J. Hoberman writes:

Scarcely had Welles returned from Brazil than he married Rita Hayworth, soon to become Hollywood’s reigning sex symbol. His political engagement and new-found celebrity meant, as Callow notes, that ‘his endorsement and his oratory were widely sought by the many committees and councils, anti-Fascist, pro-second front, pro-labour, pro-education, to which the war had given a new relevance.’ Welles was strongly identified with the most progressive elements of the Democratic Party. Callow quotes an excoriation of institutionalised racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an actor, producer, writer, costumer, magician, Shakespearean editor and leading prodigy of our generation, and then out of our mail fluttered an announcement that he was . . . delivering an oration called “The Nature of the Enemy” at the City Center.’

(LRB 6 September 2007)

Vintage | paperback 507 pp. |ISBN: 9780099462613