Welles, Orson

To set the tone, the film opens on a dark screen. There is a lengthy silence. Slowly, eerie music swells up and an Orson Welles type voice mechanically intones On this very desert... etc. Gradually, a white wisp of smoke becomes visible on the left, growing larger as it spreads across the screen. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, motion pictures became a big business in the U.S., and most were produced like products on an assembly line. Often, Hollywood films did not have distinct personalities. They instead fit into genre types western, musical, horror, gangster, and comedy. Exceptions, like Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1941), were rare. In Europe, motion pictures remained a smaller scale business that was also seen as an art. In 1925, the London Film Society was founded to promote motion pictures as an art form. 

Imagination Edgar Allan Poe. The 1987 re-released version includes the added attraction of previously recorded narration by Orson Welles (who thus returns from the dead to perform on the album). The work includes renditions of the poems A Dream within a Dream, The Raven, and To One in Paradise and tracks inspired by The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado and The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. The most successful of these, perhaps, is The Cask of Amontillado, in which sonorous lyrics contrast with the story of cold-blooded revenge. 

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