The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles ’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism

Abstract The Rhetoric OF Fascism and anti-fascism runs throughout Welles ‘s career. “Our Julius Caesar gives a picture of the same kind of hysteria that exists in certain dictator-ruled countries of today,” a Mercury press release asserted of the 1937 modern-dress production. The most famous scene in the Mercury Julius Caesar was the killing of Cinna the poet (played by Norman Lloyd) by the mob. One critic wrote that it was “a scene which for pure power and sinister meaning has never been surpassed in the American theatre”; “not even the Group Theater in all their frenzy against dictators,” another wrote, “ever devised a more thrilling scene than that in which the poet, Cinna, is swallowed up by an angry mob.” “It ‘s the same mob,” Welles told the New York Times, “that hangs and burns Negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It ‘s the Nazi mob anywhere.” When Welles went to Hollywood two years later, his first project, the unfinished film of Heart of Darkness, was, in his own Citizen Kane enjoyed a spectacular critical reception. American novelist John O ‘Hara, writing for Time magazine, said quite simply that it was the best motion picture he had ever seen. ‘ Other serious reviewers in this country didn ‘t debate whether or not it was unusually good, but whether or not it was a great, even revolutionary, achievement. Meanwhile, Kane was the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards but received only one, for best original screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, who were booed by detractors at the award ceremony.