Orson and His Afterlive

Harry Cohn, not especially partial to dangerous balance, cut chunks out of the Chinese-theater scene as well as the funhouse, and ordered a studio composer to spread a thick musical schmaltz over the sinister sambas that Welles set in his preferred soundtrack. (His preview cut showed once in Santa Barbara before Cohn had it re-worked.) Yet even in its reduced, mangled form, The Lady From Shanghai has more sheer energy, more beauty, more life than films a fraction of its age. Every image is charged: Welles didn't need to be conventionally coherent to be Welles; quite fittingly he seizes each moment to its fullest in what is fundamentally a Chinese puzzle-box of a film. His interaction with both the material and his audience are such that the film not only survives its reduction at other hands, its very flaws refresh its energies, and become part of its tragic beauty.

As Goethe wrote, our lives remain of consequence not insofar as we leave something behind, but as we "act and enjoy, and rouse others to action and enjoyment." Seven years ago, suffering over the collapse of a dangerously balanced film I'd spent a year and a half writing, I consoled myself by taking up the copy of The Big Brass Ring that had been sitting unread on my shelf. Blind chance? Psychic impulse? Considering the gigantic difference this thwarted Welles script has made in my life, given that the consequences of this involvement have now spread into the lives of the cast and crew of an actual film, one can only marvel, and feel humbled at the vastness of Orson Welles' still-expanding legacy. As the prodigy who made Citizen Kane, he remains a font of inspiration to younger artists. Godard, Truffaut, Scorsese, Lucas - name your favorite film student: All count that gorgeous tyro as the shaper of their ambitions.

Yet as one grows older, it is the heroic agony of Welles' struggle to make films beyond Kane that gives the most hope and comfort to those of us who are still struggling. And while no restoration can ever fully realize his original intentions, and no adaptation - no matter how dangerously balanced - can ever be a substitute for the films he might have made, The Lady From Shanghai offers life-giving proof that genius is less a question of intentions pristinely transmitted to posterity, than of risks taken, losses and all, in the eternity that is here and now.