Welles followed up War of the Worlds with another artisitic success., although you'd be hard pushed to find an odder double bill – the popular nostalgic reminisces of a New York family, and the brooding classic Conrad.
Life with Father is alright – it starts off entertaining enough, but Welles isn’t a natural "warm" comic, and I always feel this genre doesn’t really work unless you have a nostalgic connection to the material. You get sick of the father character – I think it’s supposed to be endearing, this bombastic dad who is actually clueless, a forerunner of Everybody Loves Raymond, but he becomes irritating. “Father did this”, “father said that” – who cares? It was interesting to hear Welles sing.
But Heart of Darkness is superb. It starts brilliantly – the sound effects (horns blowing, throb of drums) give you chills up the spine – so brilliantly that it takes a while to realise there’s not a lot of story. You can understand RKO’s reluctance to greenlight this as a feature – there’s barely enough plot here for half an hour let alone a feature. (NB to be fair, they did okay it but only allowed a limited budget and Welles didn't think he could make it work) Welles perfectly cast as Kurtz; Ray Collins plays Marlow.
NB At the end of the show Welles announces that the Mercury Theatre will be sponsored by Campbell Soup.
No comments:
Post a Comment