Orson Welles

Not that I know of, but Turner Classic Movies is showing the film THIS WEDNESDAY (May 18th) at 11:30pm Eastern.

Either get your VCR ready or find someone who has TCM.

! I must get this.

(Does his "sellout" material need any defense anymore? It's all priceless.)

I wish someone would get on Falstaff/Chimes At Midnight quick. That's a great, great Welles film.

Does anyone remember when Orson Welles was on Moonlighting?

Last I saw on Wellesnet, Rosenbaum was expressing disappointment that this wasn't the case. (Of course, that was months ago.)

i was reading recently about how as soon as those really bombastic deep-focus shots became identified as "wellesian," he stopped using them.

As I understand it, Orson was on some kind of medication that reacted badly with alcohol, so after a few takes - I imagine he had to imbibe the wine at the end of each take - he was incoherent. Then again, the director's voice seems to indicate they were only on takes one, two and three, so maybe he did show up to the set absolutely trousered. I guess we'll never know. Still, awful to see such a great man laid so low.

Some of my favorite Welles performances were on The Dean Martin Show, of all places. The sketch/dance routine with Dean, Orson and Jimmy Stewart at the hairdressers makes me weep with laughter every single time I watch it.

I saw F for Fake for the first time last week, and I'm still thinking about it. The way it's edited is so goddamn brilliant. I keep remebering the sequence when the painter is denying that he ever signed a painting, and instead of just cutting to the biographer saying that he did, he lets the camera sit for a long moment on the biographers expression, purse-lipped, not even wanting to comment on a fact so obvious. "Of course they were signed."

And the other best bit is that he's absolutely right. Sure he's being a jerk, but ask a bonafide genius to do the dumbest commercial in television history, and that's what you get. I laugh when I hear that not because Orson is an arrogant prick, but because he so outclasses everyone around him, and says so.

F for Fake: This is the Welles movie that people seem to discover on their own, perhaps by accident, and after the discovery, they cannot contain their enthusiasm. A friend of mine recently saw it for the first time, and declared it: “Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!”

It is. It really, really is.

... up until this April, mehaps.

That Thomson book is awful!

Uh, not really--especially from a factual basis. I mean maybe it's the last word on him from the Pauline Kael-revisionist/ain't Hollywood great! strand of Welles writing.

That's incorrect. He has nothing but praise for The Immortal Story and F is for Fake.

"I mean maybe it's the last word on him from the Pauline Kael-revisionist/ain't Hollywood great! strand of Welles writing."

Another reductive judgment. Kael's essay made Thomson very uneasy, and he admits it. As far as Kael's argument goes, there's some merit to it, as the auteurist wing of filmcrit had championed Welles to such a degree that Mankiewicz's contributions were overlooked or ignored. Some of her criticism re Kane is on the money too; she's right on about how beautiful Welles' performance is and the scene in which Kane intones that awful line, "If I hadn't been very rich I'd be a great man.

This book will have some of the same problems with repitition and reiteration that plagued Movie Wars.

Is Simon Callow anywhere close to finishing his bio vol 2?

What troubles Kael, Thomson, and myself (even tho' I haven't seen the film in about 8 yrs) is welles' performrance, or rather, his conception of Falstaff. We don't buy him in this lead anymore; his Falstaff is a buffoon, not the supreme prankster and wit whom Harold Bloom considered the greatest character in Western Lit. Welles couldn't play him anymore; that "great, booming, con man's voice" as Gore Vidal once described it gave the game away.

"immortal story" is a minor work at best. and yes, he likes "f for fake" - that's no excuse for all but ignoring and/or downplaying the importance of everything else welles did in the last two decades of his life.

kael was a great critic but an awful researcher. her kane essay is fun to read but extremely sloppy as an account of the actual making of the film (see peter bogdanovich's "the kane mutiny" and andrew sarris's "raising kael" for a pretty comprehensive rebuttal to virtually every point she makes), and her observations about the film are generally less-than-acute.

i don't think "if i hadn't been very rich i'd be a great man" is an awful line at all; it's exactly the kind of deluded thing kane would say about himself - which is exactly the kind of nuance kael missed in the film. as far as she's concerned it's just a "shallow masterpiece," and anyone who finds resonance in it is an idiot. by contrast, thomson's observations on kane are generous, fascinating and original - the best stuff in his book, probably.

... his voice was dubbed... by Robert Rietty!

why the fuck was welles so into jesus franco anyway

seems like whenever the spanish were involved first thing welles said was "oh well we need to get jesus franco in on this, then, nobody knows more about spain than him"

i'm just saying he might have been better off with rich little. is all.