good omnibus review of books on Orson Welles--

"Welles was younger than the Surrealists, but jump-starting his career as he did—he was a professional stage actor by sixteen, in 1931—he came of age at roughly the same time as artists who were ten or so years older than he was. And like Dalì, whose best paintings spring from the spooky seacoast terrain he identified with his boyhood, or Joseph Cornell, whose boxes are so many little monuments to bygone charms, he was excited by the taste for optical tricks of the pre-modern, late-Victorian world of his parents' time, the era he had just missed. In Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, with their sensuous, breathing sense of an earlier America, Welles has much in common with Dalì and Cornell in the way his subjects are both the past in itself and the filtered, circuitous way it is remembered. As with the two artists' work (and less sentimentally than most American filmmakers express it), these Welles movies suggest that all one's experience is tinged by the expectations and losses of childhood..."