American Cinematographer - April 1996 - 119

JxKeLA Crane
45'-58'- 7O'-85'

by George Turner
A Thousand Faces

by Michael F. Blake

his own flamboyantly fanciful accounts.
The latest arrival, Orson Welles: Hoad to

Vestal Press, 398 pps.,

Xanadu, is

paper,

$19.95

Michael Blake, a Hollywood
makeup artist, is probably the leading
authority today on the life, films and
working methods of the great character
actor Lon Chaney. Some years ago, Blake
wrote the well-received Lon Chaney: The
Man Behind the Thousand Faces. Al¬

though he had intended it as his defini¬
tive study of the actor, he unexpectedly
came into possession of so much further
information that he felt a sequel was
mandatory. The previous effort was first
and foremost a biography of a man and
only peripherally a story of motion-pic¬
ture production. This time, along with
additional biographical details, more at¬
tention is given to the films themselves
and to others who were involved in them.
Blake reveals that Chaney per¬
formed in at least 156 films; only 41 of
which survive. The author goes into con¬
siderable detail about Chaney's charac¬
ter and personality, information derived
from further interviews with co-workers
and material from the files of Alfred

Grasso, Chaney's business manager in
the

early 1920s. He refutes the widely
supposed idea that Chaney was morose
and cruel, citing many instances of his
kindness to others.
A Thousand Faces contains a
lot of previously unpublished photos and
it has a lot of heart. It definitely is a good
shelfmate for the previous biography.

hefty tome in itself, yet it is
two-volume set
the early adven¬
tures of the child prodigy from Kenosha,
Wisconsin, beginning with his childhood
and tracing up to the week of his 26th
birthday and the release of his first fea¬
a

but half of a projected
from England. It covers

ture

film, Citizen Kane.
Taken

together, the two vol¬
comprise the most ambitious
attempt to date to encapsulate the life
umes

and

will

career

of

a man

whose influence

on

theater, radio (before it was given to the
disc jockeys) and motion pictures has
been both enormous and controversial.
The author is Simon Callow, a British
actor and director who has written sev¬
eral previous books and has tackled his

subject in this instance with infectious
enthusiasm. The amount of research is

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prodigious, and the writing is enhanced
by the writer's eagle-eye for details.
He gives us both the charm and the
wartiness of Welles in a more balanced
view than is evident in either the wor¬

shipful

the denigrating approaches
given us. For example,
the controversy over the writing credit for
Kane, which provided fodder for Pauline
Kael's Weiles-bashing book, is not
glossed over. He seems anxious to prove
up some homosexual relationships for
Welles, but this remains speculative.
All in all, Book I is fascinating
reading. Let's hurry up with Book II.
or

most writers have

ClNESSi

Motion Picture Equipment Service

Centre

British Film Studios:
An Illustrated

History
by Patricia Warren
Batsford/Trafalgar Square,
192 pps., paper, $27.50

Orson Welles:
The Road to Xanadu

by Simon Callow
Viking, 640 pps,
hardback, $32.95

Patricia Warren, British ac¬
tress and TV

The mass of published books
about Orson Welles form an impressive

display at the Margaret Herrick Library of
the AMPAS. The interpretations of
events in the man's life are enormously

varied, and

are

certainly not clarified by

producer, covers a lot of
territory in telling the history of all the
movie studios in England, past and
present. She does it very well, too. In
view of the financial ups and downs that
have plagued filmmakers in Britain since
Westminster Studio opened in 1897, it

Super 16 Conversion
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April 1996

(416) 975-2565
(416) 975-0895

117
American Cinematographer - April 1996

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