Table of Contents

Translator's Preface

Introduction
1. Arrival
Orson Welles: "Hollywood . . . teaches nothing anymore"
2. Pizza with Togliatti
3. Black Magic
4. Dolce Vita
Franca Faldini: "It was just an adolescent flirtation"
5. Citizen Kane
6. Life after Rita
7. The Fall of Macbeth
Alfredo Todisco: A Necktie with Dedication
8. Othello Begins Shooting
9. Scalera Gets Cold Feet
10. The Last Desdemona
Alvaro Mancori: "Every now and then he would shout, 'Traitors!'"
11. Blessed and Damned
12. Waiting for Othello
Tullio Kezich: "A maverick filmmaker"
13. Reviewing Othello: The World Premiere
14. Byzantine Timekeeping
15. Going, Going, Gone
Gian Luigi Rondi: "I have changed my mind only about Citizen Kane"
16. Welles and Rossellini

Appendix 1: The Italian Version of Othello
Appendix 2: The Opinion of the Catholic Center for Cinematography
Notes
Index

Promotional Information

Welles's years of exile in Italy

About the Author

Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic and journalist. He is author of several books and essays about director Roberto Rossellini and comedy actor Totò. His last book (with Maria Gabriella Giannice) concerns Luchino Visconti's The Leopard.

Marcus Perryman is editor and translator (with Peter Robinson) of The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni.

Reviews

"This is a path-breaking study that will be useful both to Welles scholars and to students of Italian cinema." - James O. Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles "Anile's carefully documented and illustrated chronicle promises to overturn - or at the very least, challenge - certain received ideas about Welles's European reputation by revealing that it was in some ways as checkered and as ambivalent as his reputation in the US." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Discovering Orson Welles "[I]t is remarkable that Alberto Anile has managed to spot a niche that previous biographers have neglected. The gap in the record is the six year period between 1947-53, when Welles was based in Italy... It makes for a tale packed with vivid and intriguing vignettes...By focusing exclusively on this interlude in Welles's career, anile manages to capture something of the essence of his talent and personality- that mix of preternatural genius, wit and narcissistic, self-defeating excess - and something too of the fizzing glamour of film and celebrity industries of post-war Rome...The book is highly entertaining and at times illuminating, expertly translated and introduced by Marcus Perryman."- Robert Gordon, Times Literary Supplement