Orson Welles

A brilliant, moving portrayal of an aristocratic American family in what many critics consider a masterpiece equal to Citizen Kane. Based on a novel by Booth Tarkington, the drama begins in the 1870s when the Amberson family is at the height of its wealth and prestige. But the day arrives when all the Ambersons are stunned by the truth of their financial ruin.

The crowning achievement of Orson Welles's extraordinary film career that was the culmination of the filmmaker's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff; the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV's wayward son Prince Hal, here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace.

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka's novel, Orson Welles₂s film casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, McCarthyism, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement, one of his boldest...