Touch of genius: Orson Welles at the IFI
Saturday November 07 2009
To mark the re-release of Citizen Kane, the IFI Temple Bar is currently running a season of Orson Welles films. Today, at 2pm, his 1944 thriller The Lady from Shanghai, will be shown. A stylish film noir, the film is marred only by Welles' dodgy Irish accent (he plays an ex-IRA man) but graced by an enigmatic performance from his then-wife Rita Hayworth.
Also today (at 4.30pm) the little-seen 1955 thriller Confidential Report will screen, in which Welles plays a shady Faustian villain.
Tomorrow, at 1.40pm, there'll be screenings of the first of Welles' celebrated Shakespearean adaptations, Macbeth (1948), which despite a hasty shoot and a low budget is full of dark intensity; and (at 4.30pm) Touch of Evil (1958), a terrific thriller set on the Mexican border that's considered one of his very best films.
The Welles season continues later in the month with The Trial (November 14, at 6.10pm), his rather fanciful interpretation of Franz Kafka's paranoid classic; The Immortal Story (November 15, 4.15pm), a 1968 adaptation of Isak Dinesen's grim colonial tale starring Jeanne Moreau and Welles himself; and F for Fake (November 18, 6.30pm), Welles' last completed feature, a strange mix of documentary and hoax about a notorious but fictional art forger.
For more information visit www.ifi.ie.
Irish Independent
