The “worst movie” Orson Welles ever saw
Director Orson Welles was simply the living embodiment of the narrative arts. Known for his medium-changing contributions to film, theatre and radio, Welles consistently delivered some of the most significant efforts in storytelling, from the ultra-believable radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to his debut feature film Citizen Kane, which several cinema fans still consider to be one of the greatest movies ever made.
Welles, like any artist, had his own preferences when it came to his peers and previously named Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese and Warren Beatty to be his three favourite filmmakers. Interestingly, it’s likely that Welles himself had actually inspired each of those directors’ styles.
However, somewhat controversially, it seems as though Welles was no big fan of his fellow director Alfred Hitchcock, and went as far as to say one of his beloved films is actually the “worst movie” he ever saw. There’s a big love of Hitchcock’s works in the cinematic world, but it seems like Welles never really understood the hype.
“I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock,” Welles once said in an uncovered tape. “Particularly the late American movies… Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows”. Evidently, Welles felt that Hitchcock garnered a reputation that he wasn’t entirely deserving of.
As to Hitchcock’s worst, Welles said: “I saw one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen the other night, Rear Window… Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be”. The film arrived in 1954 with a screenplay written by John Michael Hayes based on a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich, ‘It Had to Be Murder’.
James Stewart stars in the lead role as a professional photographer who is recovering from a broken leg in his Greenwich Village apartment. Looking out the titular window from his abode, he watches several of his neighbours whilst becoming wrapped up in a murder mystery. Grace Kelly plays his socialite girlfriend, Lisa.
But Stewart’s performance did little to impress Welles, as though things weren’t bad enough concerning his overall reception of the film. “I’ll tell you what is astonishing,” he noted. “To discover that Jimmy Stewart can be a bad actor… Even Grace Kelly is better than Jimmy, who’s overacting.”
During those uncovered tape conversations, Welles also talked down on a number of his cinematic contemporary actors and directors, including Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy and Charlie Chaplin. But it looks like his biggest dislike was Hitchcock and his widely-admired Rear Window.
