Orson Welles

Furthermore, Welles feared a repetition of the experience of having the film re-edited by someone else (as had happened to him on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), so he divided up all the reels of film for Don Quixote and deliberately mislabelled many of them, telling Mauro Bonanni, "If someone finds them, they mustn't understand the sequence, because only I know that."

he underestimated jesus franco

i saw his 'king lear' and don't remember it being terribly good.

did OW have any really standout performances in films directed by other people? (other than 'the third man.') the list of projects at the back of 'this is orson welles' is dizzying. i wonder if anyone in the world's managed to see everything he was in.

yeah, he's great in jane eyre, pasolini's segment of RoGaPag....

also good in Compulsion... not to mention lots of iconic voice-over work...

I thought he looked strained in Jane Eyre, but that booming histrionic falsity works for Rochester.

He was well cast as Unicron.

I like his hokey Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, also Compulsion and The Long Hot Summer. Some say his sermon in Huston's Moby Dick is the highlight, but I still haven't seen it. The Catch-22 cameo is funny. yes, Pasolini!

Oh yeah! That sermon is his best actor-ly moment.

Stop the movie when it ends though.

I enjoyed his Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, and I'm sure he did too.

welles and melville were kinda made for each other. apparently he made a moby dick film of his own that met a typically wellesian fate:

Orson Welles filmed approximately 75 minutes of the original 1955 production, with the original cast, at the Hackney Empire and Scala Theatres in London. He hoped to sell the film to Omnibus, the United States television series which had presented his live performance of King Lear in 1953; but Welles stopped shooting when he was disappointed in the results. The film is lost, with the only copy believed to have been destroyed when a fire broke out at Welles's Madrid home in 1970, while he rented it to the actor Robert Shaw, who was drunkenly smoking in bed.

His cameo in A Man For All Seasons is amusing; he looks like a dangerous strawberry.

He did a piece he called Moby-Dick Rehearsed onstage, and I've seen footage of him (in the '70s, probably) reciting Melville's prose against a seafront twilight in an attempt to get another low-budget film of it (or about it) going... He said in one of those recent "conversation" books (maybe?) that if F for Fake had done well enough he'd have tried to do an essay film every couple years.

Chimes at Midnight available as a Region 2 DVD, sound/picture are dece:

http://www.mrbongo.com/products/falstaff-chimes-at-midnight

the long hot summer is a horrible film, i guess welles is amusing in typical scenery-chewing mode

Awful. But young Newman was never more guapo.

Interview with Welles scholar (and Rock 'n' Roll High School screenwriter) Joseph McBride, by Danny Peary... apparently the search for a complete Ambersons goes on, at least for him.

http://sagharboronline.com/sagharborexpress/danny-peary-on-film/joseph-mcbride-to-appear-at-the-fabulous-orson-welles-tribute-at-the-film-forum-35347

thanks for the link -- that's a wonderfully insightful interview.

i love 'ambersons' but find it hard to revisit because the last half-hour is so heartbreaking, the way the obviously non-welles stuff gradually consumes the real film.

don't get the dismissal of Thomson's Rosebud, which to me has the most original insights of any of the longer c ritical biographies although the form is as ungainly as Edmund Morris' Dutch.

i think mcbride is mainly peeved by thomson's airy argument that most of welles's unseen films should stay unseen to preserve the 'mystery' of them, or whatever.

I went to see Journey into Fear tonight, which I've always liked; it's very funny, so much so that it plays almost like a parody of cloak-and-dagger. (Welles handed off the direction to Norman Foster at some point; I think it was released months before Ambersons.) Cotten and OW share the writing credit, and there are a couple of fab monologues from supporting characters that sound like pure Welles mischief to me.

I haven't seen it in years but at the time it did play like a private joke b/w Cotten and OW. I love how it's, what, 70 minutes? Fit to be played as part of a double feature.

Apparently Ben Hecht did some work on it too...

It was hacked up by RKO, surprise!

What Wellesnet says is: Previewed at 91 minutes, in August 1942. Final version released in America on February 12, 1943 at 69 minutes. A version sent for European distribution was 71 minutes. So, same ol' shit.

http://www.wellesnet.com/journey-into-fear-stefan-drosslers-new-version-shown-in-san-francisco/

It's based on a novel by the very popular and well-regarded Eric Ambler, and Cotten's haplessness very much anticipates The Third Man.

going to McBride's 'Wellesiana' program tom'w

rosebud is one of thomson's best things imho, but he is tough on welles, it's quite a 'negative' reading

I went to the McBride thing, it went close to 2.5 hours... saw an OSotW scene I never had, with Bogdanovich and a couple cinephiles (McBride one) riding in a car with Huston... and the Oja Kodar sex scene, which i'd misremembered; she humps the guy, doesn't blow him, in the car (it's in the protagonist's film w/in the film).

also had a cute Welles magic act bit in Follow the Boys, with Dietrich, about 15 years before ToE. And Welles doing Falstaff's monologue about the benefits of sack (sherry)... on The Dean Martin Show! It is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ6v7GHYDbM

they showed the Moby Dick sermon too, which OW allegedly did in one take after downing a bottle Huston gave him for stage fright.

that falstaff's good got chimes at midnight dvd a while ago been meaning to watch looking forward to it saw for the first time henry iv 2 last night and 1 last week

Resaw The Immortal Story, made for French TV circa '68... adap of Isak Dinesen, sort of his hourlong Eyes Wide Shut w/ OW as Dying Wealth, Jeanne Moreau as Middle Age (discreetly palming her nipples in nude scenes), some blond Brit hunkstiff as Youth. Stilted and solemn, but I like it.

Shot in amber glow by Willy Kurant, he of the amazing filmography from Masculin-Feminin to Pootie Tang.

http://images.moviepostershop.com/the-immortal-story-movie-poster-1968-1020488190.jpg

Hadn't seen It's All True in 20 years. The reconstruction of "Four Men on a Raft" really is a helluva silent film, and the whole story of OW's sojourn down there is incredible.

complete 1993 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hy-4cI3EVc

I definitely sensed a queer sub(barely)text in The Trial this time... OW admitted as much from Perkins casting, also the BDSM flogging scene in what appears to be a broom closet.

David Thomson is quite high on The Immortal Story; I keep forgetting to check YouTube availability.

it aint there. wait to see it properly, it's got to make the rounds at some point.

Chimes print!

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/how-a-near-pristine-35mm-print-of-orson-welles-chimes-at-midnight-was-found-20150227

!

new book on The Other Side of the Wind, and an excerpt:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/orson-welless-last-movie-book-786518

Still in its infancy, Century City was nothing more than a few mirrored buildings and lots of construction dirt when Welles arrived. He transformed it into a neo-futuristic landscape by putting large mirrors on rolling platforms, then positioning them in ways that turned the reflections of the existing buildings into a strange world that existed nowhere but in his own mind and then on celluloid.

Securing a permit for Gary Graver Productions, Welles skirted additional fees by having Graver erase the date each time it expired and enter a new one. By Christmas, they’d rubbed a hole right through the permit.

Since Hannaford's film was supposed to be beautifully composed, faux-symbolic nonsense, Welles ran wild in Century City, conceiving visuals and then taking them to extremes. With no sound and Orson directing him on the fly, actor Bob Random (who played the lead in Hannaford’s film-within-the-film) recalled, the experience was like “a silent movie, except you never knew what you were going to do.”

During this period, Welles also fell in love with the idea of creating his own wind and had the crew load a Ritter fan (an airplane propeller on a giant motor) onto a truck and haul it around to various locations, where Random would drive his motorcycle into a blistering dust storm they’d manufactured or spend half a day walking into a blizzard of garbage that crew members were tossing into the fan.

Graver was able to rent the MGM back lot for $200 a day by having the crew pose as U.C.L.A. film students and making Orson duck whenever they drove past the security gate. Once inside, Welles filmed on half-demolished Western sets where tumbleweeds blew across the street, and shot as much footage as humanly possible, culminating in a final, 72-hour filming spree that took place over a three-day weekend.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/04/orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-making-of

Some great anecdotes throughout... "Idiot, I haven't the foggiest idea what to do!"

looks great, thanks!
wonder what they were spiking their frescas with
http://photos.vanityfair.com/2015/04/10/552823982447462e4e0113f5_orson-welles-citizen-kane-the-other-side-of-the-wind.jpg

Huston made the same life decision per drinking vs driving i did (choosing the first).

finally saw chimes @ midnight, and it lives up to the hype! welles's editing (esp. his sound editing) is so eccentric, you wouldn't mistake it for anyone else's.

haven't watched that in forever, but it's definitely stuck with me. far and away the best shakespeare film i've ever seen.

otm, by a very long ways

this is where i say 'not even OW's best shakespeare film'

curious, but I can't imagine it's better than Macbeth

it is! just not Othello.

haven't seen othello in a long time but i remember thinking that welles's own performance in it wasn't quite as good as it should have been.

othello is great, possible i just prefer the chimes at midnight plays more than that one.

ranked in descending order:

Chimes at Midnight
Macbeth
Othello

as i said last time i saw it, some of the Chimes dialogue is unintelligible. That's kind of important (and I've seen most of the Falstaff plays! Some more than once).

Oh, there isn't one of these films marred by budget constraints. CAM is the most realized though. I like David Thomson's line about Welles' capturing the "sea spray" of Shakespeare in Othello.