Orson Welles

Thomson is not loved by Welles scholar. I have affection for his book.

*scholars

xpost
I wouldn't be surprised - I think Thomson annoys quite a few 'serious' film scholars. Personally, I like the fact that he wasn't one of Orson's groupies back in the day.

Bogdanovich seemed fairly hostile to Rosenbaum when he was speaking about Other Side of the Wind recently

i think rosenbaum is particularly irked by thomson's airy suggestions that it would be better if welles's unfinished/lost works were never seen because the "myth" of all those lost films is more entrancing than the reality could ever be. that's probably not precisely what thomson wrote but i read that book more than a decade ago, iirc it's more of a meditation on welles's life and works than it is a "biography" in the strictest sense.

only Thomson I've read is the Big Screen (which I really enjoyed); his discussion of Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons is largely ambivalent.

xxp

I own the book. The passages about TMA contain some of the loveliest and most trenchant criticism Welles has gotten. As a guy who gives not a damn about outtakes and most B-sides, I don't care if his unfinished movies remain unreleased tbh

i dunno if outtakes and b-sides are the best analogy, since welles seems to have made a few films that were basically done but never got the final mix or edit or whatever. or don quixote which he'd more or less finished a couple of versions of but left in pieces all over the world. it'd be like if bob dylan had made a few albums just for the hell of it and then just left the tapes in a hotel room somewhere.

yeah a bunch of it is rights issues/legal/financial nonsense

I don't think you can even get a DVD of Chimes at Midnight in the US for ex.

No, it's not the right analogy. Difficult evaluating a career in which so many major works weren't what the creator envisioned. Thomson gets flak, by the way, because holds Welles and what he suggests is his indolence almost as responsible as the studios.

that's a big thing Rosenbaum pushes back against - that Welles was lazy. Dude was a workaholic by his estimation, working right up until the moment he died

Thomson says it's closer to intellectual indolence. Welles was a workaholic who lost interest in projects past a certain point, which is borne out by what happened to The Magnificent Ambersons (he was in Brazil working on a doc and his fucking and drinking).

tbf RKO burning the extra footage in that case is a p big dick move

tbh i think the "lazy welles who couldn't finish anything" view is closer to the mainstream view! i dunno if it's a fair assessment re: ambersons, though: RKO could just as easily have ripped it to shreds even if he'd never gone to brazil, welles had already relinquished the "final cut" power he had when he did kane.

Yeah -- that's precisely what Rosenbaum sought to refute.

i don't like Thomson much. He put Johnny Carson in his biographical dictionary of FILM.

btw apparently we're never seeing Other Side of the Wind bcz of Oja Kodar, acc to Bogdanovich and others.

looks like you can watch them talk about it here:

http://www.wellesnet.com/the-other-side-of-the-wind-delay-raised-at-prestigious-welles-panel/

ha, true. the johnny carson entry is a beautiful piece of writing, though. xp

Went to the BFI (to see something else) and upon the ad for the (now gone) Orson Welles season -- titled "The Great Disruptor" -- the friend I went with (a former ILXor) called him "The Donald Trump of Film".

Had a good chuckle over that, really can't think of anyone who so doesn't need a season. What a waste.

all i can say to your nonsense is Dietrich's "People should cross themselves when they say his name."

Dietrich not the only one who swallowed his bullshit.

Do love the guy but there is one really great film, a couple of other good ones and half a dozen great performances. Its more an issue around that ridiculous BFI season.

Morbz otm

apparently we're never seeing Other Side of the Wind bcz of Oja Kodar, acc to Bogdanovich and others
LAME

https://media2.giphy.com/media/14cEMhV9oKjya4/200_s.gif

(he was in Brazil working on a doc and his fucking and drinking).

there's an interesting aside in one of the Rosenbaum essays where he cites the possibility that criticism of Welles' behavior during his Brazil trip was racially motivated:

Then came the relevatory research carried out in both Brazil and the United States by Robert Stam and others - research which is still in progress, but which has already yielded some fascinating discoveries. Drawing on an array of Hollywood and Brazilian documents, Stam persuasively argues, for instance, that most of the complaints about Welles's profligacy in Brazil can be attributed to his radical pro-black stance, including the fact that he enjoying the company and collaboration of blacks, as well as his insistence on featuring nonwhites as the central characters in both of "It's All True"'s Brazilian episodes. Based on this reading, which Stam explores in detail, one is encouraged by Stam to reread most disapproving biographical accounts of Welles's "Brazilian episode", especially those of Charles Higham and John Russell Taylor, as unconsciously but unmistakably racist.

Do love the guy but there is one really great film

you don't rrrrrrreally love him, take your jigsaw puzzles and go.

Thinking about this need to bring down Papa Welles (surely in part a reaction to the romantic hyperbole of things like that Dietrich quote - or Godard's equally absurd 'All of us will always owe him everything') led me to thinking about Kael's 'Raising Kane', which led to me finding Sarris' response to Kael's piece here:

http://www.wellesnet.com/andrew-sarris-vs-pauline-kael-on-raising-kane/

At one point Sarris writes:

At the very least, we may expect a reprise of the recriminations exchanged between Peter Bogdanovich and Charles Higham on the occasion of the publication of Mr. Higham's "The Films of Orson Welles."

I don't know the Higham book, does anyone know what the fuss was about?

I never heard this before, but the recent Kael bio says Kael more or less stole most of her research for that article.

including the falsehoods?

Ward:

http://www.wellesnet.com/peter-bogdanovich-replies-to-charles-higham/

I think the falsehoods were somewhat selective extrapolations.

Thanks Morbs - not sure Bogdanovich does Welles any favours here

the Kael article I sum up: bad if not meretricious journalism, terrific as criticism. I love the "shallow masterpiece" bit.

the "shallow masterpiece" bit is really fucking annoying. does she suggest what his deep masterpieces are? i don't recall.

all masterpieces should be that shallow

It should only bug you if you're a square; I'd question someone's sanity if he walked around thinking masterpieces should be "deep." She's clear about what she means: its script is its best and worst quality. Plus, the thing is a lot of fun to watch -- pure pleasure.

Kael was a provocateur, and by 1973 or whenever she thought the film's defenders needed a kick in the shins.

I've never actually read the article and can't find it online anywhere at the moment (and its reputation as being thoroughly discredited has apparently merited its omission from various reprintings, collections, etc.)

It's worth a read, like Eliot's After Strange Gods.

it's in her collected crit too.

I assume yr referring to For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies from 1994 - it's not in her 2011 collection

Yep.

I'd question someone's sanity if he walked around thinking masterpieces should be "deep."

ah popmuzik

hope I die before I get morbed

now Brian de Palma's defenders needed a kick in the shins.

now there's a man who created a coupla shallow masterpieces

depth is a funny thing

I assume Kael hated De Palma

didn't she love him?

yeah she was his number one fan

I think De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision.

whoah okay then