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“It seems sadly characteristic of the mainstream reviewing of film books in general and those about Orson Welles in particular that nonspecialists routinely take precedence over specialists–and that biographers who forgo original research for the sake of speculation or invention, and even admit to doing this, can be deemed superior to actual scholars, at least if their biases match those of the reviewers.
“As a Welles scholar and critic, and the editor of This is Orson Welles (which Schwarz calls both ‘penetrating’ and ‘tendentious’), I can’t claim to be disinterested. But I’m not asking for Thomson or Schwarz to convert to being simple fans or apologists. It’s legitimate to criticize Welles if the criticism is based on something other than mythology or mere hunches. So it seems reasonable to ask for some clarification about where Schwarz’s judgments are coming from.
“Jonathan Rosenbaum”
