Orson Welles

Gielgud is superb in Chimes

when i last saw it it Dec 2014, friend said he saw him breathe after he died

but yes

Gielgud is superb in Chimes

― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 2:27 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he really is, but gielgud is seldom less than superb. one of the finest screen performances i've ever seen is gielgud in a television version of The Browning Version directed by John Frankenheimer. he's stunning as man increasingly unable to hide his inner anguish.

when i last saw it it Dec 2014, friend said he saw him breathe after he died

cf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w4p4GkvrJ8

Jesus, this quote from J.Ro's piece on The Trial:

To anchor these feelings in one part of Welles’ life, he was 15 when his alcoholic father died of heart and kidney failure, and Welles admitted to his friend and biographer Barbara Leaming that he always felt responsible for that death. He’d followed the advice of his surrogate parents, Roger and Hortense Hill, in refusing to see Richard Welles until he sobered up, and ‘that was the last I ever saw of him….I’ve always thought I killed him….I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it.’

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/06/nightmare-as-funhouse-ride-orson-welless-the-trial-2/

Hard to believe he wasn't Irish Catholic.

if only the catholics had a monopoly on self-hating guilt! they're very professional about it, though

practice makes perfect

it's an instinct i share

“Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968) were the last two fiction features that Orson Welles completed,” begins R. Emmet Sweeney at Movie Morlocks. “Still to come would be the self-reflective essays of F For Fake (1973) and Filming Othello (’78), as well as the perpetually promised to-be-finished projects like The Other Side of the Wind (1970-’76), but Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story mark an endpoint. Both deal with aging, obsolete men living outside of their times, belonging to previous epochs. In Chimes, Welles’ Falstaff is a ruddy-cheeked representative of the Merrie England torn asunder by the War of the Roses, while his ‘Mr. Clay’ in The Immortal Story is a wealthy Macao merchant who lives inside his account books, completely cut off from the world outside. Chimes at Midnight is the capstone to Welles’s extraordinary career, while The Immortal Story is a dream-like coda. Today both have been released in essential DVD and Blu-ray editions from Criterion.”

http://moviemorlocks.com/2016/08/30/end-of-an-era-chimes-at-midnight-and-the-immortal-story/

The Immortal Story gets thick when Moreau and the gay bait lie in the bed for a seeming eternity, but my gad, sir, what an oddity.

V excited to finally get to see Chimes at Midnight

OK, got The Immortal Story out from the library. Should I be watching the English or the French version?

The only difference is the soundtrack? English i'm p sure

ENGLISH.

Replacing now broken link because J-Ro slightly reshuffled web page:
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/09/nightmare-as-funhouse-ride-orson-welless-the-trial/

Thanks guys.

I suppose it makes sense that the English version would be preferable; guess I was still haunted by how my first viewing of Herzog's Nosferatu was ruined by clicking the "English" option.

While I didn't love it, The Immortal Story is Welles' most homoerotic film.

Nice use of Satie, and the sailor was yummy, but The Immortal Story is a mildly interesting curio at best.

ie better than F for Fake

Bogdanovich teasing on That Movie again

https://thefilmstage.com/news/editing-on-orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-aiming-for-spring-start/

I finished Simon Callow's third volume two weeks ago. Rather good on sorting out who was responsible for the TOE screening debacle, explaining the complicated Welles- Mac Liammóir-Edwards axis during the filming of Othello, and the disastrous production of Rhinoceros, during which Welles realizes he hates Larry Olivier after all.

I hope to move this June so i can find out which box(es) the first 2 volumes are in.

If you can't find them, every public library in America has'em.

I wish.

Other Side of the Wind to be released by Netflix:

http://www.wellesnet.com/other-side-of-the-wind-footage-netflix-to-release-orson-welles-film/

wowowowow

sounds horrifying tbh

even if it sucks it'll be fascinating

(fwiw F for Fake is probably my second favorite Welles after CK)

Finding all the detailing of archiving/preservation of most interest -- this turned out to be a smart move over the last eighteen months:

Unknown to many, Rymsza had a team quietly at work at LTC during the lengthy negotiations. Each film can was opened and the footage checked for signs of deterioration. Metadata and handwritten information from each reel or film can was collected and entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The footage was then transferred onto modern cores and prepped for its 4K scan at Technicolor. The sound elements, contained on quarter-inch analog audio tapes, were packaged for their eventual conversion into digital files. The materials were placed in moisture-proof bags with absorbent paper, securely boxed and then packed onto eight pallets for shipment.

"We definitely made good use of that time," Rymsza said. "We have a very good sense from an inventory of what's what. It's extremely well-organized."

i've seen the first 40 minutes on a bootleg dvd and i love it. as long as they keep jesus franco out of it (shouldn't be too difficult what with him being dead and all) it should be a great watch.

The agreement calls for producers to deliver to Netflix, among other elements, a 35mm print of the completed film, which leaves the door open to some type of theatrical release.

You better bet yer fuckin' ass.

Someone said that all of Welles' films, despite some stylistic/thematic resemblance, were all sui generis. I doubt this cut of OSOTW will be "horrifying," but based of the clips and accounts it should be an ungainly, arresting thing, whether it's good or not.

(might be received more like recent Malick then like Chimes at Midnight)

xxp

the thing i'm most worried about is that it's the sort of film that _ought_ to be seen on a bootleg dvd. it is, by design, an unfinished mess.

ya sure? i'm sure OW wanted it to feel "70s" and improvisational but i think he wanted to finish it, and for it not to be a mess. None of his finished (signed) films are messes, exactly, not even the multiple Mr Arkadins.

well, the conceit is that a washed-up, aging director had a party on what turned out to be the last day of his life and invited everybody with a camera there. at that party, he showed the unfinished rushes of his film in progress. so what i saw, at least, cuts between those unfinished rushes and "guerilla" footage filmed on about every kind of camera imaginable at the party. my feeling is that "chaotic mess" is kind of baked into that structure.

The summaries I've read of his working method -- Welles writing scraps of dialogue on 5x7 cards which we would give to an amused John Huston -- don't augur well for what we'll see.

I'm more disappointed that he never got to film The Big Brass Ring

i guess if i'm worried about anything it's about the way welles handled the homosexuality - that part of the story wasn't really prevalent in the first 40 minutes i saw, but it apparently starts becoming important in a major way later in the film, and that aspect of it might well turn out to be badly dated.

The summaries I've read of his working method -- Welles writing scraps of dialogue on 5x7 cards which we would give to an amused John Huston -- don't augur well for what we'll see.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

hell, i'm just glad welles got rid of rich little.

Homosexuality's in his and Oja Kodar's script for TBBR too, and, arguably, in every one of his films (especially The Immortal Story). I suppose he saw it as an form of self-love.

there's a lot of queer in The Trial, too, more than i remembered

if it's not bigotry (and i haven't seen any in him previously) i don't give a shit about "badly dated." Films were made when they were made.

Morbz otm

so do Bogdanovich & Co have more OW editorial-intention evidence for this than the guys who did It's All True?

I can't pin down why, but I have this deep distrust of Bogdanovich

http://www.movies.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2i27jiv.jpg

"But...I am here. Can you not believe?"

I feel like he really thinks he is that guy, and that is the problem

But he directed this oh wait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Sir,_with_Love_II

Kind of a Tarantino-esque film nerd who did a couple decent films but I think mainly of him drooling over the fact Orson Welles would hang out with him

He did a number of good to excellent films, actually. I think his respect for and knowledge of Welles probably makes him as good a candidate as any to be involved... assuming that he's crowding 80 isn't a mitigating factor.

btw he was a critic first, which T Who Shall Not Be Named most assuredly isn't.

very fair and I appreciate your analysis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bogdanovich#Film_critic