Around the World with Orson Welles
A six-part British television travel series written, directed, and presented by Orson Welles for ITV in 1955. Filmed entirely in Europe, the series follows Welles through Vienna, the Basque Country, Madrid, Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and London’s Chelsea Pensioners, blending travelogue, cultural portraiture, and personal essay. Moving between documentary observation and reflective commentary, the episodes combine interviews, local history, and Welles’s distinctive narration into a series that functions as both travel film and cinematic essay.
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Ep 1Pays Basque I: The Basque Countries
Welles takes the viewer to the Basque countryside, a remote corner of Europe on the border of Spain and France. He interviews American expatriates and a Basque sheepherder who returned to Europe after spending 23 years in Colorado.
Ep 2Pays Basque II: La Pelote Basque
Welles continues his tour of the Basque region of France and Spain and learns about the game of pelota and some of its variants — jai alai, joko garbi, and rebot.
Ep 3Revisiting Vienna
Welles revisits Vienna, the setting of one of his most famous films, and one of his greatest performances as the unforgettable Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man.
Ep 4Saint-Germain-des-Pres
Welles travels to Paris, where his visit to the Saint Germain des Pres neighborhood is chronicled by newspaper columnist Art Buchwald. Welles interviews an artist, poets inventing new letters to describe sounds and night clubs featuring musicians playing hot jazz.
Ep 5London: The Queen's Pensioners
Welles travels to London to visit an alms house in Hackney for indigent widows created in the 1600s and an old soldier's Chelsea home.
Ep 6Spain: The Bullfight
Welles and Mr and Mrs Kenneth Tynan travel to Madrid to explain the nuts and bolts of bullfighting.
ITV1
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