This book offers a comprehensive overview of Orson Welles' life and career, highlighting the shape of the filmmaker's career, his astonishing precocity and his extraordinary gifts that resulted in both splendid successes and puzzling failures. Examining the key and recurring themes of Welles' long and varied career, Robert Garis provides a fresh appreciation and interpretative commentary of his films. At the core of this book are sustained readings of Welles' masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and critically incisive accounts of his other major films, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Othello, Macbeth, and Chimes at Midnight.