OK, so Orson Welles peaked at 26, but nobody has ever had a better cinematic peak.
Welles would be considered a genius if his movie career were judged on how it began, with "Citizen Kane" widely considered the best movie ever made and the one that established American movies as art. Instead, he's remembered for the end of his career. Having endured a decadeslong fall from that height, he had become a big fat loser who shilled, while drunk, for a crummy vineyard that, in its much-lampooned catchphrase, pledged to "sell no wine before its time."
Either way of looking at Welles shortchanges the fact that his movie career had a pretty incredible middle. While it's possible he gets too much credit for "Citizen Kane" — as alleged by the movie "Mank," which debuts Friday on Netflix with Tom Burke playing Welles — the actor/writer/producer/director/vino huckster left plenty of evidence that he was extraordinary at each of those jobs.
There is a poetic justice in Welles being known for his cinematic start, because he was a master of beginnings. It's not just "Touch of Evil," in which he and cinematographer Russell Metty crafted the most famous opening scene in cinema, a three-minute sequence that swoops all around a Mexican town, introducing us to several characters while also putting us on the edges of our seats with a literal ticking bomb. There's also "Citizen Kane," which starts at the end of the story with the famously cryptic line, "Rosebud."
Welles also excelled at beginnings in the sense of getting projects off the ground. Several of his films were begun but never completed — at least not in the way he intended — because he ran out of money, interest or both. Most dramatically, that applies to "The Other Side of the Wind." Shot in the early 1970s, "Wind" finally hit theaters 40 years later, long after Welles died, in a version that only hints at what interested him about the story.
Technically, his "Othello" was finished, but it took Welles three years and all his own money to do it, and with his actors often unavailable during those years, he ended up having to overdub most of their dialogue, turning a promising adaptation into a joke.
That happened to many of his projects, some of which withstood production rigors better than others (many are streaming via the Criterion Channel). Unfortunately for this movie great who often couldn't close the deal, Welles' legacy in Hollywood is that it's not where you start; it's where you finish.
