Around the World with Orson Welles

1955 - 2003

Pays Basque I: The Basque Countries

7th October 1955

Episode 1

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.

Pays Basque II: La Pelote Basque

21st October 1955

Episode 2

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.

Revisiting Vienna

4th November 1955

Episode 3

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.

Saint-Germain-des-Pres

18th November 1955

Episode 4

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.

London: The Queen's Pensioners

2nd December 1955

Episode 5

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.

Spain: The Bullfight

16th December 1955

Episode 6

Welles and Mr and Mrs Kenneth Tynan travel to Madrid to explain the nuts and bolts of bullfighting.

France: The Tragedy of Lurs

12th April 2003

Episode 7

The Dominici affair is a criminal case that occurred in France in the mid-20th century, which gave rise to detailed counter-investigations, emblematic of investigative journalism. On the night of August 4 to 5, 1952, three Englishmen, Sir Jack Drummond, a 61-year-old scientist, his wife Anne Wilbraham, 45, and their 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, were murdered near their car near La Grand. 'Terre, the farm of the Dominici family, in the town of Lurs in the Basses-Alpes (current Alpes-de-Haute-Provence). Patriarch Gaston Dominici was accused of the triple murder and sentenced to death in 1954. In 1957, President René Coty commuted the death sentence and on July 14, 1960, General de Gaulle pardoned and released Gaston Dominici. The affair was followed by numerous journalists, both French and foreign. The episode was ultimately unfinished, but French filmmaker Christophe Cognet recovered his materials and reconstructed the documentary for TV5 broadcast in 2003.

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Director

Orson Welles

Writer

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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