THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND: A Preliminary Report

It hardly seems possible that I'm about to write these words, but here I go. I just saw THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Like most Orson Welles fanatics of a certain age I've been waiting many years to see this movie. I first read about it in the early '90s, when it was more or less considered a long lost film. Gradually the narrative around it changed. Whispers were heard of heroic financiers who were going to swoop in and finally sort out all the tangled strings attached to the movie (i.e. someone with deep enough pockets was going to pay off all the people who had--or claimed to have--a piece of it). Then things would fall through. Finally, after decades--yes, decades--of effort by people like Frank Marshall, Peter Bogdanovich, and (most nobly) the film's late cinematographer Gary Graver something did happen. Netflix reached down into its big pockets and paid everyone off and bankrolled the post-production on the film. Now the film exists and will come to theaters and Netflix in early November.

I saw the film this afternoon at the Chicago International Film Festival. I'm still staggered by it.

Everyone will want to know if it's good or bad. That's how the average person appraises a movie, which is fair. The funny thing, of course, is that Welles rarely made movies that fit into easy categories. So to talk about, or really just to begin to talk about it, I should say a couple of things. One, Orson Welles died before he could finish editing this film. (Since he died almost ten years after wrapping principal photography, that should tell you something about the pace of his editing and the tortured circumstances of his film-making process in the 70s and 80s.) So, beware anyone who talks about this movie without first acknowledging that it is not simply a recovered Orson Welles film. It is a film written and directed by Orson Welles but completed by other people. That's important. Welles did not have, as if were, final cut of this movie. This in no way denigrates the admirable efforts of the people who finished the film, it's simply to acknowledge the reality. The other thing to say is that THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is a 70s art film. I wonder what the Netflix audiences will think of it. I frankly doubt that most people who start it on Netflix will finish watching it.

The film tells the story of the last day in the life of a film director named Jake Hannaford (John Huston). He's surrounded by sycophants, cinephiles, disciples, yes-men, skeptical reporters, would-be starlets and pissed off producers. 

The action swirls. I use that word advisedly because THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is the culmination of the whirlpooling mise en scene that Welles honed in films like THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and THE TRIAL (you see it, in fact, in practically all his films). Characters are always in motion, constantly circling each other as they fire off dialog. This whirlpool movement is married with the rapid-cut editing Welles planned (but, again, never fully achieved) for the film. The result is a propulsive experience.

I want time to process the film, and I'll certainly see it again when it's released in theaters next month. So here's just a few preliminary notes:

1. The film marks the largely unexplored intersection of Orson Welles and 1970s pornography. There's softcore porn vibe to the opening scenes of the film and to the scenes of the film-within-the- film (Hannaford has directed an out of control "arty film" that's mostly notable for being full of sex and nudity). Welles's cinematographer and right-hand man for the last 15 years or so of his career was Gary Graver, a part-time porn director, and we know that in the 70s Welles helped Graver edit at least one hardcore porno (1975's 3A.M.). THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND'S interest in sex is part of Welles's expanding sexual interest--at least onscreen--in the 70s. I think we owe this to his partner in life and art, Oja Kodar. The film was cowritten by Kodar, and she's clearly the muse at the center of it. Welles's camera never worshiped a woman like it worships Oja Kodar.

2. Yet the film is largely a dissection of the male ego in all its misogyny, bigotry, and repressed homosexuality-turned-homophobia. It's almost shocking how acidic Welles's take on the main character is, given that he knew Huston's character would be seen as a stand in for himself. He would have fought back against that interpretation, I imagine, but there's too much of Orson in the character to ignore, from his relationship to a Peter Bogdanovich-type character played by, of course, Peter Bogdanovich, to little phrases (like "Always remember that your heart is God's little garden") that Welles himself was fond of.

3. Neither of the actors in the film within the film, Oja Kodar and Robert Ransom, speak a single word. They remain objects--unattainable, sexualized objects--for the director. It is implied that Hannaford kills himself because he cannot have the Ransom character. I suspect that this would have been edgier stuff in 1970 when Welles began working on the picture. I want to see THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND again in part because I'm interested to know if Welles is saying anything beyond that. In terms of sex, I'm not sure that he is.

4. But what a film "is saying" is always a pretty nebulous thing, and often a wholly unimportant thing. No one knew that better than Orson Welles. It was Welles, after all, who would tell anyone who asked that "Rosebud" was a cheap trick, a way to tie up the end of CITIZEN KANE. Welles knew better than most that what mattered was the film itself, not the filmmaker, and certainly not the filmmaker's "message."

5. Which brings me to the point that, yes, I'm happy to report that THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND  is a good movie. It's stylistically fascinating and often quite funny, with some good performances from Huston and Bogdanovich, and a stand out performance from the underrated director Norman Foster as Hannaford's flunky, Billy. The fact that Foster was often unfairly maligned because of his association with Welles is just one of many, many ways the film overlaps with real life, commenting on it, satirizing it (often perversely), and lamenting it.

Orson Welles and The Other Side Of The Wind

Are we ever going to see the last film of Orson Welles? In 1970, the Great One set out to direct a film called The Other Side Of The Wind. Principal shooting (if such a thing can be configured on a Welles picture) and much of the editing were completed in January of 1976. As with all of Welles' films, there's a long, fascinating story to tell about the making of the film. No great director was more interesting off the set than Welles, and most of his productions required Herculean feats to reach fruition. Part of Welles' problem was his sheer ambition (a good problem to have). He had the money, talent and resources to make small, intimate films in the Cassavetes mold. He simply lacked the desire. He dreamed big, and he made epics like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Trial, and Chimes At Midnight. Even his noirs were larger in scope than the usual crime story. This wasn't a flaw. He simply wasn't a painter of miniatures; he needed a broad canvas.

The Other Side Of The Wind is the sprawling story of a past his prime movie director played by the late, great John Huston and his contentious relationship with a younger director played by Peter Bogdanovich. If this outline seems a little too meta--Welles the great director had, after all, a close but complicated relationship with Peter Bogdanovich, who was a huge star director at the time--well, it is pretty meta. Based on the script, which I've read, and various footage I've seen over the years, the film is meta as hell.

So why has this movie been held up for thirty-two years? To answer that would require us to dive into the deep end of the pool of Welles' business dealings, a harrowing task for anyone. In comparison to Welles' finances, AIG's accounting practices have an Amish-like simplicity. Just a taste: for a long time the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran asserted a financial claim to the film. When you consider that The Other Side Of The Wind also involves a decades-long standoff between Welles' daughter and his mistress, you can see what a Gordian's knot we're dealing with. A Gordian's knot inside a labyrinth in the Lost City of Z.

Will we ever see the whole thing, completed and released in the manner befitting one of the cinema's truly great talents? I suspect we will. We certainly seem to be getting closer, and Bogdanovich, who has overseen some of the work on the film, says it's getting closer and closer.

At the end of the day, I don't know how thrilled I am about it, though. Don't get me wrong, I'd watch anything directed by Welles, but I have a strong suspicion based on all I've read and seen that with this film Welles was attempting to push the rapid style editing he'd used on F For Fake to an almost dizzying affect. Add to that, his use of long dream sequences--part of the fight over the film was a disagreement between the editors about how long Welles wanted these sequences to be--and you have a film that might very well smack of late sixties art house.

My concern isn't really so much for the film itself. Welles made more great movies than most people and even his failures are fascinating. The Other Side Of The Wind might be great or it might be horrible. Neither outcome would change the fact that he was a great director. My concern, though, is for his reputation. No director I can think of has had such an avalanche of bullshit written about him. For this nearly forty year old movie to be released to a collective shrug from the critics wouldn't do Welles any favors.

Oh well. As the Great One himself once wrote, "What does it matter what you say about people?"

***

Here's a strong argument from Lawrence French at Wellesnet.com that I am in fact wrong to worry that the film won't be that great. There aren't many people alive who know more about Welles than French so hopefully he's right.

Here's a link to The Museum of Orson Welles. This amazing site has the audio of a series of interviews Peter Bogdanovich's did with Welles in preparation for their book This Is Orson Welles: 1969-1975 Peter Bogdanovich

Speaking of Bogdanovich, here's an interview he did with Movie Maker about the film.

Report from the Welles Centennial Festival

There are two master narratives about Orson Welles. The first holds that he was a boy genius who made the Greatest Movie Of All Time and then went into a precipitous decline that lasted the rest of his life. In this view, he was a man undone by his passions and his personal failings.

The second narrative holds that Welles was a boy genius who made a great movie that so unsettled the fickle company town of Hollywood that he was driven out, forced to make his increasingly brilliant art as an independent producer. In this view, Welles isn't just the guy who made CITIZEN KANE. He's the author a body of work that includes pivotal contributions to film noir (THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TOUCH OF EVIL), European cinema (THE TRIAL, THE IMMORTAL STORY), and the documentary (F FOR FAKE). In this view Welles' greatest film wasn't the masterpiece he made in 1941, it was the one (FALSTAFF) that he made in 1965.

The second view (and, by my lights, the correct one) was well on display in Woodstock, Illinois the last few days. The town is playing host to the Orson Welles Centennial Festival because it is the place that Welles himself regarded as his hometown. Though he was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and lived much of his early life in Chicago, and lived all of his adult years as a continent-hopping nomad--Welles reserved a special love for Woodstock because it was home to Todd Seminary for Boys, where he was sent as a child after the death of his parents. The school's headmaster, Roger Hill, was Welles's oldest and dearest friend.

I made the trip from Chicago to Woodstock this weekend. On Friday, I attended a screening of MAGICIAN: THE ASTONISHING LIFE & CAREER OF ORSON WELLES, a new documentary by director Chuck Workman. Pardon the pun, but the film is best described as workmanlike. Moving lockstep through Welles's life and career, following a basic chronological style, it's unlikely to turn the heads of people who aren't already interested in its subject. Instead, it does admirable recovery work on the legacy of Welles, moving his later films like THE TRIAL and FALSTAFF and F FOR FAKE back into focus after decades of neglect. It's a partisan film, and thank god for that. Welles has been hammered enough over the years under the guise of objectivity. It's nice to see a movie that actively wants to debunk the "boy genius gone sour" myth of a supposedly objective piece of business like THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE, the American Experience documentary that is regrettably included in DVD packages with CITIZEN KANE. That film is slicker and more dramatically-focused, but MAGICIAN is far more nuanced view of Welles and his work. It is, in the best sense, a movielover's movie. No Welles fan will want to miss it.

Saturday, I got to see Jonathan Rosenbaum interview Oja Kodar. For the last twenty years of Welles' life, Kodar was his partner and artistic collaborator. Her talk with Rosenbaum was wide ranging. She explained the origin of the title of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (in short: she regarded Welles himself as an elemental force, like the wind, and the film sought to explore the other side of that kind of larger than life figure). She explained why she wasn't intimidated by him when then first met. ("Yes, he was this world famous legendary genius...but I knew he was just a man and I was a very pretty girl.")

She also dished on behind the scenes drama, including why she is no longer friends with some of Welles' old confidants, including Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom. (Her disdain for Jaglom is particularly palpable.) Rosenbaum didn't take the conversation into any uncomfortable areas such as the Kodar's feelings about Welles' wife or daughter, nor he did touch on any controversy involving THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. No mention was made of the claim in Josh Karp's new book ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE, that Kodar has been the main obstacle in getting the film released.

All in all, though, it was a fascinating experience to get to hear Oja Kodar (who looms large for any Wellesian) talk about her life and career with such intelligence and good humor. And, of course, it was an honor to hear her talk about the man she loved, a man she still talks about with joy and passion.

Wellestock, as I hope someone is calling it, will continue for the next two weekends. Check here for details.

My 2018 At The Movies

I had an incredible year at the movies. In the last 12 months I've seen 126 films on the big screen. These experiences ranged from forgettable to sublime to surreal. 

First a word about the number itself. 126. Last year I saw 125 films on the big screen and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't aware of that number as I was racking up visits to various movie theaters in 2018. I know it doesn't matter to anyone but me, but I thought it would be fun to top my movie count from last year.

On the whole, my experiences seeing new movies this year were positive. I think the film that affected me the most was Alfonso Cuaron's ROMA, a beautifully realized story that manages to be majestic and personal at the same time. Right behind it in terms of personal impact was Paul Schrader's FIRST REFORMED with its powerful central performance by Ethan Hawke as a lonely priest lost in an existential spiral. Less affecting but more tightly controlled was THE FAVORITE, the wickedly funny power/love/sex triangle from director Yorgos Lanthimos.

It was a good year for superhero movies, which is good news because the box office is now dominated by these kinds of expensive blockbusters but bad news because the box office is now dominated by these kinds of expensive blockbusters. I saw most of the big stuff: BLACK PANTHER, INFINITY WAR, ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, AQUAMAN. I enjoyed them all without being blown away by any of them. (I didn't see DEADPOOL 2 because I didn't want to.) I will say that the best of the 2018 superhero flicks--the smartest, funniest, and, curiously, the most comic book-ish--was undoubtedly SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE.

All in all, it was a good year for popcorn. I had a great time at A QUIET PLACE and it was fun to see Tom Cruise come pretty close to perfecting his popcorn-movie game with MI: FALLOUT.  

My most exciting movie experiences this year were retro. I got to see old favorites like SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and SILVERADO, and I got to discover or rediscover classics like DROP DEAD GORGEOUS (which I saw at a packed showing of fans at Chicago's Music Box Theater) and the magnificent 1929 silent (wholly new to me) THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS. I also got to see my beloved HIGH NOON two nights in a row at the Logan Theater. 

Most profoundly, I got to see DETOUR three times. The first time was in a 15th century abbey in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, France, where I introduced the movie at a crime festival. (This was the surreal experience I mentioned earlier.) A couple of months later I was able to see the restored print at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Seeing this film--perhaps my favorite film--restored to pristine form was the happiest I've been at the movies all year.

Having said that, the biggest event of the year was the long-awaited release of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, the final feature film to spring from the mind of Orson Welles. Welles was never able to finish his work on the film so we can't simply call it "Orson Welles's TOSOTW", but we're lucky to have this version, recently edited completed by others. It's a fascinating piece of work, a fine and fitting addition to the oeuvre of my favorite filmmaker.  

Here were my favorite experiences at the movies, both new and retro.

New:
1. ROMA
2. THE FAVORITE
3. FIRST REFORMED (tie)
3. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (tie)
4. THE DEATH OF STALIN
5. VOX LUX
6. CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
7. FREE SOLO
8. SEARCHING
9. HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD
10. A QUIET PLACE (tie)
10. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FALLOUT (tie) 

Retrospective and Classic
1. DETOUR (1945)
2. WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005)
3. DROP DEAD GORGEOUS (1999) 
4. HIGH NOON (1952)
5. ZERO FOR CONDUCT (1933)
6. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)
7. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS (1929)
8. PICKUP (1951) (tie)
8. THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (1993) (tie)
9. BATMAN RETURNS (1992)
10. DOUBLE SUICIDE (1969) (tie)
10. THE GREAT SILENCE (1968) (tie)

MOBY DICK - REHEARSED (1955)

above: Welles directing MOBY DICK - REHEARSED in 1955.

 If you divide the career of Orson Welles into three periods--Early, Middle, and Late--then you will find his most prolific work in theater in the Early period. That was the period of rapidly successive experiments and triumphs--the time of the Dublin Theater, the "Voodoo MACBETH," the Mercury Theater, JULUIS CESEAR, and NATIVE SON. A heady time, to be sure.

But even in his Middle period, when he'd left America and was making his way as an independent filmmaker in Europe and Africa, he did not abandon the theater. (As he would, alas, in his Late period. Although he lived until 1985, he stopped working in the theater in 1960.) In some ways, his most significant production during this time was CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, by all accounts a failure as a play but one that functioned as a trial run for his triumphant 1965 film FALSTAFF, perhaps the single greatest work of his career.

Having said that, however, Welles' most lasting contribution to the theater during his Middle period was certainly his Melville adaptation MOBY DICK - REHEARSED. It was the highpoint of his career as a playwright and another piece of evidence that he may well have been the supreme literary 'adaptor' of the 20th century. (Other evidence would include his adaptations--on radio, stage, and screen--of HG Wells, Richard Wright, Booth Tarkington, Kafka, Isak Dinesen, and, of course, Shakespeare.) It also brings his experiments in self-conscious meta-artmaking to something of a boil, which would pay off in later works of extreme self-consciousness like his essay film F FOR FAKE and his unfinished THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

MOBY DICK - REHEARSED is a play in two acts. The setting is the backstage of a small theater. In Act I, we're introduced to an acting troupe getting together to rehearse a production of KING LEAR. Petty complaints and light teasing are exchanged, lines are run, a little time is killed. Then the troupe's Actor-Manager arrives and announces that they will be rehearsing a new play, an adaptation of Melville's novel MOBY DICK. The gang grumbles a little more but soon enough everyone snaps to, and the story of Ishmael, Starbuck, Captain Ahab and the great white whale begins to take shape. As it does, the story begins to take over. By Act II, we are fully in MOBY DICK, the story having subsumed the actors. Only at the very end, with Ahab and his mortal enemy confined to the watery deep, do the actors at last shrug off their roles and return to themselves. Then the curtain falls.

When Welles produced MOBY DICK - REHEARSED in June of 1955 at the Duke of York's Theater in London it garnered largely rave reviews, but it didn't draw a huge audience. (Welles, always a popular celebrity, was never a strong box office draw.) In the years since, the play has rolled on, taking on a life of its own in numerous productions (the most famous of which was the 1962 production starring Rod Steiger as the Actor-Manager/Ahab). The director of one such production in North Carolina, Robb Mann, told me that his actors played the early scenes as comedy and "then as the play progressed rolled it into drama, going from realism to hyper-realism." That strikes me as the natural progression of Welles' play, which develops from a half-hearted rehearsal to a deep immersion--with the actors playing actors who are at first playing characters until the characters finally become people who fully take over. 

The adaptation itself is brilliant. With a nod to Shakespeare, Welles converts Melville's prose into blank verse. He takes the author's sprawling novel--itself a roiling compendium of styles (part philosophical meditation, part gothic comedy, part boy's adventure tale, part cetology textbook)--and pares it down to its fierce beating heart: Ahab's obsessive hunt for the whale. The crew's growing unease with their captain's obsession becomes the focal point of the play, with Starbuck's caution crashing against Ahab's mania like the waves beating the sides of the ship.

But, of course, there are no waves. There is no ship. Adapting a story like MOBY DICK to the stage is a fool's errand because you can't put the ocean or a whale inside a theater, and faking it would just look goofy. MOBY DICK works best as a novel because it works best in the theater of the mind, with Melville's incantatory prose casting its spell even when he's lecturing you about whale blubber. 

Welles grasped this blunt reality and worked with it. At the start of the play, the Actor-Manager, who will transform into Ahab as the rehearsal progresses, explains to his actors that the production will involve the audience as cocreators in the evening's production. It's up to the audience to supply the ocean and the whale. This kind of stripped down theater is (to use a phrase the theater director Jerzy Grotowski would coin years later) pure "Poor Theater." It embraces economic constraints as an engine of creativity. It shows incredible faith in the audience. It also finds Welles working in direct opposition to the Brechtian notions of epic theater that characterized his Early period mega productions like FIVE KINGS (1939) and AROUND THE WORLD (1946). Both of those plays had been flops artistically and commercially, but with MOBY DICK - REHEARSED, Welles found the perfect vehicle for his particular brand of epic classical theater.

This last point is worth pondering a moment longer. As both a filmmaker and a theater producer, Orson Welles would have had a far easier time of things if he'd been interested in crafting small stories or intimate character studies. But, then again, he wouldn't have been Orson Welles, would he? He was interested in outsized personalities taking center stage on the largest possible canvas. And that never changed. FALSTAFF is as big as any movie he ever made, and he made it for a pittance. 

Likewise, MOBY DICK - REHEARSED may be Poor Theater, but it's epic Poor Theater, a heedless adaptation of an unadaptable novel. It's Welles acknowledging, more than ever before, the importance of the audience as cocreators of a live performance, even for a text as iconic as Melville's book.

Reflections on a Welles Retrospective Part II

Here's the second part of my reflections on AFI's recent retrospective Larger Than Life: The Films of Orson Welles. For part one click here.

7. We're always harder on The Stranger than we should be. Perhaps because it was Welles's one attempt at a big traditional studio thriller, I'm always a little flippant about it. Most Wellesians dismiss it. And Welles himself treated it like an especially unloved child. I must report, though, that when I watched it on the big screen, I enjoyed it from start to finish. And so did the audience I saw it with. Welles was incapable of filming an uninteresting shot, and set pieces like the long, one-take murder in the woods have an undeniable energy. The movie is no one's idea of a masterpiece--least of all the man who made it--but it's fun. Read more about The Stranger here.

8. You can almost feel Welles's heartbeat when you watch Touch of Evil. It was his last stopover in the Hollywood system before permanent exile, and he clearly made the most of the opportunity. Working with a decent budget, big stars and--most importantly perhaps--an experienced crew, he made a jolting, sleazy noir masterpiece. My experience of seeing this film the other night was one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life. I saw a late showing in AFI's historic Theater One, a huge, beautiful room with a large screen. There were about five patrons there at that hour, just four strangers and me sitting in the dark late one Thursday night watching Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh descend into Welles's nightmare border town. I couldn't have been happier. More more about the film here.

9. The Trial is a dark, impenetrable film. It's an oddity among Welles's films--which is to say it's an oddity among oddities. Adapted from Kafka's book, it tells the story of a man (played by Anthony Perkins) accused of a unknown crime. It's a parable about the arbitrary nature of power and the law, and that makes it something of a sermon. It's the heaviest film Welles ever made, and it may well be his least accessible. It's also a masterpiece, albeit a brooding, difficult one. Watching it on the big screen was a joy--it's a gorgeous film, one that envelops you in a world every bit as bizarre and artificial as Oz. The scene where two men are stripped and whipped in a storeroom is creepy on the small screen, but on the large screen it's terrifying. The whole film becomes scarier on the large screen--and, oddly enough, funnier as well. Bonus: you can make out sexy Romy Schneider's mustache.

10. F For Fake was Welles's last completed film, and it gives a fascinating idea of where the director might have gone with his art if he'd had the money. The film is hard to classify--it's been called both a documentary and an "essay film"--but I regard it as a piece of creative nonfiction. It blends together documentary footage, interviews, dramatic recreations, and almost Expressionistic set-pieces for a meditation on art, forgery, and expertise. Welles starts by looking at the career of the world famous (or world infamous) art forger Elmyr de Hory, the subject of a book called Fake by Clifford Irving, who himself was shortly to become notorious as the author of a bogus biography of Howard Hughes. Welles follows this swirl of events and uses them to ponder several questions about the nature of art: What is the value of authorship? If no one knows the difference between a real masterpiece and a fake masterpiece, then is there a difference? Are critics and experts merely con men pretending to know what art "is" so that they can have a job teaching the rest of us? All good questions, and they make F for Fake an excellent answer to people who accuse Welles of shallowness. This is a profound film.

Of course, it's also a meditation on Oja Kodar's perfectly sculpted ass. Welles's companion and collaborator during the last three decades of his life, Kodar features prominently in this film, mostly as a figure of erotic attention. I bring this up because a) the Oja ass fixation is something that is rarely written about in relation to the film, and b) on the big screen, it is impossible to ignore that this often brilliant film has an entire subplot dedicated to Kodar's ass. Is this simply Welles's overindulging his fixation of Kodar? Is this his way of setting up the last act of the film, the story of Kodar's brief relationship with Picasso? I don't know. I'll have to digest this fact some more before I can form an idea about what it means for the film. Read more about this film--though, sadly, not about Kodar's ass--here.

11. Seeing it on the big screen confirmed what I have long thought: Chimes at Midnight is Welles's best movie. It's the kind of art-house epic he was born to make--intimate in emotion but grand in its ambitions. Unawed by his Shakespearean sources (he fashioned the script from five different plays), unvexed by his limited resources, Welles plunges into the story of Falstaff, that jolly, fat old knight gone to seed on booze, food, girls and good times. He's the "misleader of youth" whose friendship with the callow young Hal, Prince of Wales (Keith Baxter) is a thorn in the side of the King of England (John Gielgud). On the big screen, his gorgeous film unfurls and catches a gust of wind. It's full of huge images: the king's cavernous castle, the battle of Shrewsbury, and Falstaff himself, bloated and jovial.

The centerpiece of the film is the Shrewsbury battle. It's a bravura piece of filmmaking, full of movement and violence and edited for maximum effect. The heart of the film, however, is the tension between the high world of the king's court and the low world of Falstaff's tavern/brothel. This tension was near and dear to Welles, who as an artist was constantly blurring the lines between high and low art, between "literature" and "pulp." While his Falstaff is funny, Welles's genius was to zero in on the tragedy of this supporting character, this instrument of comic relief in Shakespeare's plays, and place him it at the center of a tragedy. As he told Peter Bogdanovich "the closer I got to Falstaff the less funny he seemed to me."

As Falstaff, Welles gave his best performance. If Charles Foster Kane and Harry Lime stand as the great examples of the charisma of the young Welles, then Falstaff stands as the mature culmination of his actor's art. Welles fills the screen here, in more ways than one.

For more on Chimes at Midnight, read this terrific interview with Keith Baxter.

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1943)

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a dated movie, dated in that way people mean when they say, "They don't make 'em like that anymore." It's a museum piece in a certain sense because it does indeed feel like a movie from a previous generation. It's a huge production with an overture and intermission, big love scenes and bigger action sequences, with a score that never lets you forget you're watching an epic. If you like that kind of thing, this is a movie not to overlook.

The film is an adaptation of Hemingway's 1940 novel about an American named Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) fighting against the fascist forces in Spain in the thirties. Jordan meets up with a band of Loyalist fighters hiding in the mountains. His mission is to destroy a pivotal bridge before a major republican offensive, but he comes into conflict with Pablo (Akim Tamiroff), the drunken leader of the ragtag mountain fighters. Pablo's woman, the imposing Pilar (Katina Paxinou), sides with Jordan, and they become the de facto leaders of the group. Jordan also meets a beautiful but traumatized young girl named Maria (Ingrid Bergman). Jordan and Maria have only a few days together before the big battle, a battle so improbable it verges on a suicide mission.

The film was directed by a fellow named Sam Wood, an interesting figure in Hollywood history. Wood was a hardcore rightwinger who served as the president of an organization called Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (a group which included both Cooper and John Wayne, and which helped launch the political career of Ronald Reagan). Wood was instrumental in bringing the House Committee's investigation of "Un-American Activities" to Hollywood in the late forties, and he would very likely have pushed through a "loyalty oath" at the Director's Guild of America had it not been for the objection of notable artists with unimpeachable "patriotic" credentials, chief among them being John Ford*.

All of this makes it ironic that Wood helmed the adaptation of Hemingway's unabashed liberal novel, a novel in which the hero is fighting on the side of Communists. Of course, since the movie was made in 1943, it made for good wartime propaganda. Wood and his adaptors stripped the movie of any overt political content (aside from a few digs at Germany's and Italy's fascists). They focused instead on the stuff of big scale movie making: romance, comedy, action, and drama.

In terms of craft, the film isn't exactly perfect. There's some truly awful use of back projection, which is especially jarring in such a high dollar production. And the comedy, mostly coming in the form of a buffoonish Gypsy character played by Mikhail Rasumny, wears thin. As with many movies of the time, the "ethnic" characters here are played by actors from a variety of backgrounds. This is nowhere more apparent than the casting of the Swedish goddess Bergman as a 19 year old Spanish girl.

And yet for all those faults, For Whom The Bell Tolls strikes me as a triumph of old school movie making. For one thing, for all its grandiosity, the film is really about the gentle romance at its center. Cooper was never better as a leading man than here. A quiet, Montana-born outdoorsman, Cooper was perfectly cast** as the laconic Robert Jordan (and is it me, or does his look in the film--fedora, leather jacket, work clothes--seem like a forerunner to Indiana Jones?). At the same time that he cuts a dashing figure, however, Cooper's greatest attribute in the role is his slightly androgynous quality. Never as aggressively masculine as Wayne, there was something intrinsically gentle about Gary Cooper***. His pairing here with the exquisite Bergman is a cinematic gem.

As for Ingrid Bergman, there are times when I'm pretty sure she was the greatest movie star who ever lived. At other times, I am absolutely certain she was. It is very nearly impossible to write about her without talking about her beauty, but what of it? Movies are largely an excuse to stare at people for two hours. Who wouldn't want to stare at Bergman? She wasn't simply beautiful, she was also the best actress of her era, a performer who's face communicated every confusion and thought to the camera. She's miscast here only in the sense that she is in no way believable as a 19 year old Spanish girl. (But the classic Hollywood film always performed a weird magic, wiping away ethnic demarcations, translating the story and characters into the American idiom. For instance, the characters all speak English even though they're Spanish. Yet at one point, they have a discussion in which they make clear they're 'speaking' in Spanish. This is a hokey device, I suppose, but I'm not sure the implications of it have really been examined.) At any rate, Bergman's performance isn't about portraying a certain age or a certain ethnicity. She plays the character's fear and exuberance, her love for this man and her scars from the past. The scene where she tells Cooper about the atrocities committed against her by a group of soldiers is masterfully handled (and surprisingly candid for its time). When she tells him she's afraid he won't love her anymore, and tearfully promises him "but I was telling the truth when I said I never kissed anyone before you" Bergman is heartbreakingly vulnerable. Cooper's response to her is simply beautiful. This was the finest scene either of them ever played.

In addition to Cooper and Bergman, the film features pitch perfect performances from Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. Its final act is a terrific extended action sequence (where the special effects hold up remarkably well nearly seventy years later), and the action depends on constantly evolving characters. Tamiroff's drunken, murdering Pablo, for instance, is an unfolding mystery of a man right up until the end.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a old fashioned epic full of big, sweeping emotions. It's not for everyone, but if you're in the market for a stirringly heroic story of love and sacrifice, it a prime specimen.

***

*To read a little about the fight between Sam Wood and John Ford over the loyalty oath--a fight in which Ford made pointed references to the leftist politics of Hemingway's story--read Joseph McBride's fascinating article, The Convoluted Politics of John Ford.

**Hemingway selected Cooper himself. The two were close friends, and some writers maintain that Hemingway even based aspects of Robert Jordan on the actor. A new documentary examines their friendship. View a trailer for it here.

***I've written before about this gentle quality in Cooper. Read here.

One final note: Wood reteamed with Cooper and Bergman two years later for a big budget rip-off of Gone With The Wind called Saratoga Trunk. It is, I'm sad to report, simply awful. Some biographers have maintained that the actors only made the movie in order to continue an affair they'd begun on FWTBT. I hope the sex was great, because the movie is dreadful.

The Other Side of The Wind Update

Is it too early in the year to begin passing along reports that Orson Welles's final uncompleted film, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND may be about to see release? It seems like one hears these rumors every year. Made in the early seventies with a group of friends and associates, WIND is only one of a shelf of projects that Welles was unable to complete and release in his lifetime (others include DON QUIXOTE and THE DEEP). Ever since footage from his long lost anthology film IT'S ALL TRUE was recovered and released in a documentary in 1993, however, it seems like the rumblings about WIND have grown steadily stronger.

They may be about to get even louder.

On January 23, Dalya Alberge reported in The Observer that a deal is in the works to finally clear the way for the film's release. Click here to read the report.

To learn more about the film and the controversy surrounding it, click here.

Then Again...

above: want to see John Huston in Welles's unseen THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND? Me, too. Sorry.


Wellesnet has knocked down the Observer report. So we go back to waiting.

Sigh...