“The Immortal Story” (1968)
It’s odd that for all the unfinished and/or compromised movies that Welles made, perhaps the least known was completed in full: “The Immortal Story,” made for French TV but released theatrically in much of the world (in the U.S, it was paired with Buñuel’s “Simon Of The Desert” in a double-bill, though not available to watch at home until Criterion put it on Hulu Plus a few years ago). But there’s reason beyond that: the 55-minute film feels tossed-off in every sense and Welles feels palpably disengaged both as an actor and as a filmmaker throughout. It’s based on a short story by Karen Blixen (the author of “Out Of Africa” and “Babette’s Feast,” and played by Meryl Streep in the adaptation of the former), of whom Welles was a professed fan, telling the story of an elderly merchant in Macao (Welles), who becomes obsessed with an old story of a rich man offering a sailor money to impregnate his wife, and sends his employee (Roger Coggio) to find both the sailor (Norman Eshley), and a woman to pose as his spouse (Jeanne Moreau). Intended to be the first half of a two-part anthology film, Welles lost interest after financiers forced him to shoot the film in color, and it shows: robbed of his beloved expressionist chiaroscuro, the compositions are flat and uninspired, while the material, very much a short story, feels over-stretched to an hour. Moreau’s performance is much better than the film around which it occurs —it’s a shame that, after her strong turn in “The Trial” they didn’t get to work on something Welles was more interested in. Other than her turn, the film’s a curio at best. [D+]
“F For Fake” (1973)
Orson Welles’ final masterpiece, nominally a documentary, began as a BBC project about art forger Elmyr de Hory, originally only to be narrated by Welles. After it emerged that Clifford Irving, who’d featured in the footage in his guise as de Hory’s biographer, had himself pulled off a giant hoax by fabricating an “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes (as told in Richard Gere-starrer “The Hoax”), Welles took over the project and turned it into something quite different,and quite remarkable: a meta-tastic, undoubtedly self-indulgent and self-satisfied examination into fakery. Much of the film’s last half-hour, involving Welles’ girlfriend Oja Kodar and Pablo Picasso, appears to be entirely made up. But truth is subjective, and the playfulness of the way Welles approaches his subject enhances its themes in a way that a more straight-ahead film probably wouldn’t be able to manage. Commenting on the art of performance that dominated Welles’ life as much as it does on anything that Hory and Irving ever managed, it’s a dense film, heady with ideas but hugely entertaining, even as its digressions occasionally spin off into dead ends. It’s unclassifiable and was mostly ignored by critics at the time (Welles told Jonathan Rosenbaum that he was making “a new kind of film,” one that was rejected by many devotees initially). Thankfully its reputation has been restored significantly over time. [B+]
“Filming ‘Othello'” (1978)
Designed as the first in a series of features for German television in which Welles was to discuss his films, “Filming Othello” was the only one to be finished, and as such comprises the last feature film completed with Welles as director (footage for “Filming The Trial“ is available in unedited form). Halfway between a making-of and a director’s commentary, it’s actually a rather wonderful insight, not just into Welles’ filmmaking process but also into his personality. He is a fascinating raconteur, and the storied production of “Othello” yields some choice anecdotes (like how he found out in advance that he’d won the Palme d’Or when a frantic organiser came to ask what the national anthem of Morocco — the country submitting the film—was). But he is somewhat self-consciously an icon, and while he makes frequent self-deprecating remarks, they can seem disingenuous, the performance of a humility he maybe does not feel. But this is part of the delight of this informal and yet entirely directed documentary —the caricature of Welles as a Kane-ian figure whose talents were only matched by his ego is so deeply embedded that it’s enjoyable to see him speak for himself, and to realize just how well-founded that caricature was. Over the course of the film we get Welles talking to camera, sit in on a post-screening Q&A and share in a lunch with friends and co-stars Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards (where all three get progressively squiffier), making it a great resource not just for “Othello” fans, but for anyone interested in Welles as a filmmaker whose creative brilliance both caused and flourished in adversity. [B]
Welles’ filmography is scrappy, comprising so many unfinished or hacked-up films in addition to those few shimmering completed classics. But in light of what a control-freak perfectionist he was, perhaps we should be more amazed he ever finished and released anything at all. The lost footage from “The Magnificent Ambersons” remains one of the greatest White Whales in cinematic lore, and every now and then new hope flares that it may yet be recovered. And long and storied is the epic tale of Peter Bogdanovich trying to bring Welles’ fascinating-sounding “The Other Side Of The Wind” to a finished state, last news there being that it is either all finished and ready for a Centennial release, or that the rights issues that have dogged the project for decades are still not resolved, or editing/restoration work has hardly even really begun, or that financing is in place, or that there’s not enough money. So that’s all clear as mud and par for the course with Welles. Optimists that we are, we’ll leave an open slot on this retrospective in the hopes that someday we’ll have a new title to add.
And this is not even getting into Welles’ acting appearances, which we should definitely return to look at another day. He usually appeared in his own films, but he also took on often substandard projects to fill his pockets (no matter how famous and revered he ever became, Welles never seemed to have quite enough money to meet his needs) and was not even above pilfering costumes and props from his hired-ham gigs to decorate his directorial passion projects. But of his performances in films he did not direct, it would be perverse not to call out his Harry Lime in Carol Reed‘s “The Third Man” (and for anyone still tiresomely clinging to the notion that Welles directed the film, you can hear the man himself refute that at 1.24 in this clip.) Partly because it’s simply such a wonderful performance (and you can read a write up on it in our recent Carol Reed feature here), but also because if you halve the distance between Lime, with his magnetism, wit and manipulation, and Charles Foster Kane, with his self-conscious ideas about grandeur and power, and add just a soupcon of the rapscallion Falstaff, the base Hank Quinlan and the fatally flawed Othello, you do not just get the ultimate Wellesian hero, you begin to get an idea of Orson Welles himself.
—Jessica Kiang, Oli Lyttelton, Nikola Grozdanovic & Rodrigo Perez