All's Well That Ends Welles: The Other Side of the Wind

This is the final installment of a 2021 bi-monthly series watching my remaining unseen films directed by Orson Welles. 

Well here we finally are, at the "end" of Orson Welles.

I might logically have watched The Other Side of the Wind back when it was released in 2018 -- shot decades earlier, of course, and only assembled into a modicum of a coherent narrative by dutiful Welles acolytes a couple years back. But the film presented me with a bit of a conundrum about whether to count it as a 2018 new release and rank it with the other movies I saw that year, given its composition of old materials, not to mention its status as a curiosity more than a real film. So I just decided not to see it at all.

The chance to finally catch up with it was one of the reasons I decided to do this series. If so, it's a bit of an anticlimax in that respect.

However, I did find stuff, or at least a vibe, to like in this movie, in spite of the fact that I almost never knew what was going on.

An aesthetic sensibility that definitely overtook Welles as he aged was this jittery, rapidly edited montage approach to storytelling, one in which the shots are noticeably shorter than the comfortable length viewers are accustomed to, and the logic of any particular sequence of shots is jumbled. Not only did the images have this feel, but so did the dialogue, leaving a person out to sea if he or she failed to keep up with its frenetic pacing.

I despised this approach in Mr. Arkadin, the worst film I saw for this series, but I thought it worked much better in F for Fake. It still had the same disorienting effect, but there I thought it was to a purpose, since the movie itself is a bit of a puzzle box. 

The Other Side of the Wind is this sensibility to the extreme, and it's somewhere in between the two films listed above in terms of its effectiveness. Here, though, the editing in particular is not of Welles' choosing, but rather, an interpretation of what he would have done with the hundred hours of footage he shot -- and a damn fine interpretation, enough that it becomes an impersonation, which is really what you're going for in this situation. The assemblers of The Other Side of the Wind were certainly familiar with Welles' body of work, that's for sure. 

Semantically, though, the approach left me with the least amount of bearings on the material. I don't know whether to blame the increasingly eccentric footage Welles' shot, or the incredibly faithful attempt to reproduce Welles' peculiar editing rhythms, but I couldn't really follow any of the conversations in this movie and what they all added up to. I was left appreciating it, to the extent that I did appreciate it, in individual moments, not as an overarching narrative.

And you know what? That was fine.

The effect created by The Other Side of the Wind is kind of like being a fly on the wall at a party where you don't know any of the people. The majority of this movie takes place at a party, so that makes a certain sense. The party is for the character played by John Huston, Jake Hannaford, a brilliant director who is as polarizing as he is brilliant. (It's fitting, I suppose, that Welles' final film was the closest the man ever came to a literal self-portrait -- and equally fitting that he could not finish it before he died.) The occasion for the party is Hannaford's birthday, and also the screening of his latest and most inscrutable film. It's also the last day of his life, as the film tells us early on (but never shows us, likely because they never filmed it).

Truly, given what we see of this movie, which is called The Other Side of the Wind, it's appropriate that the people talking about it seem like they're speaking a foreign language. They talk in rapid-fire shorthand that makes sense to each other but doesn't function very well as exposition. However, that approximates experiences people have in the real world, where they're in a situation that's over their head, and they have to glean from it what they can through a sort of flooding of words they can't completely make sense of. I'm sure this is what people feel like all the time when they are immersed in a culture where they don't speak the language. 

The film within the film is this weird arty mess that has tons of nudity and sexual content, and plenty of brooding from a James Dean-like star, John Dale, played by Bob Random. It also features plenty of skin from Welles' current partner and muse, Oja Kodar, who was used similarly in F for Fake. Here, though, her exposure is much more graphic than it was there, as we see her fully nude, and also in sex scenes with Random that are far hotter than I expected they'd be. I'm not sure if Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was on Welles' mind when he was making this, but there's something campy about it that recalls that. 

I didn't get this film within the film -- I don't think you're meant to -- and I didn't get most of the conversation surrounding it, which kept coming back to the star Dale's inability to finish the film. He's the mystery who fuels the whole film -- will he show up at Hannaford's party? what's he all about? -- and assumes a sort of mythic quality, as he is for the most part only seen in the footage of the incomplete film. There are a number of other familiar actors here, the most prominent in terms of screen time being the director Peter Bogdanovich. Most of the other characters are enablers and functionaries in the employ of Hannaford, and I had trouble distinguishing them from each other.

I didn't really care. There was something sort of intriguing about the experience of watching this that made me like it more than I probably had any reason to. There was also a comfort in realizing it was basically hopeless to glean anything definitive from it, so eventually I judged it merely in terms of its moment-to-moment sensory impact. 

Interestingly, though -- for all its meanderings and incomplete thoughts -- the final product is something that has a clear sense of a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't know if Welles shot enough material for all parts of the narrative, or whether existing material was reimagined for the role it could play in a plausible denouement for the film, but the last ten minutes or so were actually sort of the most profound for me. I guess that's the definition of ultimate success -- however marginal. 

Overall, though, I'm not sure if I would consider Welles' career a success. Watching his movies in 2021 has clearly demonstrated for me that I had already seen the best of Welles before this year. Really, though, he never did anything else that was even in the ballpark of Citizen Kane.

It was a very compelling sort of career, though, full of interesting failures. Welles was not the type of artist to just keep remaking the same movie, and though it was possible to isolate themes and recurring artistic choices, he had a sort of restlessness that was probably to the positive overall. It seems like a full half of the films he made had major financial difficulties, and they certainly forced a sort of innovation to his approach, an adjustment that probably made his films more memorable than if they had just been well-funded studio movies that felt prestigious. I can't say I went with him on all the thematic journeys and all the wild techniques he selected, but I'm glad he did those things. It was never boring, and that's not something that every filmmaker with a four-decade career could say.

Although I didn't love any of the Welles films I saw this year -- which included The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, in addition to those I've already mentioned -- the ultimate success of this series is that I'm primed to follow a similar format again next year. I've got another director picked out whose career I can finish in six films, as well as a cheeky name for the series, and it may be that this will be a recurring project for me. I'll fill you in on all the details in a few weeks.

Whether anyone can surprise and confound and prod and tickle me as much as Orson Welles, though, remains to be seen. 

All's Well That Ends Welles: F for Fake

This is the penultimate installment of my 2021 bi-monthly series finishing off the feature films of Orson Welles that I had not previously seen.

F for Fake (1973) is the film I might have been looking forward to most in this series, as I'd heard more acclaim about it than any of the various other Welles misfires I hadn't gotten to yet, which this series has helped rectify. And the film did not disappoint -- with some important caveats thrown in.

F for Fake reminded me in structure of one of my favorite documentaries of the 21st century, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. Of course, it would be appropriate to reverse that order of causation and say that Exit reminded me of F for Fake, but I saw Exit a decade earlier, and subjective impressions all have to do with which film you see first. 

Both films deal with the issue of what constitutes art and how we measure the authenticity of the artist compared to the acclaim/financial remuneration he/she receives for his/her work. Both films also feature two main characters who are kind of each other's foils, that being Thierry Guetta (a.k.a. "Mr. Brainwash") and Banksy himself in Exit, and art forger Elmyr de Hory and the journalist who writes about him, Clifford Irving, in F for Fake. 

Of course, if you know the history -- which I didn't -- Irving was also a faker, having written a book based on a meeting with famed recluse Howard Hughes that never actually happened. This was the basis for the Richard Gere vehicle The Hoax, but I didn't put that together until after I'd finished F for Fake and was going down various internet rabbit holes related to it.

The content that's here is very interesting, especially since Welles is in peak playful form as a kind of master of ceremonies throughout. We keep coming back to him for commentary and little sleights of hand to remind us that on some level, all film is an illusion. He doesn't seem as corpulent here as he had seemed in some of his more recent films that I watched for this series -- perhaps needing to retain a certain fitness level for his newish love interest, Oja Kodar, who has a significant role in this film -- and he doesn't at all strike you as a person winding down in his career. In reality, though, this was the final feature-length film he completed before his death in 1986. 

(I should note that I am excluding for this series a documentary he made in 1978 called Filming Othello, which I suppose supplants F for Fake as the last completed feature. It runs 84 minutes. But because a film someone makes about their making of another film does not seem like an essential part of their filmography, more like a glorified "making of" feature as a DVD extra, I am comfortable excluding it from his official filmography.)

What I found disorienting about F for Fake, though, is the frenetic editing of the material, a shortcoming that I first noted in my least favorite film so far in this series, Mr. Arkadin. The way that film slathered on information with great rapidity really put me off, and some of that same feeling creeped in as I was watching F for Fake, even though the actual content of this film was something I enjoyed much better. It's like he's layering information in a montage, which is almost chronological in its progression, but loops back enough and is just abstract enough to push you off balance. After any particular five-minute stretch of F for Fake, you've consumed the information Welles wants you to take away from that section, but you feel like he's organized it in a deliberately roundabout fashion that's designed to tease you and troll you. To the extent that it ultimately achieves its goals, it seems sort of clever -- while at the same time remaining this close to causing you to question the filmmaker's competency. 

It was interesting also to learn about this master forger, Elmyr (he's referred to that way rather than "de Hory"), who was capable of producing near perfect imitations of the works of various master painters -- not only producing them, but dashing them off quickly before lunch. He made lots of money selling these and fooling experts, though eventually, the police were only a few steps behind him. It's interesting content for me right now, having just come off of watching Tim's Vermeer, which involves a non-professional painting a Vermeer with a lot more time, labor and precision, and a lot less attempt to deceive.

It felt like the material on Clifford was considerably less well documented, such that it took me a long time to actually determine what he was guilt of, in part because the film holds that close to the vest for a while. As the two men are introduced as the film's dual focal points, the fact that Irving doesn't come to life the way de Hory (or Elmyr) does feels like one of the film's demerits.

In the end, though, the takeaway from F for Fake is a really thoughtful consideration of art and artifice, one which seems like a real extension of many of Welles' career-long interests. It's easy to see why he was intrigued by Elmyr de Hory, as he's a larger than life personality (like Welles and many of the characters he played) given to throwing lavish parties, while also containing an essentially unknowable quality. 

There's also a bit of Welles the horndog in here, as the aforementioned Oja Kodar is ogled at by the camera in two different passages of the film, sometimes without any clothes on. It's not entirely clear how this relates to the other themes -- it's supposed to have something to do, I believe, with secretly observing people whose eye is drawn by the woman's curves, and how this has to do with the role of art on the observer. Neither does it really detract from the film, but it does contribute to it feeling more diffuse, more of a dump of similar subject matter than one cogent argument seen through from beginning to end. 

Along those lines, I see F for Fake described more as a "film essay" than a documentary, though "docudrama" is often used in connection with it as well. (Because not everything in the film is actually true, though I will respect Welles' careful wording and not give away the parts that were fabricated to illustrate a point.) That term "film essay" also ecompasses its more free-form aspects, as the film is designed to promote thought about its themes more than it is designed to present a narrative that is easily tracked from point A to point B to point C. 

The final film in this series comes in December, and it was the one that sort of prompted me to set out on this journey in the first place: The Other Side of the Wind, Welles' incomplete film that was patched together and released on Netflix in 2018.

All's Well That Ends Welles: Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story

This is my fourth bi-monthly installment of a series watching the films of Orson Welles that I haven't yet seen.

August represented my second twofer in this series, as I needed to watch slightly more than one film per month to get through the remaining Welles films I hadn't seen. However, it also forced me to stretch my definition of "feature film," which gets at a larger issue with the remaining "filmed art," for want of a better phrase, that I had to parse through when I first laid the groundwork for this series.

The "Orson Welles filmography" Wikipedia page contains a number of items that I do not, strictly speaking, consider to be films, for length or other reasons. Some I excluded, but some, just as randomly, I included. My second film in August, The Immortal Story, fits into the latter category. 

The Immortal Story is a 58-minute "movie." Is that a feature? By some definitions, yes. By my own personal definitions of silent films made a hundred years ago, yes. By the standards of a film released in 1968, when standard feature length was much more firmly established? Eh.

Part of the problem with me watching The Immortal Story was that I decided not to watch Journey Into Fear, a 68-minute film released in 1943. However, putting myself back into the mindset of myself nine months ago, I believe I decided to exclude this not based on length, but based on the fact that Welles is only an uncredited director on this film. The credited director is a man named Norman Foster, who I have not otherwise heard of.

In any case, I have now watched The Immortal Story so I guess I've ruled on its worthiness to be considered a feature film, and since we've started out talking about its classification, let's get into it first, even though it was the film I watched second. (Although I actually watched both of my Welles features on Sunday as a kind of day-night doubleheader, to use the baseball terminology.)

Before we get to it, though, I'll mention one annoyance related to it that caused me to consider excluding it from this series on that basis alone. The film is available for free on YouTube, but the version that's up there is compromised. You start watching it, and after about a minute, the screen freezes. The clock is still running, but the image doesn't move. When it does resume about two minutes later, two minutes of the story has been missed. If this were the only time it happened, I probably would have just pressed onward, but it happens again periodically throughout the running time, making the viewing impossible. 

Instead of walking away from it entirely, I decided to check on iTunes to see if it was rentable. It was. So I went ahead and rented a 58-minute "movie" for $3.99. With no small amount of grumbling.

The Immortal Story is most certainly not something that could be stretched out to feature length. It's basically sort of a parable, and if there's any stretching, it's to get it to nearly an hour at all.

It concerns a rich old man living in China (Welles, naturally) whose dying wish is to stage a story that has been told by sailors for generations. The story is about a penniless sailor being selected from the streets and brought back to a mansion where he is fed and led into the bedroom where a beautiful woman sits ready for him -- the mansion owner's wife, who is set to be impregnated by the sailor. The rich man (Mr. Clay) becomes obsessed with the idea that although the story is likely apocryphal, he wants it to become some sailor's reality, so when he tells the story, it will be true.

The film has some interesting thoughts about the storytelling tradition and about the willingness of various participants to fulfill the roles that are proscribed for them. Both the sailor Mr. Clay's bookkeeper conscripts (played by Norman Eshley) and the woman Clay hires (played by French treasure Jeanne Moreau) are able to intuit what Clay is doing -- it's a very well-known story I guess -- and balk at the requirements of them in intriguing ways. The film is a bit of a trifle I suppose, but it does take itself quite seriously, especially in comparison to Welles' most recent previous film, which I'm about to discuss in a moment. 

Technically, I noticed a few Welles touches. For example, when we are first introduced to Clay sitting in a restaurant, he is reflected multiples times through the mirror that's next to his face, like the climactic shot of Kane in Citizen Kane. And of course the character Welles plays is a variation on the others he had played, which were somewhat dictated by his increasing girth -- though whether that is a technical detail or not is hard to say.

Let's move on to Chimes at Midnight.

This was my first cinematic introduction to Falstaff, played by Welles (naturally), who is a literary figure much discussed and referenced, but who has generally evaded me to this point in my life. As you would probably know (because I am very late in coming to this information myself), Falstaff was a character who appeared in a number of Shakespeare's histories -- a big, larger than life figure who enjoyed his alcohol (referred to in the text continually as "sack") and his skirt chasing, and was a close confidant of Prince Hal, a.k.a. Henry V in his younger years. He has the naughtiness and the verbal dexterity of characters in Shakespeare's comedies, and indeed, the plays he appeared in resembled his comedies at least for the parts involving Falstaff.

Welles has said it was his life's ambition to play Falstaff, to the point that one almost wonders if his excessive indulgences in food and drink were designed to prepare his own body for the role. The interesting trick he pulls off here is to combine the appearances of Falstaff in five Shakespeare plays and give them a single narrative cohesion within one story. It's something Welles first did on stage before making this filmed version of it, and even though I'm a bit of a rusty Shakespeare scholar, it seems to be a phenomenally successful experiment. Welles himself said this was his greatest cinematic accomplishment, which is pretty crazy coming from the guy who directed Citizen Kane.

I certainly wouldn't go that far, but this did immediately become my second favorite film I've watched in this series. That's not quite the compliment that it seems, given that many of the Welles films I had not yet seen had remained unseen by me for a reason. But there have only been one or two that didn't work for me on some level, so that does strengthen Chimes' accomplishment.

I'm not going to delve too much into the story, but I can give you a general overview. It involves the period of time when the young Henry V had to fight off a claim to the throne by a man his own age, also named Henry, who represented what many believed to be the rightful king of England, who was instead languishing away in prison. Henry IV, Prince Hal's father, was considered to be a usurper -- in part because of the small detail that he had the previous king killed (not checking my facts on this but I believe that's accurate) -- and in order to defend his father's right to the throne, Hal had to set aside his carousing ways and take up arms, as did his drinking buddy John Falstaff. As Hal grows into a more serious person, set to eventually become king himself, he outgrows Falstaff, to the latter's great disappointment.

I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, but I have actually never read any of the histories. I stuck to the comedies and tragedies that were assigned to me in two different college courses. I've seen a couple filmed versions of Henry V and Richard III, but never actually read the texts myself. My point in telling you this is that I could discern nothing about Chimes at Midnight that did not seem to read as one continuous narrative from one text, and I consider that to be incredibly impressive. If I'd been more familiar with these five texts, I might have easier seen the seams, and they might have distracted me. But Welles loved his Shakespeare and was certainly equal to the tasking of assembling this coherent homage to the Bard's work. 

Technically, this is one of Welles' better realized efforts. The black and white cinematography (by Edmond Richard) is really great, and I was particularly impressed by the editing. The big battle scene at the film's center has a really impressive montage quality, with quick snippets of swords clashing and bodies in distress creating quite the portrait of the chaos of battle. It may have been the highlight of the film for me, even with Welles' delicious performance of Falstaff, and the typically high-level contributions from the likes of Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV. 

I've had a vast preference for Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies, meaning I was really surprised to enjoy the scenes of the carousing of Falstaff and Hal as much as I did. I think one of the things that enhanced my enjoyment was my decision to turn on the subtitles, which I now think I'm going to make a regular habit when I watch Shakespeare. It's not that I couldn't have followed what was going on, but having the text on screen allowed me to catch the great plays on words that were Shakespeare's (and Falstaff's) bread and butter. Given how important word choices are for Shakespeare, and how the cleverness of any particular unfamiliar turn of phrase might get lost if you are not laying eyes on it, I don't think it's any sign of failure that I benefitted from the subtitles. Rather I view it as an enhancement of something I suspect I should have enjoyed quite a bit anyway.

Okay, just two more movies in this series, F for Fake in October and The Other Side of the Wind in December. 

All's Well That Ends Welles: Mr. Arkadin and The Trial

This is my third in a 2021 bi-monthly series cleaning up the rest of Orson Welles' feature films that I haven't seen.

My first month watching two Welles features -- a pace I have to keep for this month and August if I want to watch eight films in six months -- demonstrated the wide range of Welles' talents as both a filmmaker and an actor. 

Both films also go by two names.

The first I watched was his 1955 film Mr. Arkadin, which is also called Confidential Report. Technically, this represented the nadir of Welles' skills. The actors he cast are really quite bad, not a recognizable face in the cast other than his own -- and the bad acting includes him. But more on that in a moment.

The real technical issue with the film is its shoddy look. When I watched Welles' incomplete Don Quixote film that was cobbled together and released in 1992, I was aghast at the poor filmmaking on display. It reminded me of a bad student film, with amateurish camerawork, poor editing, and a post-dub of the voices that was simply ridiculous. Of course, this film was incomplete so we can't really know what Welles intended to do with any of it, and what's bad about it could be blamed on the guy who wove the footage into something vaguely resembling a narrative film.

That same excuse does not fly with Mr. Arkadin. Welles was fully alive for the entirety of its production, and though some of the problems that famously plagued his shoots -- which I haven't read up on in this particular case -- may be to blame for what we're seeing here, Welles ultimately greenlit these raw materials to go out as a completed film.

Although I found the camerawork (by Jean Bourgoin) mostly to be terrible, it was really the way Welles stitched it together in the editing room that drove me to distraction. Renzo Lucidi is the credited editor, though IMDB mentions Welles as an uncredited editor, and of course his massive ego would not have allowed anything he didn't approve of to go out without a knock-down, drag-out fight. Of course, that's what happened on a number of his films, which is why he had such a checkered career, with so many films released that were only some small percentage of his actual vision. 

The editing here is frenetic. Shots are layered upon one another to no end, often sacrificing the logic of the dialogue in the process. It looks like the editor was on speed and just kept on getting more and more worked up the faster the edits occurred. It looks like garbage.

I didn't like the story either, though aspects of it remind me of both The Lady from Shanghai and Citizen Kane. Like Shanghai, it's about a man who involves another man in an intricate plot intending to frame him or double cross him, and like Kane, it's an intricate mystery piecing together details about an unknowable personality. But Welles' script is so jumbled and garbled that I quickly stopped caring what was happening. (I guess it might have been clever at some point in there, at least according to Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who is quoted in the film's Wikipedia entry as saying it is one of the greatest films of all time.)

The single worst thing about the movie may be Welles in the title role. Yes, the lead (Robert Arden) is bland, and yes, the series of women with sort of interchangeable roles who traipse through the picture range from ridiculous to forgettable (with the lone exception of Katrina Paxinou in what was probably the film's best, and most successfully paced, scene). But Welles is just an overblown idiot here. First of all he looks absurd. This look would be better suited to one of his Shakespearean adaptations than a film that seemed to have been set in the present day in 1955:

He reminded me a bit of this guy:

Though of course that comes much later.

You can imagine the type of performance that goes along with that appearance, and you'd be right. I'd call it scenery chewing, but some of the sins Welles commits are of extreme interiority, like he's an insane person on lithium. Anyway, he's always the biggest person on screen, and I'm not just talking about his increasing body size. He's "big" even when he's quiet, as in all the choices he makes are to one extreme or another, and he's out of sync with all the other actors. It's laughable.

In terms of the techniques you would expect from Welles, given his past work, there were a couple. For one I noticed he's still very interested in depth of field, as there's a shot with a folder in the foreground on a bed -- the "confidential report" of the alternate title -- and the characters in the background that's quite striking. It almost looks as though it's a novelty oversized folder to create the effect, which I'd be able to confirm with one quick google search if I could be bothered. But Mr. Arkadin does not warrant any more of my time than I've already given it.

There were also a lot of high-angle shots, and different camera angles in general. In fact, my notes from the viewing read "Too many camera angles." The multiplicity of angles contributes to the sense of frenetic disarray created by the editing. This is a movie made by a person who has too many tricks and can't make tough decisions on which ones not to use. What's worse is that some of them are used badly.

The results were much better with The Trial, which came out seven years later in 1962. No, it didn't take him seven years to make his next movie -- though after Mr. Arkadin, I wouldn't be surprised if it had -- but I've already seen the film that came out between the two of them, 1958's Touch of Evil. I don't know if that was heralded as a comeback for him at the time (I believe it was) but it definitely helped point him in the right direction for his adaptation of the famous Franz Kafka novel.

Which I didn't realize this was until just a few days before I watched it. The Trial, despite its famous associations, is quite a generic sort of title and could have been used for any sort of movie, though likely one involving a trial. But Welles loved his adaptations, so I probably should have guessed.

Making this connection gave me a lot of additional excitement about my second June movie. I only just read this book for the first time about five years ago, and I really enjoyed it. "Enjoyed" is the wrong word. I found it intellectually stimulating and invigorating.

Alas, The Trial works better on the page. When you live with the tedium central to Kafka's themes over a series of weeks, it's enriching; when you live with it over a couple hours, it can make you impatient for it to be over. Which kept The Trial from landing higher in my estimation despite some very good filmmaking.

I noticed the difference right away. Although this was Edmond Richard's first feature as a cinematographer, his work is so much more crisp and purposeful than the work of veteran DP Jean Bourgoin in Mr. Arkadin. The first shot is of Josef K's bedroom, which the camera (and probably also the set) makes look impossibly undersized -- an early metaphor for the type of psychological imprisonment the story will saddle on its protagonist. (Who is played by Anthony Perkins, by the way, making this the second Perkins film I have seen this month after On the Beach.)

The set continues to be a masterstroke on The Trial, enhanced by Richard's photography. As one might expect if having seen later Kafka adaptations, the sets seem to be out of a dream space, either much bigger or much smaller than they should be, to further the film's themes. One unforgettable scene involves a giant warehouse-sized room that seems to be filled with a thousand people at desks on typewriters, none of them divided from their neighbor by more than a foot or two. There are strange court chambers and file rooms jammed with rows and rows of filing cabinets. The palatial office/convalescence room of the advocate, played by Welles himself, is absurdly grandiose, able to have rooms filled with what appear to be just random stacks of documents and old newspapers.

Let's take a moment to pause and discuss Welles himself as an actor. While his role here as the advocate is very similar to his role as Mr. Arkadin -- both characters are larger than life and inscrutable -- the effectiveness of the performances couldn't be more diametrically opposed. There's something truly chilling about his advocate character, not only the bizarre power he wields by rarely leaving his bed (and sometimes controlling things from under the covers). What I found most memorable was that he seems to speak almost without moving his mouth, all the subtle malice and menace contained in his wide-eyed stare. 

Here is what I mean:

As discussed earlier, seeing The Trial on film underscored for me how much better it works as a book than a movie, but that's no fault of Welles'. This is a very faithful adaptation, including all the narrative circumlocutions involving the women K meets -- one of whom is played by Welles' wife, Paola Mori. (Who also appears in Mr. Arkadin.) You get a sense of the Kafkaesque absurdity of it all for sure. 

It also allows him to really pursue his natural inclination toward amplifying his themes through extreme camera angles, though this time in a more restrained manner. Here's a shot of Welles the first time he is seen standing next to K, though in reality they are close to the same height:

A moment later we are shown that the advocate is indeed on an elevated surface, but as this is our first time seeing them side by side, it works as a symbol of how the strange bureaucracy that has ensnared K towers over him. 

A shot through tunnels under the city also reminded me of The Third Man, which Welles appeared in but did not direct. 

Another important point of contrast between The Trial and Mr. Arkadin: the use of black and white. It was likely a financial limitation for Welles in both instances, but in the former it serves his themes, while in the latter it feels like a shortcoming. It's the perfect film stock for the stark The Trial, but Mr. Arkadin has a number of scenes with large parades, colorful costumes (you would assume, anyway), and even a masquerade ball. It seems to scream out for the color that it does not have.

Oh, I said both films have two names. Even though The Trial is entirely in English, its credits appear in French, where the title is listed as Le Proces.

Welles himself bookends the film, speaking the opening parable "Before the Law" against a series of still drawings, as well as at the end concluding with "My name is Orson Welles, and I wrote and directed this picture." I'm starting to see the groundwork laid for the type of fourth-wall-breaking authorial role Welles played in his work, which was so richly parodied by Will Ferrell in the Funny or Die show The Spoils of Babylon. 

As a side note, I watched both films on YouTube, the first free and the second a rental. That's the first time I've ever done a rental from YouTube. It was perfectly smooth. Under some circumstances, that "landmark moment" might be the occasion for its own post, but since I'm already writing about The Trial here, let's just move on. 

Well it took me about four sittings to finally get through this post. Hopefully that's not what my next installment of this series will entail. August will be my second (and final) two-movie month with Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story.

All's Well That Ends Welles: Macbeth

I'm spending 2021 going through the Orson Welles-directed films I haven't seen, on a bi-monthly basis.

There were a couple reasons I wasn't looking forward to the next film Orson Welles had directed that I hadn't seen. One is that I've been sleeping a bit poorly and any kind of Shakespeare can be taxing if you're perceiving things at diminished capacity. Another is that this particular Shakespeare play is one I simply do not like.

Never been a fan of Macbeth.

What a depressing story, but that's not what I don't like about it. What I don't like is that it's not a "tragedy" in the purest definition of that word.

For a character's story to be "tragic," it should represent a downfall from a previous period of grace and moral uprightness. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth never have that period. Watching Welles' 1948 cinematic staging of the play, I was again reminded how quickly they turn into monsters. Yes, the phrase "turn into" suggests they started out not being monsters. But so little time is spent meeting them and learning of any potential noble aspects to their character -- almost none with Lady Macbeth -- that we have a hard time feeling like these were good characters breaking bad. They're just Heisenberg right from the start.

I know Macbeth is supposed to be a heroic man twisted by the prophecies of a trio of witches -- sorry, "weird sisters" -- but it isn't more than a soliloquy or two before he descends into outright murderous ambition. What's worse is that the lion's share of the play is spent on him -- both of them -- descending into a sort of regret-induced madness, talking in their sleep and talking to ghosts, bemoaning their wretchedness, wallowing in misery. I believe it when it comes to Macbeth, as I feel like he's a weak man who was manipulated. But I don't believe it when it comes to Lady Macbeth, who never seems to have any qualms about murdering their way to the top. Maybe in my sleep-deprived state I am just not reading between the verses to find those qualms.

But I don't fault Welles for making Macbeth. That play has some of Shakespeare's most enduring lines, and has contributed household phrases to our lexicon. For example, I believe "the be all and the end all" and "what's done is done" both originate here. That's in addition to the more commonly recognized lines like "Out, out damned spot!" and life "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." I just wish the content of the play was easier to like.

But back to Welles. This was not his first time with Macbeth, though it was his first time filming it. As I was reminded in Mank, Welles directed a stage version of the play in 1936 -- as I only just learned by looking it up now, the cast was all African American. Twelve years later, Welles got to appear in the play himself as its main character.

This was not my first time seeing Welles make Shakespeare. I went out of order as I saw his 1951 version of Othello a couple years ago. That's a tragedy I really love -- in fact, it's the consummate tragedy as I would like to define it, featuring a character undone by a fatal flaw. I suppose Macbeth's fatal flaw is ambition, but I find Othello's insecurity to be a more interesting fatal flaw. Besides, to be "undone" you have to be "done" in the first place, and Shakespeare gets that right in Othello, where our opening interactions with the main character are pleasant verging on joyous. Can't say the same thing with Macbeth.

Until watching this and recognizing that Welles was drawn to both plays, I didn't consciously realize how much they have in common. Both feature a main character unwittingly driven to horrible acts by the urgings of a sinister character whispering in his ear. Again, though, I find Iago to be the more interesting puppet-master, dramatically, than I find Lady Macbeth.

Welles' cinematic staging of these two plays is similar, too, having the same rough-hewn quality to them. I was struck by the roughness of Othello when I saw it, thinking of Citizen Kane as a very clean and controlled sort of film, but I can see that the aesthetic roots of Othello were present in Macbeth. Although Macbeth takes place on a set that was constructed for the film and Othello in existing buildings, both locales have a desolate quality to them that approximates the characters' emotional isolation. It's effective.

I also appreciated seeing some signature Welles touches. From Citizen Kane and from February's The Lady from Shanghai, we know that Welles is big into mirrors. He uses a reflected image in a particularly compelling way here. When Macbeth first fits on his crown after killing Duncan -- an ugly, spiky, square sort of thing -- his image is radically distorted in the mirror, making Macbeth look almost like a drawing whose ink had been smudged into something blurry and unrecognizable. We also get a good dose of Welles' interest in shrouding characters in shadow, as there are a couple shots lit in such a way as to fully obscure Macbeth into silhouette while other characters are in the light. 

I suppose I should spend a paragraph here on performance. The secondary characters in Macbeth blend into one another for me, and that was the case with the performances as well -- with the exception of a 19-year-old Roddy McDowell as Malcolm, who was fun to see. But both the leads do acquit themselves admirably here. Welles is big in certain spots, but we're talking about Shakespeare here -- subtlety is rarely rewarded in a performer. I continue to be impressed by his acting ability, as we think of his work behind the camera as the thing that defines his legacy. The revelation for me was Jeanette Nolan, someone I'd never heard of, as Lady Macbeth. Now that it's been a couple nights since I watched this, I can't remember exactly what the technique was, but there was something Welles did to her voice to make it sound a bit distant and distorted. 

As much as Othello and other Welles works came to mind while watching Macbeth, the film I found myself thinking about most was another Shakespeare adaptation that came out in 1948. And Macbeth really suffers in comparison to that. The Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet, which he also directed, came out in 1948, and won best picture that year. Except for a sort of flat denouement, I absolutely loved that version of Hamlet, which is more traditionally staged in some senses, but also more emotionally satisfying overall. Then again, Hamlet is my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies -- followed closely by Othello. So I guess this version of Macbeth had a couple tough acts to follow.

After devoting the first two installments of this series to only one film apiece, we'll have to increase the pace for the next two if we want to get where we need to go by December. So in June I will watch the next two Welles features I haven't seen, Mr. Arkadin and The Trial, followed by Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story in August -- pending availability of course.

All's Well That Ends Welles: The Lady from Shanghai

Well that series title is a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?

That's the first chance I've gotten to see it in print, and especially when the title of the film in question is pretty long itself, it's a bit awkward. But I can't rightly change it up now, because ... well, I don't know, I just can't. 

This is indeed the first in a bi-monthly series devoted to watching the rest of Orson Welles' films that I have not yet seen, which is more than six so at some point we'll have to double up. But not in this first month, as I watch Welles' fourth feature overall, and the oldest I haven't yet seen.

But here's two little bits of information that will give you some idea how difficult this series will be. On IMDB Welles has 62 directing credits. Now clearly, some of those are shorts and some of them are TV, and some are probably something else entirely. But they also include "uncredited" directing credits, of which The Lady from Shanghai is one. If I remember correctly, his credit is something like "production by Orson Welles," and there is no director credit at all.

To be sure, I'm trying to focus on features Welles directed in this series, but how I will draw the line and what I will consider to qualify will be something of a crapshoot. For example, in poring over those self-same credits, I noticed that he actually has another "uncredited" directing credit before this, the movie Journey Into Fear from 1943. Why is this film not on my radar, and why didn't I start this series watching it? Well because it is not listed in Welles' filmography as director on Wikipedia, and that's the first resource I used to determine which of Welles movies I had not yet seen. (Easier than sifting through 62 directing credits, I can tell you that.) Or rather, Wikipedia does list it but lists only that one as uncredited, not Shanghai, which is why I thought I should include one but safely exclude the other.

Am I ever going to get to talking about The Lady from Shanghai? Soon. Soon. Patience.

The first thing I noticed about The Lady from Shanghai was that it probably also could have qualified for my noir series. Although a lot of the action takes place during the day, on a boat at sea, that self-same Wikipedia lists it as a noir right there in the opening paragraph. It's really the character dynamics and the femme fatale that make it a noir, though there are some other things I'd point out if I were doing this for the noir series (like the slats of one of those revolving doors throwing shadows across Welles' face in one of the film's final scenes). If I hadn't already watched Gun Crazy this month for Knowing Noir, I suppose I could have cheated and just done a two-fer.

Another thing that makes the film recognizably noir is its serpentine plot, which I probably would have had trouble following anyway, even with the unwise decision to have a whiskey with the movie. Given that I had been waking up extra early the few days beforehand -- excessive concern over being the only one to get my kids ready for school with my wife out of town -- any kind of alcohol was a questionable choice, and whiskey likely especially so. But I think I would have been a bit lost even without the need for a couple impromptu five-minute naps during the movie.

The basic story is that Welles plays Irish-born sailor Michael O'Hara, pulling off the accent with only occasional lapses, who is lured by the femme fatale into crewing on a ship owned by her older husband, a powerful attorney who walks with the assistance of two canes. She's Rita Hayworth, and he's Everett Sloane, who I recognized as one of Kane's closest confidants in Citizen Kane. (He worked at the newspaper, and reluctantly says "That one" when pointing to the headline that involves Kane's election loss being a fix job.) If you can believe it, I think this is the first time I have ever seen Rita Hayworth in a film, knowing her primarily from the plot function she plays in The Shawshank Redemption. Alas, she did not strike me as particularly charismatic. 

Anyway, it's a long journey from the east coast of the U.S. to the west coast, through the Panama Canal. Along the way the two fall for each other, but O'Hara also receives a proposition from the attorney's business partner, played by Glenn Anders, who offers O'Hara $5,000 to pretend to kill him. The man has designs on faking his own death and getting away to some island paradise, with the "proof" of his death being that O'Hara has signed a confession saying he did it. Only thing is, legally they cannot charge O'Hara because the man's corpse will never be found, but the confession will be proof enough in the eyes of the law that he's dead. Sounds fishy, but O'Hara agrees to go along with it.

From there it gets far more complicated in ways that I shouldn't spoil, but probably couldn't anyway, as I had to read the plot synopsis afterward to make sure I'd gotten everything. It's one of those plots where even if you read it afterward to confirm what happened, you still aren't sure if it really hangs together, as it involves double crosses that don't totally seem to make sense, and characters acting naively in a way that counteracts their best interests.

If I'm looking for the Welles of Citizen Kane in this film, I'm not really finding him, despite a few touches here and there that recall some of the director's interests from that film. For example, there's a climactic scene involving funhouse mirrors that reminded me of that shot at the end of Kane where we see Kane's image reflecting over and over again, the perfect distillation of the character's loneliness and isolation at that point in his downfall. 

But not seeing that great ambition at work here was probably also a function of the turn Welles' career took after his follow-up to Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was botched and rendered unrecognizable from Welles' original vision after he lost final cut. It's easy to see why he would, or why he had to, go in another direction after that, turning a buck on smaller genre projects. I suppose the film is ambitious in terms of its plotting, though I found the filmmaking itself pretty workmanlike.

I did enjoy The Lady from Shanghai enough to narrowly recommend it. There are some pretty lively sequences, particularly one where Sloane's character ends up both the defense attorney and a material witness in O'Hara's eventual trial. This leads to him being in the unusual position of cross-examining himself, including both his questions to himself and his answers to those questions. This has the jury in stitches, and would have had me in the same condition if I hadn't been so tired.

Overall, though, I fear this is a harbinger of things to come, as there's a reason that many of Welles' later films did not get the same recognition as Kane did, and that his career is often thought of as a missed opportunity. Fortunately, he had films after this that I really liked -- such as Othello and Touch of Evil -- so there's at least a decent chance things will get better from here.

If I continue to go chronologically, and I don't see why I wouldn't, next up in April will be another Shakespeare adaptation, his 1948 version of Macbeth. Given that this is not one of my favorite Shakespeare tragedies, there could be more disappointment on the horizon. 

I'm thinking of Kaufman and Welles

For about the past five years I've done both a monthly viewing series on this blog and a bi-monthly viewing series, which have both reset at the beginning of each new calendar year.

Twenty twenty-one is an expansion forward in that regard, as I'm not going to get six months out of the year to rest comparatively easily. 

That's right, I could not decide between two different bi-monthly series for 2021, so I decided to do both of them, intertwined. One will consist entirely of repeat viewings, while the other will be my first time seeing the film in question.

The first will start this month and is called I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, a riff on my #1 movie of last year. Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things struck me as a kind of culmination of all the films he'd written or directed before it, though to be fair, you could probably say that about each of his films. Also "culmination" is not the correct term, since he's only 62 and could have another couple decades of films in him.

But given how many themes contained in I'm Thinking of Ending Things have appeared first in other Kaufman works, I thought it would be a good time to go back and revisit those other works, all of which I've seen, in chronological order.

It'd work out great if Kaufman had exactly six films before now, but that's not the case. Between his work as a screenwriter and his work as a director, he's got eight total films to his credit.

So here's how I've decided to handle it. I won't watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things again at the end of 2021, as I saw it twice last year and it's still fresh in my memory, so that cuts out one movie. And the two of his films I'm most familiar with -- which were also my favorite films of their respective years, just like Ending Things -- also happen to have been consecutive works in his filmography, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So I'll squeeze those two into the same month at the midpoint, leaving myself with the following schedule:

January - Being John Malkovich (1999)
March - Human Nature (2001)
May - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
July - Adaptation (2002)/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
September - Synecdoche, New York (2008)
November - Anomalisa (2015)

The sticklers among you will note that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind technically came out about three weeks after Adaptation, so I can't really call Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine consecutive releases. But the fact that there were two Kaufman movies in December of 2002, when he has only eight total movies in the past 22 years, is an oddity to begin with, so I think it'll be okay. (In fact, when I first envisioned this series, I had forgotten he even wrote Confessions. It made me grumpy when I realized that as it meant I had to combine the other two movies into one month.)

The symmetry of the series does work out pretty well otherwise, though, as half of the months will be movies I've seen only once (Nature, Confessions and Anomalisa) while the others will be movies I've seen at least twice, and more than four times in the case of my July movies.

In each post I'll try to reflect on how the movies relate to each other, and to I'm Thinking of Ending Things in particular.  

The other half of the year -- the months in which I usually do my bi-monthly series, starting with February -- will relate to another great director who was in our minds last year, and who would have directed a #1 film of the year for me if I'd been around back in 1941. That of course is Orson Welles, whose greatest film was the subject of the movie Mank last year, though Welles himself played only a bit part.

It was actually well before I saw Mank that I was thinking one day about how much I like Welles, if not always every movie he made, then at least the idea of him. And then I got to thinking about how I still had not seen his final, uncompleted movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which was released to Netflix in 2018.

At the time, I decided against seeing it that year in order to resolve the problem of how to rank it, as a "new release" in 2018 or just a relic that had been dug up and finished. I wrote about that dilemma here. I figured I would get to it pretty soon in 2019, but that whole year and the next both passed without me doing so. By the time this occurred to me near the end of 2020, the movie was almost totally off my radar.

So I decided to reverse engineer a series leading up to the watching of The Other Side of the Wind, which would have the added benefit of making me an Orson Welles completist.

Because you know how I like my clever series titles, this one will be called All's Well That Ends Welles. The purpose will be to "end Welles," in other words, to see the remaining films of his I haven't seen.

As with I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, though, the numbers don't work out perfectly. There are more than six Welles films I have not seen. I tried to whittle down that number with a 2020 viewing of his version of Don Quixote, also an uncompleted patchwork that was finished in 1992. I had already watched The Stranger a month or two before that. But I didn't whittle any further than that, leaving me with the following titles still to watch:

Journey Into Fear (1943)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Macbeth (1948)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Trial (1962)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Immortal Story (1968)
F for Fake (1973)
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

The series is a bit problematically conceived, because I am actually closer to the beginning of Welles' filmography than I am to the end of it. Plus, it's unclear how many of these things are actually really considered feature films, and how many will even be accessible to me. Then there's also the fact that I kind of want to watch a movie I've already seen, The Magnificent Ambersons, a second time, to get a proper grasp on my feelings toward it.

But if Welles wanted to have a messy career full of fits and starts and incomplete projects, I don't know why a bi-monthly series devoted to him should be any less messy. In six installments spaced about every 60 days, I will reach my own idea of what constitutes "ending Welles" by the time 2021 is done.

Although I didn't plan this, I think Kaufman and Welles actually have a fair bit in common. They are both exceedingly ambitious in the scope and themes of their projects, and are both fascinated with existentialism, insofar as it affects the psyche of men. I would not say their films are made to the exclusion of women, but their perspectives on and relationship to women are things I'm sure I'll grapple with -- things I'll be thinking of, if you will -- as I visit and revisit their work over the coming 12 months. 

So I may have bitten off more than I usually chew, but I think it will make for good chewing. 

Come have a bite with me, if you like.

Avoiding the Orson Welles problem

Pretty much every year, a movie gets released that’s been sitting on the shelf for a long time. The ones that were shot and maybe debuted at film festivals in, say, 2015, then tried to find a distributor for a couple years, are not so difficult to subsume into the field of 2018 releases, in terms of ranking them on year-end lists.

The ones that stretch that timeline out to closer to a decade? You really have to agonize over them. I didn’t like including All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a 2006 film that only finally got a U.S. release seven years later, in my 2013 year-end rankings. But I did it.

When The Other Side of the Wind debuted on Netflix a couple months ago, 48 years after Orson Welles began shooting it, I had to draw the line.

The fact that there was a whole separate documentary about the making of it, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, which is properly a 2018 release, made it easier to just slough off the whole thing to 2019.

I love Orson Welles, and in December alone saw another movie he directed (Othello) as well as revisited one he appeared in (The Muppet Movie). But I did not see the one he directed for six years on and off in the 1970s and left incomplete at his death in 1985. I didn’t want to include it with my 2018 movies but also didn’t want to not include it. Easiest solution to that is just not to see it. Not yet, anyway.

This is occurring to me today not only because I’m in the final stages of preparing my own year-end rankings (just 11 more days now), but also because I’m reviewing a list of critics top ten lists on Metacritic, partly out of general interest and partly to make sure I see as much as I can before I finish mine. Of 318 lists Metacritic examined, Wind came in 28^th on their scoring system, which awards three points for a first-place ranking, two for a second place, one point for anywhere between 3^rd and 10^th and then a half point for any appearance on an additional 11 through 20 offered by the critic. This ties it with Minding the Gap and First Man to round out the top 30, and it’s one of only five films on the list I haven’t seen, two of which I will not be able to see before my rankings close.

So I’ve actually got quite good coverage of critically acclaimed 2018 films, which is part of the reason I’m not feeling the same mad rush to squeeze in viewings before January 22^nd, and am making some time in my schedule for rewatches. But of those three in the top 30 that I can still see if I choose, The Other Side of the Wind is the only one I will intentionally decline to view.

On the one hand I think my reasoning is sound. This is a movie that was made in the 1970s. It may not have been edited until 2018, and I think there’s some new voiceover if I remember correctly (though I’ve tried not to read too much about it). But it just doesn’t feel like it should go shoulder to shoulder with movies like Eighth Grade and Love, Simon, the stars of whom were not even born when Welles shot his last Wind footage. In fact, the star of Eighth Grade would not be born for another 27 years.

On the other hand, the movie could not have been ranked in any other year. No one saw it until 2018. Even with All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, it might have been possible for me to rank it in 2006 if I’d gone to the right festivals or lived in the right countries. Not the case with The Other Side of the Wind.

And my general overriding principle is that every movie deserves at least one year in which it has the opportunity to be ranked. Some get two possible years, such as Paddington 2, which came out in Australia at the end of 2017 but didn’t take the cinematic world by storm until its 2018 U.S. release. I didn’t see it in the theater so I’m choosing to rank it with 2018. But no movie should have no years, which is what gives me such headaches about Wind.  

What year the footage was shot in is rendered less of an important factor when you consider documentaries containing archival footage. One interesting 2018 example of that is They Shall Not Grow Old, the film consisting entirely of World War I footage painstakingly colorized by a team led by Peter Jackson. Sounds really great and I wish I’d taken the opportunity to see it. (Technically I still have that opportunity, as it’s still playing at a theater near me, but it’s gone well past the two-week period I could see it with my critics card, and I guess my desire doesn’t rise to the level of paying $20 for it.) There’s no doubt this is a 2018 film and I would have ranked it with this year’s films if I’d seen it.

Yet the case of The Other Side of the Wind feels different. It feels more like a corpse shocked back into twitchy life by some really powerful electrical currents. It feels like something that was never meant to exist, but did because some good people saw the chance to bring us an artist’s vision, and some not-as-good people saw a chance to make money on it. But many of those who have seen it – those not ranking it in their top ten, anyway – have described it as a weird kind of incomplete experiment, less a film than a collection of disjointed thoughts. Which is to be expected.

I have no doubt that if The Other Side of the Wind had been completed by Welles, it would look significantly different than what we’ve gotten. Since he obviously had a fraught relationship with what he’d shot, there was a good chance he would have thrown out some or even most of it. I appreciate that I will get to see what he shot when I do watch it, but I can’t agree with the argument that this is Welles’ film as he intended it to be seen – if anyone’s making that argument. It’s more akin to an old silent film uncovered in a basement than an actual new release and meaningful part of the 2018 film landscape.

So I might watch The Other Side of the Wind as soon as next month. I kind of can’t wait, actually. But by waiting, then I won’t have to torture myself with whether I made the right decision to rank it or not rank it. It’ll just join the ever-increasing body of Films That Did Not Come Out This Year, and I will appreciate its merits or lack thereof in that context.