations ranging from antiquated to avant-garde.

In spite of some glaring missteps, including Welles' cringe-worthy attempt at an Irish accent and Rita Hayworth ditching her ravishing red tresses for a bleached blonde bob, "The Lady from Shanghai" has only grown in critical esteem over time, and deservedly so. Not only was its ambience bolstered by being one of the first major films out of Hollywood to be shot almost entirely on location — in Acapulco, Pie de la Cuesta, Sausalito, and San Francisco — but the disintegration in real time of Welles and Hayworth's already estranged marriage lent an unintended frisson to the ill-advised affair between their star-crossed characters.

The succession of reveals and switchbacks in "The Lady from Shanghai" is well-timed and subtly seeded enough to qualify the film as a smart noir mystery, and its final-act funhouse visuals imbue the already dramatically heightened circumstances with a dreamlike surrealism, but its best and most class-conscious moments came from Welles' hired-hand wanderer taking stock of the casual cruelties that the rich inflict upon those whose rely on their favors to survive.

Welles harbored the wistful nostalgia of an old man even in his youth, so while his film adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel functioned as a judgment upon the entitled culture of 19th century America's equivalent of the "landed gentry," so too did it serve as an elegy for what the film presents as the elegant simplicity of the pre-automobile era.

Tim Holt plays George Amberson Minafer as a self-centered, reactionary terror of a man-child, whose mulish refusal to concede the march of progress marks many of his follies and presages his downfall. But even Eugene Morgan (welcome back to the list, Joseph Cotten), the automobile manufacturer who courts George's mother, acknowledges that not all the changes wrought by motor vehicles are likely to be positive.

In retrospect, the studio-edited curtailments of Welles' intended narrative appear as crude as an "Itchy and Scratchy" title card reading "George Amberson Minafer died on the way back to his home planet," but there's a quiet grace in how George's long-awaited comeuppance only occurs when no one is left to see it — even the audience is deprived of the sight of his face as it happens.

When Orson Welles presents a documentary about frauds and con artists, pay attention to his precise words, lest you discover that you've been duped.

What begins as a biography of Hungarian professional art forger Elmyr de Hory digresses into an examination of de Hory's biographer, Clifford Irving, who himself got caught hoaxing an autobiography of Howard Hughes. Along the way, Welles recalls how he got an acting job in Ireland by falsely claiming to be already famous in New York, and how he made misleading use of simulated news reports to make his 1938 "The War of the Worlds" radio drama seem more real, before he wraps up with an anecdote involving his protégé, Oja Kodar, and the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

It's up to you to keep track of which parts are true, but when Welles' interviews yield priceless lines like de Hory saying, "To be Hungarian, it is not a nationality, it is a profession," you'll find yourself glad just to bask in the milieu of their discourse.