by Norman Barry

The story of Anglophone cinema, it could be said, is the story of Orson Welles. He was a child prodigy who aged only 23 appeared as a theatre actor on the front of Time Magazine in 1938. Having moved to Hollywood, he directed and starred, at 26, in Citizen Kane, the story of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate. In film polls it usually comes out as the greatest film ever made. That was in 1941, scarcely a decade after the talkies had been introduced. And here he is, in our time, being credited as the director of a film he had not completed at his death 35 years ago.