Orson Welles

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.

harold bloom's thinly disguised self-worship aside, jack falstaff is a con man AND a buffoon! i personally find the performance very moving, much moreso than almost any other welles ever gave - the long close-up of his face after hal banishes him is just a beautiful piece of acting.

To me, that's the most generous kind of praise: you dismiss a film's flaws, but love its pluses. Do you want more two-dimensional appraisals?

As for "If I wasn't very rich..." the scene in which it's found is just pompous and lacking nuance. Kane sits there, intones, and allows the line to sink in; there's no irony intended. It's clear Welles (or Mankiewicz) was crafting a moment of pseudo-profundity, and, to their credit, one of the few in a movie that's far from the shallow masterpiece Kael declared it to be (how's that for nuanced praise?)

haha what kind of asshole?

Kramer: Oh! yeah.

Elaine: Huh . So What's it about?

Kramer: Well it's a story about love, deception, greed, lust and...unbridled enthusiasm.

Elaine: unbridled enthusiasm...?

Kramer: Well , that's what led to Billy Mumphrey's downfall.

Elaine: Oh! boy.

Kramer: You see Elaine, Billy was a simple country boy. You might say a cockeyed optimist,

who got himself mixed up in the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.

Elaine: Oh! my God.

October 18

F is For Fake vs. Dial M for Murder
Orson and Alfred by alphabet.

Audio will alternate with each seating
4:00pm Dial M for Murder audio
6:00pm F is For Fake audio
8:00pm Dial M for Murder audio
10:00pm F is For Fake audio

We're not sure if there are any synergies besides their alphabetic titles, but seeing Orson's last great masterpiece next to Alfred's waltz with Grace Kelly should reveal something, right?

Orson Welles' F is For Fake (1974) deserves the same level of praise as Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil. This past year, Criterion Collection released it on DVD. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) is a murder-melodrama wrapped in Hitchcock's formalist, baroque aesthetic.

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/showing/spanish05.htm

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0549,morales,70712,20.html

I saw it and found it really frustrating. I'm not sure how many of those "postmodernist quirks" were Welles' and how many were invented by Franco using the In the Land of Don Quixote footage.

The dubbed voices were really terrible--especially in light of Welles' hyper-attention to the way actors sounded. I couldn't tell how many of the jokes were just flat and how many suffered due to the hammy dubbing.

I'm not sure why the footage looked so awful--if Welles used bad stock, or if it wasn't preserved well or if Franco did that to normalize the look of the film, but I felt like I was watching a movie on an Apple II.

I mean, I'm still glad I saw it and these are just my first impressions, but it certainly wasn't a particularly enjoyable film going experience.

Either the footage had deteriorated, or OW was delusional that hewas making something releasable.

"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millenium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."