Retrospective: The Directorial Films Of Orson Welles

Note: this will all sound so much better —as would anything— if you imagine it read in Welles' mellifluous, autumnal voice:

A century ago this very day, in Kenosha, Wisonsin, a mewling, puking infant was born to Richard and Beatrice Welles, and was named Orson, after his grandfather. Little Orson couldn't know it yet, but the next 70 years would see him live an astonishing life, criss-crossing continents, living high and low, skittering across theater stages and film sets, intoning into microphones and megaphones, accruing laurels and loathing, dining with kings and duelling with fickle financiers, falling in love and fathering children, ever buffeted by the fair and foul winds of fortune, but steering head-on into them, lashed to the mast of his immense self-confidence. Welles is a towering figure in cinema, and yet cinema was just a sliver of his life's work. But little Orson couldn't know that yet.

It is hard to imagine Orson Welles as a child —naive, seeking approbation from...