by ·Comments Off on A couple of auteur lists

I’ve taken to posting lists of movies I’d like to watch on this blog, which is unnecessary since I already keep a master list of movies I’d like to see in a database. Keeping extra lists here just means I’ve made everything less efficient. But no matter. A month or two ago I declared The Auteurist Completion Project, with aims to watch the last few remaining titles by directors I care about whose complete works I’d almost seen. Here’s the status report for that particular goal.

P. Anderson: The Dirk Diggler Story
W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket (short)
Anger: Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, Anger Sees Red, The Man We Want to Hang
Arnold: Deanimated
Bahrani: Man Push Cart, Plastic Bag
Baldwin: Spectres of the Spectrum
Bong: Memories of Murder, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Influenza
Cocteau: Eagle Has Two Heads, 8×8
Cronenberg: From the Drain, Italian Machine
Dante: Second Civil War, The Hole
Fuller: Day of Reckoning, Crimson Kimono, Verboten, The Command, The Tanks are Coming
Gilliam: Storytime, Tideland
Gondry: The Letter, Thorn in the Heart
Guest: For Your Consideration
Hartley: Fay Grim, shorts vol. 2
Haynes: Poison
Hillcoat: Ghosts of the Civil Dead, To Have and to Hold
Jarmusch: Permanent Vacation, Year of the Horse
Jodorowsky: Santa Sangre, The Rainbow Thief
Keaton: The Navigator, Battling Butler
Korine: Trash Humpers, Julien Donkey-Boy
Kubrick: Fear and Desire
Lang: Harakiri, The Wandering Image, Four Around a Woman
Leone: Duck You Sucker, My Name is Nobody
Linklater: Me and Orson Welles, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow…
Lynch: On The Air
Marker: Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer, The Last Bolshevik, Level Five
Moore: Pets or Meat, Slacker Uprising
Murnau: Haunted Castle, Burning Soil, 4 Devils
Panahi: White Balloon, The Mirror
Park: Chicken Run, Creature Comforts
Quays: Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Songs for Dead Children, Inventorium Sladow
Raimi: Within the Woods
Soderbergh: King of the Hill, The Girlfriend Experience, And Everything Is Going Fine
Svankmajer: Jabberwocky, Sileni, Surviving Life
Tarkovsky: Nostalghia, Mirror, Steamroller and the Violin
Tarr: Macbeth, Almanac of Fall, Damnation
Tati: Jour de Fete, School for Postmen, Trafic
Taymor: Juan Darien, The Tempest
Welles: Around the World, Chimes at Midnight, Fountain of Youth, The OW Show
Wong: In the Mood DVD extras

Deleted from list because I was missing more titles than expected: Miike, De Palma, Dreyer, Tashlin, Van Sant, Varda, Demy, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Kieslowski, Kitano, Powell/Pressburger, Sally Potter, Dennis Potter, Renoir, Resnais, Rivette, Scorsese, Watkins.

If I was planning to make my annual end-of-year list of movies which I simply must watch next year (which I’m not, since I feel like having a freeform 2011), those titles would probably be on there. Though it would be more fun to tackle famed filmmakers whose works I’m largely (or in most cases, completely) unfamiliar with, so here’s a handy list of those, too.

Joseph Losey
Anthony Mann
Rainer Fassbinder
Josef von Sternberg
Cecil B. DeMille
Roberto Rossellini
Otto Preminger
William Wyler
Alexander Dovzhenko
King Vidor
Luc Moullet
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Mikio Naruse
Jean Eustache
Marcel Carné
Raoul Walsh
Derek Jarman
Elia Suleiman
Julien Duvivier
Terayama Shuji
Luchino Visconti
Aleksandr Sokurov
Fatty Arbuckle
Ritwik Ghatak
Masahiro Shinoda
Yevgeni Bauer
James Benning
Stanley Kwan
Carlos Saura
Maurice Pialat
Jacques Becker
Marguerite Duras
Theo Angelopoulos
Marcel L’Herbier
João César Monteiro
Herschell Gordon Lewis
Humphrey Jennings
Otar Iosseliani
Chantal Akerman
Lee Chang-dong
Paul Leni
Hiroshi Shimizu
Albert Brooks
Rene Clement
Whit Stillman
Jean Epstein
Bertrand Tavernier
Tran Anh Hung
Barbet Schroeder
Zhuangzhuang Tian
Andrea Arnold
Marco Bellocchio
Pere Portabella
Vera Chytilová
Anthony Asquith
Basil Dearden
Mark Rappaport
Hong Sang-soo
Takashi Ito
Jan Sverák
Youssef Chahine
Karel Zeman
Bruno Dumont
Francesco Rosi
Karel Reisz
Don Siegel
Roger Vadim
Guy Debord
Mara Mattuschka
Henry Hills
Andy Warhol

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The Armando Iannucci Shows (2001)

Sadly there was only one season, but I guess he tackled every major issue that humanity faces in these eight episodes (Time, Reality, Work, Twats), so why make more? Aired in September 2001 so I imagine it could have been overlooked. I have no idea if it was, though, since here practically all British television is overlooked. I sought this out after loving Iannucci’s In The Loop. Still looking forward to The Thick of It and Time Trumpet.

All vaguely thematically-tied sketch comedy, a la the first two seasons of Mr. Show, mostly (but not limited to) starring Armando as himself, or his stand-up persona.

A poem from the show:

As she grimly walked away
“I’m leaving you,” she said
And I had nothing new to say
Like the second album by Portishead

–
30 Rock seasons 3 & 4

Remained funny/good over two more seasons. Less stand-alone-episodic, more season-long plot threads. Until netflix gets more episodes, there’s no other show we can easily agree to watch together – contenders have included Parks & Rec, Louie, Slings & Arrows and Arrested Development.

New writers & directors: Steve Buscemi (!), Todd Holland (director of the Fred Savage classic The Wizard), Ron Weiner (writer of one of my favorite Futurama episodes), Tricia Brock (made a 2004 Fred Willard movie), 15-year SNL writer Paula Pell, and the show’s music composer directed an episode.

Oh, the guests!
The cast of Night Court, Oprah (my favorite guest spot), J. Aniston, Steve Martin, Peter Dinklage, John Lithgow, Alan Alda, the Beastie Boys, Jon Glaser, Betty White, the voice of Gilbert Gottfried, Al “should not be allowed on television” Gore, Buzz “ditto” Aldrin, James Franco, Will Ferrell and Matt Damon, and semi-regulars Elaine Stritch, Salma Hayek, Jon Hamm, Michael Sheen and Juliane Moore.

by ·Comments Off on Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)

Katy’s first pick for Westerns month was this, the most acclaimed Western of all. We both liked it very much, though I’m probably not qualified to proclaim its greatness or otherwise. For one thing, it’s not all Citizen Kane-y, shouting its own greatness to the heavens, just a cheap-looking, charming flick (reportedly, Welles loved it). Story by Ernest Haycox (Canyon Passage, Union Pacific), screenplay by Ford regular Dudley Nichols (also Bringing Up Baby and Scarlet Street – I like this guy). Remade in the 60’s with Ann-Margret, Bing Crosby and Slim Pickens, then in the 80’s with Highwaymen Willie, Kris, Johnny and Waylon. I would kinda love to see both remakes. Ford also made two Henry Fonda movies this year, including Young Mr. Lincoln.

Bunch of people who do not belong together are crammed into the stage to Lordsburg through dangerous Indian territory and their military escort has vanished. The long-dreaded attack comes, but they’re saved last-minute by the cavalry, and everyone learns a little something about each other. Lots more humor than I expected, too. It’s hardly a dry, stodgy classic. It’s hardly realistic either – you never forget that it’s a movie (in fact, sometimes it feels like a stage play).

John Wayne (in his star-making role after flying under-radar for his last hundred movies) shows up late, out for revenge on some guys who killed his brother, watched closely by Marshall Curley (George Bancroft, star of those Josef von Sternberg movies Criterion just put out). It seems weird now that Claire Trevor (Dark Command, Key Largo, that 60’s remake of Pickup on South Street) was first-billed in this. She’s a hottie haunted by her dark past (as a “saloon girl,” it seems, not a prostitute) and shunned by the right and proper other girl, pregnant Lucy (Hollywood short-termer Louise Platt of Street of Chance, Spawn of the North) who’s trying to meet up with her husband.

There’s an uptight crooked banker named Gatewood (Berton Churchill, the villainous senator in Judge Priest) who gets arrested upon arrival, after irritating everyone the entire way, and for comic relief, nerdy whiskey salesman Peacock (appropriately named Donald Meek, also of You Can’t Take It With You, Peter Ibbetson, Return of Frank James) and the seriously drunk Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell, who won an oscar for this, also with major parts in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, Only Angels Have Wings and The Hunchback of Notre Dame – all this same year!). The doc sobers up just long enough to deliver Lucy’s baby halfway through the trip, becoming everyone’s hero. I can’t tell if gentleman gambler Hatfield (John Carradine, who was playing Robert Ford in the Jesse James films around the same time) is a hero or not, dying in the attack (somebody had to) before he could blast Lucy in the head to spare her from Indian capture. And I loved coachman Andy Devine, whom Katy immediately pegged as the voice of Friar Tuck in Robin Hood. And oh yeah, when they get into town, lawman Curley lets Ford blow away his opponents then escape with Claire Trevor.

D. Cairns:

Stock types, but Nichols and Ford and the cast make them fresh by letting them bounce off one another in surprising ways. Character change elevates Stagecoach far above The Hurricane, where the cardboard figures blow in the wind but don’t bend. Nearly everybody in Stagecoach is either developed or transfigured during the adventure. Snooty Lucy transcends the prejudices of her upbringing via her growing respect for Dallas, and even the timid Mr. Peacock gains a little force. A family man, he is more able to assert himself after Lucy’s baby is born, even if nobody pays much attention. Curley, meanwhile, thanks to his exposure to that noble outlaw the Ringo Kid, abandons his rigid service to the law so a higher justice can be done. … Throughout the film, the Apaches are an anonymous threat, Geronimo a mere renegade with no motivation supplied. It’s the least nuanced portrayal of Indians in any of Ford’s classic westerns, though his relations with the Navajo extras were very warm—he even had a medicine man on retainer to arrange photogenic cloud formations for his camera.

We watched it on crummy netflix streaming, not on the gloriously restored, feature-rich new Criterion-edition blu-ray, so I have no supporting materials.

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A very late entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

Le final film de Jean Renoir, made for television when the director was in his mid-70’s, eight years after his last theatrical picture The Elusive Corporal. Some tinges of bitterness, of sadness and despair, but as always Jean is finally generous and life-affirming, closing with a whole town roaring laughter, making me laugh in response.

But first, Renoir minimizes expectations. Away from the monumental cinema screen (which he often conflated with a theatrical stage), now working for television, he envisions a diminished stage, a tiny theater, and so presents short stories instead of one long work.

A rich loudmouth (Roland Bertin of The Model Couple, The Hairdresser’s Husband), in a move imitated by Lars Von Trier for The Five Obstructions, pays a homeless guy to watch his friends’ Christmas feast through the restaurant window. Some of his guests are bummed, so they flit off elsewhere, leaving this guy outside making restaurant patrons nervous until the maitre d’ pays him in food and wine to buzz off. The bum (Nino Formicola) brings the food to his girlfriend (singer Milly, in The Conformist the same year) under a bridge – they celebrate the holiday talking together (but not eating) then lie down and freeze to death with happy smiles on their face. A weird holiday fable, and a circular one for Renoir, who’d filmed The Little Match Girl (with much window gazing and freezing to death) over forty years prior.

Gaze from outside:

Gaze from inside:

As with the concept of the “petit theater” itself, the next episode can be seen as a cranky old-timer’s refusal to accept modern technology, but in both cases he suffuses his premise with humor, downplaying the crankiness in favor of amusement. It’s the most comedic and musical of the pieces, featuring a Greek choir of townsfolk, a painting that changes expression, and cartoonishly fun acting.

Marguerite Cassan (my favorite actor of the same year’s La Rupture – mother of the husband-gone-mad) wants only an electric floor buffer, and bullies her husband about it until the next-door neighbor, an electric floor buffer sales rep, overhears and comes over to demo the product. Unfortunately, Cassan’s poor husband (Pierre Olaf of Camelot) slips on the ultra-smooth floor and dies. She remarries a man with a stronger will (Jacques Dynam, who played buffoon inspector Juve’s second-in-command in the 1964 Fantomas) who insists she not run the machine while he’s home. She disobeys and he hurls it out the window, so she hurls herself out the window. That’s two Renoir stories in a row that end in demise.

M. Cassan giving the silent treatment to first husband:

M. Cassan giving the silent treatment to second husband:

Part Three is a musical interlude featuring Jeanne Moreau (the same year she was/wasn’t in Orson Welles’s The Deep) singing “When Love Dies.” Incredibly, the producers of the VHS copy I watched decided not to subtitle the song.

The final segment was my favorite. Duvallier (Fernand Sardou), a well-loved retired captain, resides happily in his big house with his young wife (Francoise Arnoul, lead girl in French Cancan) and a lovestruck maid (the rarely seen Dominique Labourier, a few years before starring in Celine and Julie Go Boating), spending his days in town playing bowls (a similar game to bocce). All is bliss until the wife is discovered to be sleeping with a friend of his, then it’s tears all around. Duvallier ponders the situation, asking townsfolk for advice, while the friend first decides to leave town (him: “He loves you”, Mrs. Duvallier: “Yes, but only when I’m happy. When I’m unhappy I upset him, and if you leave I’ll be unhappy.”) then proposes a duel. But Duvallier decides it’s best for everyone to stay happy, to live as they have been, and so the trio goes into town for a game of bowls. It’s the most cheerful movie about infidelity that I’ve ever seen.

Final bow:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 5

On one hand, I really want to see the G.I. Joe movie (since I used to watch all the cartoons) and Supernova (since it’s a legendarily troubled sci-fi with F.F. Coppola involvement) and many other, even worse movies. On the other hand, time is precious and I take my movie watching seriously. So I find The Last Ten Minutes to be a happy compromise – in one guilty-pleasure hour, I kill six potentially trashy time-wasting movies, at an average savings of 89%, or over 13 hours per ten movies! What a deal.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, Stephen Sommers)
Ah, what’s happening?! General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) looks concerned. A stealth bomber was shot with green smokey special effects and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) escaped alive. People are referring to “joes” and their “hoo-rah” when they get excited is of course “yo joe!”. Maybe they should’ve gotten rid of those parts. Cobra Commander and Destro (I never thought of him as Scottish) are off doing creepy villain stuff and saying lines like “you and what army?” The visuals look slick as shit, though. Why is Duke (Channing Tatum of Public Enemies) so young? Mild sequel set-up, Jonathan Pryce-as-president coda, and it looks like I missed all the Storm Shadow scenes. Movie looks totally bearable overall. In a few years I look forward to G.I. Joe: The Wrath of Golobulus then G.I. Joe: Beyond Thunderdrome.

Horsemen (2009, Jonas Akerlund)
Why is General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) putting Zhang Ziyi in prison, and what does it have to do with the apocalypse? Oh of course baddies are after his family and are luring him to an abandoned building… that is way more boring than the apocalypse. Quaid’s son (Lou “Thumbsucker” Pucci) is hanging Ichi The Killer/Hellraiser style over a stage saying some boringness about neglectful parenting while Quaid is chained up watching. And every Saw sequel said the same thing. Why don’t our parents worry about us? Why don’t our parents worry about us? From the director of nothing and the writer of Doom.

Supernova (2000, Walter Hill)
James Spader in a Leviathan diving suit fought a badass white guy who I don’t recognize until rescued by Angela Bassett. The ship’s computer warns us about “ninth-dimensional matter.
Karl gets extremely blown up, but I wouldn’t call it a supernova. I don’t think Angela Basset has a shirt on. Ah there’s the supernova – neato. After going warp-speed while nude and hugging, Basset-Spader have gone all The Fly and swapped eye colors and now she’s pregnant – that never happens when people beam up together on Star Trek. Interesting pedigree, this movie – from pseudonymed director Walter “The Warriors” Hill with uncredited help by Francis Ford Coppola.

John Q (2002, Nick Cassavetes)
Denzel… shoots himself in the head! But the safety was on. Transplant heart for Denzel’s insurance-less dying child is arriving. The police arrest a False Denzel while the real one sneaks around in hospital scrubs, but Robert Duvall is on to the plot. Is this really what heart transplants look like? So simple and clean, like the Operation game. Montage of people telling us America may have a national health-care problem. A blatant message movie, then. Look, James Woods! I thought it didn’t seem terrible overall until a cringey final shot.

Hollow Man 2 (2006, Claudio Fäh)
Was Hollow Man even successful? Invisible Christian Slater (the poor man’s Invisible Kevin Bacon) indirectly kills a suited guy who’s tracking him via infrared scanner. Oh wait, dialogue tells me that was actually Invisible Peter Facinelli of the Twilight series… Slater is now trying to murder Laura Regan until Facinelli shows up. Invisible Man fight in the rain ends with a shovel stuck into Slater. From the writer of all sorts of unnecessary sequels, from Hellraiser: Hellworld to Dracula 2000, from Pulse 3 to Prophecy 5.

Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow)
Short movie. Evil James Cromwell, inventor of the surrogate system, surprises Bruce Willis with a gun. Ooh, in the future we have light-up staircases. Crom “uploaded a virus into the system” to kill all the surrogates, but a fat guy excitedly shouts some key commands at a blonde chick, then shots are fired and all the robot surrogates in the world fall down. So whoever she was (Bruce’s wife?) she saved all of humanity from a life of surrogate slavery, waking them from, one might say, the Matrix in which they lived. From the director of sad sequel Terminator 3.

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A belated entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

“This war’s gonna have a head on it”

Frank Tashlin’s final film as director is a Bob Hope picture, appropriate since Hope gave Tashlin his big break into live-action directing in the first place with Son of Paleface. Tashlin was only 59 when this came out, younger than Hope, but would only live a few more years. It’s a shame to have lost him so young, since his style kept changing with the times – would’ve been a trip to see a Tashlin picture in the 1980’s. From The Girl Can’t Help It to Caprice, Tash’s films have seemed very of-their-time – until this one, which feels stodgy and old-fashioned.

Why is this? My guess is old buddy Bob Hope. The credited writers are responsible for some TV episodes and the goofy crystalline sci-fi flick The Monolith Monsters but this has Hope written all over it. It wants to be a comedy, but it can’t make any jokes at the military’s expense – not in ’68 with Hope a political right-winger who probably spent more time than any other entertainer performing for U.S. troops. It’s more consistent a story than most Tashlin movies but it lacks all the good gags – the best jokes are the couple that Hope makes at the expense of his beloved partner Bing Crosby – and any comic momentum is killed at the end with a dry ten minutes of flag waving. So you could say it fails as a comedy since it pulls so many punches, or more generously, that it’s a light military drama with a bit of humor.

Hope’s buddy Calvin Coolidge Ishamura, played by Mako of Conan the Destroyer and Pacific Heights – the movie is very tolerant of Japanese-Americans, if not Japanese-Japanese.

Makeshift beer fridge:

The premise is simple: the Japs sunk a boat delivering beer to the army/navy base and Hope schemes to recover it, following the tides to find drifts of beer cars which he passes out to friends and hides from others. Not caring much about military matters, I didn’t realize until late that there’s a whole army vs. navy rivalry on the base (or is it two bases?) which would’ve cleared up some mysteries – like friendly, clean-looking (but with spooky eyes) lieutenant Jeffrey Hunter (below with Hope), don’t know if he’s a rival, a superior, or just a buddy. This turned out to be a late film for Jeffrey Hunter (also Jesus in King of Kings) as well – his career was cut short by a fatal stroke the following year.

The other allowable topic for comedy besides beer is girls. The group sends for nurses, imagining a team of sexy young girls arriving on the island, but all they get is a wild-haired Phyllis Diller, my favorite person in the movie. Hope gets a flashback-provoking love interest in the form of Gina Lollobrigida (of Dassin’s The Law), and I already can’t remember what Mylène Demongeot (of those 1960’s Fantomas movies) was doing there.

The new nurses: imagined

The new nurses: actual

Tashlin has to sneak in one line about television – something about reruns, I forget the context, and he manages to close the picture on a Tashlinesque piece of live-action cartoonery, Hope pulling a captured submarine with his rowboat. I assume there’s a metaphor there.

by ·Comments Off on Black Swan (2010, Darren Aronofsky)

Watched this the same night as The Social Network. They both currently rank in the top 150 movies of all time according to IMDB voters, who have no sense of history. I cringed when I saw Aronofsky’s handheld follow-cam from The Wrestler, but he didn’t overdo that stuff this time. He’s always had a knack for filming deteriorating human bodies and creating sustained intensity through editing and music – plenty of opportunity for both in a story about a ballet dancer going mad. Mila “Extract” Kunis was just as good as Natalie Portman. Barbara Hershey (as Portman’s mom) and Winona Ryder (as the washed-up dancer Portman replaces) round out the cast – apparently a very female picture, though it didn’t feel like one. Will Darren ever make a movie in which nobody dies (or suffers massive trauma, whatever) at the end?

Do I detect an Inland Empire influence?

Too bad the song “Black Swan” wasn’t in the movie, but it couldn’t have made a bigger impact than it did over the ending of A Scanner Darkly.

by ·Comments Off on The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)

I avoided this because I don’t much care about Facebook, but after it started winning every major year-end award I thought again. Besides, I’ve seen every other David Fincher movie in theaters, so why stop now? And I kinda loved it. What’s strange is that the stylistic flourishes I love in Fincher’s films (didn’t love so much in The Benjamin Buttons) were missing from this one – except in the great scene of the Winklevoss brothers’ big race, a wordless high-energy montage scored to a Reznor version of In the Hall of the Mountain King (better known by me as the Tetris song). Otherwise, Fincher’s style seems to disappear, simply supporting the brilliant writing (Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Wilson’s War) and acting (Jesse Eisenberg of Zombieland, Andrew Garfield of Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Justin Timberlake of Southland Tales and Armie Hammer, who recently played Harrison Bergeron).

Timberlake:

April 2024: Rewatched the first 20 minutes while reading Adam Nayman’s Fincher book.

Rooney Mara and her Jack Johnson 2003 tour poster:

by ·Comments Off on Orson Welles: One-Man Band (1995, Vassili Silovic)

A catalog-style entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

Not just a late film, but a whole compendium of late films: a catalogue of works by Orson Welles during his last twenty years, assembled with stylish fun by Silovic and Oja Kodar, very entertaining and informative. All these years I’ve read Jonathan Rosenbaum championing the late, unreleased works of Welles, I still haven’t been clamoring to see them – I figured I’ve got enough things to watch. But now that I’ve had a taste, the clamoring begins.

It starts, naturally, with magic and stage shows – this wonderful bit of duck hypnosis which I played again and again.

Then Orson’s 1975 acceptance speech for his AFI lifetime achievement award, at which he presented scenes from The Other Side of the Wind.

P. Bog as actor:

Oja introduces herself, says she wants to combat the public opinion that Orson idly spent his time doing voiceovers and liquor commercials, but she only fuels the opinion that he couldn’t finish projects at the end because he was easily distracted by newer, shinier projects. Sure, some of it was sheer bad luck, mostly finance-related, but also the negatives of Merchant of Venice going missing.

That unlabeled can holds the original cut of Ambersons:

Scenes from Filming The Trial are shown, a good opportunity for Welles to speak for himself out of character (or, more accurately, in character as himself).

Oja discusses the great trailer for F For Fake (his final completed feature) and shows half of the trailer, then rifles through paintings and sketches he made.

Monologue readings from Moby Dick: filmed solo performance of select scenes before water-shadowed backdrops. Supposedly the rushes have been edited together and screened in Germany and New York. Please feel free to send them here next.

Don Quixote, which he spent 30 years trying to complete. I haven’t seen Jesus Franco’s version, but despite all the public whining about it, it’s probably better than nothing. Franco had no access to some of the footage, which has since aired on television (and therefore on youtube).

A Winston Churchill-related comedy sketch piece in silhouette, and an embarrassing bit at a hammy tailor shop – these are possibly part of the compilation piece known as London, also edited in Germany. I wonder if the Germans would care to release a DVD.

With tailors Charles Gray (of Dearden’s Man in the Moon and a couple of Bond movies) and Jonathan Lynn (director of Clue, My Cousin Vinny):

A trailer for The Deep, a thriller set on a couple of boats in the middle of the ocean, featuring Jeanne Moreau.

Footage shot for Merchant of Venice. The film was almost completed when part of it went missing.

A desperately lonely-looking Welles performing the missing monologue outdoors on a windy evening.

“I think acting is like sculpture, in other words it’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing that makes a performance … There is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of makeup.” – spoken by Welles, but similar to what Renoir says in that short with Gisele Braunberger.

More projects: The Orson Welles Show (featuring The Muppets, and available on video):

The Dreamers, which I know little about:

Overall a very useful little doc, which unsurprisingly got me fired up to watch more Welles movies (and to finally read that recent Welles book by Rosenbaum). Unfortunately my follow-up feature, Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, was much less enlightening.

Afterwards I scouted around online, having a Late-Welles scavenger hunt. I came up with a couple interesting bits. First, a piece of Vienna, as it aired on the Arte channel – a segment of the 1969 One Man Band project. Seems like an unexceptional travelogue, featuring a man who feeds birds, a montage of quick zoom-ins on different cakes (also shown in the Silovic/Kodar doc). A caped and hatted Orson walks through the city scenery, visits a ferris wheel and comments on the Third Man soundtrack, then he and Mickey Rooney perform a magic trick with Senta Berger (of Major Dundee, The Terror of Dr. Mabuse).

Ten minutes of silent screen tests and still photography in preparation for Merchant of Venice, compiled by the Italians – not especially enlightening except to get another look at those long-nosed Eyes Wide Shut masks. I wonder how these tests got out while the film itself remains under wraps: