by ·Comments Off on Othello (1951, Orson Welles)

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations.

I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting) stealing the movie in the last fifteen minutes.

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Filming Othello (1978)

Such a ponderous intro, it’s ten minutes before he gets into any details beyond the movie’s title, then it gets good as he shows scenes from the feature – photographed by Early Welles and re-edited in the fast Late Welles style. He quotes a critic speaking of the film’s “tortured compositions, grotesque shadows and insane distortions,” tells a hilarious story of winning a prize at Cannes with his “film without a country.”

“The thing to do was somehow to make a movie” – sometimes it feels like an elegy for the studio age. In the second half he stages a long, slightly loopy conversation with Iago and Desdemona’s dad, Welles getting the final word via retakes and overdubs.

Me after ten minutes: “Rosenbaum was making a point about film canons and Welles’s late filmography by putting this minor doc on his top thousand films list.”
Me after an hour: “Rosenbaum was a coward for not putting this great work on his top hundred films list.”

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Return to Glennascaul (1952, Hilton Edwards)

A short made by the two guys above during an Othello filming break. Narrator and framing story participant Orson picks up Cassio on the road, who tells his spooky story of giving a ride to a couple of Irish women. He drives them to their titular home, they turn out to be ancient ghosts who’ve vanished when he returns to the now-delapidated house a few minutes later. Pretty deliberate and obvious, with some nice photography.

by ·Comments Off on Macbeth (1948, Orson Welles)

A difficult story to film, but major film artists keep trying for some reason: Bela Tarr, Joel Coen, Polanski, Kurosawa. Welles turns in one of the crazier versions, the actors having a great time with their Scottish accents then lipsyncing (very well) their own performances on an abstract paper-mache stage. The opening 8-minute overture over black would be impressive if it wasn’t big symphonic 1940s music.

Lady M would not become a star, but had decent parts in Ford and Lang films and voice roles in major Disney movies. Mac’s destroyer Macduff is Dan O’Herlihy, Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe. Heir resurgent Malcolm is Roddy McDowall, unrecognizable from either Planet of the Apes or Fright Night. Mac’s short-lived witch-prophesied friend Banquo and the late King Duncan are original Welles Mercury players. The Joseph McBride commentary is much better than the Tim Lucas, from what I played of ’em.

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

Welles’ approach to the material is wildly neo-primitive and so expressionistic that one can never be entirely sure whether the action is taking place in interiors or exteriors; the same ambiguity persists in the spoken text, where off-screen internal monologue and on-screen external speech often seem only a breath apart. The witches’ foaming, bubbling cauldron and Macbeth’s equally unstable consciousness are the closest we can get to any continuous sense of location, and the unabashed B-movie artificiality of the sets confirms that Welles wanted to draft something closer to a charcoal sketch than a finished canvas.

James Naremore:

Welles has cut extensive passages from Shakespeare’s opening scenes, scenes establishing Macbeth as a trusted soldier whose ambitions gradually take control of his better instincts. As a result of the cutting, Lady Macbeth enters the film sooner than she does in the play, and we are given very little sense of her as a malevolent, psychologically interesting influence over her husband. The film simply shows the pair as evil conspirators and plunges immediately into murderous barbarism.

by ·Comments Off on Journey Into Fear (1943, Norman Foster)

My movie watching is outpacing my progress on the James Naremore book, so I don’t know the whole deal with Norman Foster and this Mercury Theater production, but it stars all my Kane and Ambersons buddies and is obviously a part of the big Welles picture. Annoyed to discover that there’s a longer reconstructed version with ten extra minutes that played MoMA a decade ago, but which never came out on video, so I watched the dull censored version, and it was still pretty great.

The Kane Boys:

An assassin is after arms dealer Joe Cotton, but this was during WWII so we’re supposed to be rooting for the arms dealer, not the assassin. Turks and Russians and nazis are involved, Cotton is sent undercover on a small ship but the assassin is also onboard (very nicely introduced via his skipping turntable). Now we get to meet all the other passengers and try to sort out their loyalties in time to save Cotton’s life.

Major Ship Captain Amberson:

Orson is apparently an ally, Major Amberson great as the ship’s captain, Agnes not great with a French accent, Dolores del Rio hot as a dancer in a catsuit. Cotton (a married man!) gets pushed around by everyone, has no plan or confidence, is overly insecure about the dancer, then when they arrive on shore he escapes a kidnapping attempt through actual quick thinking and defeats the assassin during a rainy rooftop struggle.

Remade in the 1970s with Sam Waterston, assassin Ian McShane, Shelley Winters in the Moorehead role, and some crazy additional cast (Zero Mostel, Vincent Price, Stanley Holloway).

by ·Comments Off on The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles)

Edward G arranges for a desperate nazi to escape prison so he’ll lead them to the big man. Eddie (just after Scarlet Street) gets knocked out and loses the trail of his guy (K Shayne of a Boetticher noir), so he doesn’t see Orson Welles strangle Shayne in the woods, decides to hang around this Connecticut town until more leads turn up.

When your old nazi friend drops in on your wedding day:

Orson is so confident in his new wife Loretta Young (oscar winner the following year) that he admits to killing the “little man,” then when she doesn’t take this news well, he plots to murder her too. Eddie helps tie up loose ends but it’s Loretta who shoots Orson before he’s stabbed by the town clock (my second movie this month to end in a big clock). Clockworker Richard Long is Loretta’s brother, appeared with Orson the same year in Tomorrow Is Forever. The beginning of Welles’s dubbing problems, which would last the rest of his career.

Also rewatched Magnificent Ambersons on the new blu, and learned some Welles tidbits. Simon Callow explains the musical structure of the original cut very convincingly, making a case for what was lost when the studio recut the film. Apparently Pearl Harbor was bombed on the last day of filming, then Orson disappeared to Brazil to shoot It’s All True on the studio’s dime during editing. I just got derailed by a couple other books, but trying to get to the James Naremore biography.

by ·Comments Off on Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)

Kane’s death, then newsreel segment on him, then the news editor asking the reporter to find out more, seek the rosebud angle. So meek reporter William Alland (producer of 1950s monster movies) goes to see washed-up widow Dorothy Comingore (of Three Stooges shorts), who sends him away, then he finds his way into a chronological backstory with the help of others. Kane’s mom inherits a gold mine by chance, sends son away from an abusive dad to boarding school with rich guardian George Coulouris. The reporter meets boring old school friend Joseph Cotten and delightful newspaperman Everett Sloane, who tell of Kane’s takeover of the paper and his political aspirations. Kane’s run for governor is destroyed when rival Ray Collins reveals Kane’s affair with showgirl Dorothy while he was married to Ruth Warrick. Now that we’re caught up with her backstory, the reporter returns to Dorothy for his interview, but never finds his rosebud.

Rewatching for the first time in a long while… thought about listening to the four audio commentaries and watching the docs and reading two or three books on Welles, but the year’s almost over and I’ve got lists to make.

Lights & Mirrors:

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 15: The Spanish Earth (1937, Joris Ivens)

Unfortunately they still haven’t invented commie propaganda films that aren’t boring, but in the early scenes Joris pulls out some terrific images of the farmland before it goes into newsreel-like war scenes. What does lboxd mean by “The film would have been seen by those making it as a documentary.”

The soldiers and the farmers working for the same cause, driving back and destroying fascism. Nice story – of course this outcome brought decades of prosperity and creativity, which is why Spanish cinema was so dominant in Europe throughout the mid-century. The music is pretty decent, and halfway through I realized there were two narration tracks and switched from Hemingway to Welles.

by ·Comments Off on The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018, Mark Cousins)

“The world has become more Wellesian… things seem exaggerated.” The narration is written as a letter to the late Orson, and I thought this might get too cutesy, then I recalled that I never get tired of listening to Mark Cousins. He emulates Welles’ camera moves as he did in The Story of Film. Welles took a trip to Ireland to paint in the early 1930’s, then Morocco, and Cousins shows the evolution of his sketches, travels to these places himself and films them in the present day. He ties the films to the radio plays, to the paintings, to international politics. It’s a cradle-to-grave career bio-doc like I’ve never seen, integrating the life with the art, half a rich analysis and half a love poem.

by ·Comments Off on The Other Side of the Wind (2018, Orson Welles)

Love to spend years following rumors of the recreation of the lost masterpiece by an all-time great filmmaker, only for the thing to finally appear direct-to-video, then watch it in fragments over a week of late nights because I keep falling asleep. I watched the previously released scenes of this in the early days of the movie blog, never thinking there’d be a feature, and here we are, not quite knowing what to put in quote marks (the “complete” feature “by” Welles). Rosenbaum approves, so who am I to argue?

Stills, narration, and the line “that was long before cellphone cameras” mar the opening minutes, then hammy P-Bog becomes a main character, and the movie’s in trouble. It recovers easily – a party film with a magnetic John Huston as the Wellesian center, artists and hangers-on all around, cutting all over the place, and then the scenes of Huston’s never-to-be-completed film (this is an extremely self-aware movie – even Hammy P-Bog appears to be playing “hammy” “p-bog”), a miniature, fragmented work inside the work, which is both a beautiful art film and a pretentious parody of a beautiful art film, problematically starring an always-nude Oja Kodar, who in fact cowrote this film, making it knowingly, self-parodically problematic, I guess. Playfully homoerotic dialogue, apparently documentary sections, and all the colored lights making this more Suspiria-like than the Suspiria remake. The whole project and its implications fill your brain up all the way. Besides P-Bog there are a few overdone performances – I’m thinking of the film critic (Susan Strasberg) and Zimmy The Southern Gentleman (Cameron Mitchell) – but on first viewing it seemed 15% tiresome, 85% wonderful.

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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018, Morgan Neville)

I remember this being fun… let’s see, my notes say “uses every bit of Welles footage they could find to place in dialogue with interviewees” and “ends with Why Can’t I Touch It, wow.” I should watch the making-of and the new Mark Cousins doc then rewatch the feature, but I also got things going on besides Orson.

by ·Comments Off on Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)

It has been a while since I watched some Orson Welles.
And hey, the voices are in sync, so we’re off to an unusually good start.

“Give me the spare men and spare me the great ones.”

While King Gielgud is off ruling the country, his son Prince Hal fucks around, drinking and robbing and having fun with his low-life friends including Falstaff, an overweight self-obsessed clown played by Welles. Falstaff was apparently a running secondary character in three overlong Shakespeare plays, here stitched together to make him the main player, the royalty drama becoming the background story. A good Welles movie, with fun editing, grotesque close-ups and nice compositions.

I’m not too good with the timelines of English kings, but this is the early 1400’s, Henry IV (Gielgud) having recently killed Richard II. Of course the true heir Mortimer has been locked up somewhere else, as is always the case (at least in Shakespeare), and his friends plot the current king’s overthrow. Hal returns to his dad the king and joins in a victorious fight against the Mortimerists (not their real name), personally killing their leader, which cowardly braggart Falstaff attempts to take credit for.

Falstaff thinks this is all in fun, that his group will be friends forever, and when Henry dies and Hal becomes King Henry V, Falstaff is overjoyed, thinking he’ll become rich beyond belief, but instead is banished from the court by the newly serious Hal, returning home to die (offscreen) of grief. I was amazed that Welles wouldn’t give himself a big, talky death scene, but I suppose he wasn’t adding new dialogue to the Shakespeare.

King Gielgud:

King Falstaff:

King Hal:

Ebert says the battle scene is “edited quickly, to give a sense of confusion and violence — providing an ironic backdrop for the frightened Falstaff himself, running from tree to tree to hide from the combatants” in the comically large and round armor Welles has made for himself. Being a Shakespeare drama about kings and thieves, there’s not much screen time for women, but Margaret Rutherford (Blithe Spirit) runs the pub/inn and Jeanne Moreau (just after Diary of a Chambermaid) plays a friend/prostitute. This played at Cannes alongside Dr. Zhivago, The Nun, The Round-Up and Seconds.

W. Johnson in Film Quarterly:

The vastness of the film’s spaces serve to deepen the sense of nostalgia. The tavern, for example, is enlarged beyond probability in much the same way that a childhood haunt is enlarged in one’s memory: this is how Falstaff, the perpetual child, would remember it. Similarly, the wide horizons of the film’s outdoor scenes (actually shot in Spain) evoke the spacious, innocent Olde Englande that Falstaff imagined he lived in. Naturalistic settings would have called attention to the costumes, the archaic language, the theatrical structure of the scenes, everything except what’s really important – the characters and their changing world. Welles’s exaggerations give the film its human perspective.
…
As portrayed by Shakespeare, Falstaff is not only lazy, gluttonous, cowardly, lecherous, dishonest and the rest but also a great innocent. He is devoid of malice or calculation; no matter what is done to him, he remains open and trusting. He lives in a dream world where there are no politicians or policemen or pedagogues; and when Hal destroys that world by rejecting him, he does not adjust to reality but dies.

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The Fountain of Youth (1958)

Welles himself calls it “a wacky little romance” in his intro, which seems both accurate and too humble. It’s a jokey little story with a predictable twist ending, but the way its told and shown is thrilling.

Glamorous actress Joi Lansing marries scientist Dan Tobin “the gland man,” but leaves him for tennis champ Rick Jason. The gland man has his revenge, claims to have discovered a 200-year youth serum, gives them a single dose and lets them fight over it.

Orson interrupts the action and talks over it, blocking the picture with his body and voicing the characters himself. Instead of editing he’ll use sudden lighting changes. It’s all a charming trick.

Rosenbaum calls it the only completed film besides Citizen Kane “over which Welles had final and complete artistic control” which “even begin to qualify as Hollywood products,” as opposed to his independent works.

Since so little has been said about this cool little movie, I’m going to overquote from an article in his book on Welles:

In The Fountain of Youth, Welles’s first television pilot – an adaptation of John Collier’s short story Youth From Vienna that begins as an essay on the subject of narcissism – the dialectic is given a new pattern. For once, the narrating Welles persona is intermittently visible as well as audible; he begins the show, in effect, as a slide show lecturer, and reappears periodically to remind us of his privileged position. … By speaking for the characters as well as about them – literally lip-synching Joi Lansing, Dan Tobin, and Rick Jason, his three stars, at certain junctures to mock their roles as puppets – his moral fallibility (that is to say, his narcissism) becomes identified with theirs, and the implicit nastiness of Welles’s amused, glacial detachment consciously boomerangs.

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Too Much Johnson (1938)

JR: “The only copy of the film was lost in a fire .. in August 1970.”

Apparently not! I watched Scott Simmon’s new 34-minute edit. Three sections, to be screened between acts at a Mercury Theater play. Mostly they are goofy chase scenes. In the first (and longest), mustache villain Edgar Barrier (Journey Into Fear, Macbeth) chases Joseph Cotten (The Third Man / Ambersons / Kane star) across city rooftops over a girl. In the second, they board a ship bound for Cuba, continuing the chase, and in the third they’re both chased around the island by Howard Smith. It probably would’ve worked better in context.

Simmon:

It feels to me as if Welles and the Mercury theater were working toward some reenactment of a history of American film up to that point: Silent film comedy interspersed with 1930s screwball stage dialogue. In any case, the revised play, in its tightest last revision, has a spirit far from the Gillette original — with rapid-fire exchanges in place of relatively longer speeches.