David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.
APPETIZER: Review of The Other Side of the Wind
For almost 50 years it haunted Orson Welles’s name,
longer than the span from Citizen Kane (1941)
to F for Fake (1977). Filmed in
patchy intervals from 1970 to 1976, partly edited by Welles (to curry investor
interest at a 1975 tribute to him), The
Other Side of the Wind remained unfinished. After his 1985 death, lavish
footage sat in a vault as legal combat between an Iranian investor, Orson’s
estate-ruling daughter Beatrice and the film’s star Oja Kodar (Orson’s great
love for 23 years) blew on and on, like a tireless wind. This is cult-myth
stuff, made poignant by the 2006 death of cameraman Gary Graver. Enthusiast,
friend, gofer, problem-fixer, Graver was for 15 years Sancho to Quixote Welles.
His imagery is often excellent in the “reborn” Wind, now on Netflix – which was a completion angel, but
also cramped theatrical showings. Wind
is now, at last, a visible ghost –
but how viable?
Using Arizona and L.A.
locations, either rented or shot on-the-run, it pivots around the 70th
birthday of fabled director Jake Hannaford. He is clearly a variant on Welles,
also evoking old studio bulls (Walsh, Ford, Hawks) as incarnated by John Huston
(playing Jake out of loyalty to his friend Orson). The budget has collapsed for
Jake’s The Other Side of the Wind,
his comeback project to eclipse the young, Rebel Hollywood guests (which
include Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom, etc.). Aging Welles
veterans circulate as snipers: Paul Stewart (wryly echoing his butler in Kane), Lilli Palmer, Cameron Mitchell,
Norman Foster, Mercedes McCambridge and funny, booze-ravaged Edmond O’Brien.
Pedants, paparazzi and voyeurs help churn the event into gossipy chaos. Fast-cut
editing aims for docu-spontaneity. yet the party often feels staged. Much
dialog was improvised, yet many zingers sound recycled. Nobody has much fun.
Serving this Jake cake, Welles never rivals his great gatherings: film’s best
office party (Citizen Kane), the
mansion ball in The Magnificent Ambersons, the Goya fiesta and wild Munich party in Mr. Arkadin.
Preening as master-of-revels
is insufferable Brooks Otterlake – Peter Bogdanovich, oozing the flip hauteur
that by 1971 made him Hollywood’s most resented young success (he seems to
intuit his coming hard lessons, and the fate of his hero). In this feast of
rancor, the acid plum is Welles’s evident disdain for his acolyte, which
curdles most of Huston’s famous charm. Bogdanovich would age to
champion this film, despite this self-portrait. Because Hannaford is such a sour pickle he never suggests the vital, unbeaten
Welles who was still planning films on the night of his death at 70, nor the
Huston who made late masterpieces before departure at 81.
Another buzz-kill is Jake’s
nastiness to intrusive critic Julie Rich, a spitball at Pauline Kael. Pretty,
easily rattled Susan Strasberg plays Rich as an aggressive pest, much less like Kael
than Hedda Hopper in The Oscar. As
filming lurched along, Kael’s big New
Yorker piece arrived, attacking Welles’s primacy in scripting Citizen Kane. Bogdanovich led the
counter-blast, nailing Kael for some lazy research and for over-touting
forgotten writer Herman Mankiewicz (while ignoring her canny rooting of Kane in its era, and her shrewd analysis
of Welles’s creative dominance). A “Polack extraction” line snaps at Kael’s
Polish-Jewish ancestry. It may be the worst of the ’70s bad vibes, in a movie
with too many.
The party sputters on past fireworks and drunken
midgets and Jake’s giddy rifle shooting, to a drive-in screening of segments
from Jake’s unfinished film, a swank erotic reverie in which Kodar and a dull
stud (who had worked for porn parodist Russ Meyer) display flesh. This connects
with nothing, but suggests a lampoon of Vogue
Antonioni (the au courant auteur whom
Welles disdained). Orson distanced himself, leaving much of the design and cutting to Kodar and Graver. Glossy,
elegant but not very sexy, the mock-kitsch Antonioni styling and Welles’s love of
Kodar cancel each other out. Could Orson Wizard have pulled off the radical
reboot that he later talked about? A fanatical improver, he was still editing The Trial on the morning of its Paris
premiere. Instead, surplus footage, a baggy script, revision notes and too many
iffy choices swamped the rescue’s brave editor, Bob Murawski. This is not the movie Welles would have finished.
There is some pathos, for Hannaford is a shipwrecked talent, and luscious Kodar
is like his mermaid dream. Nothing can help the dreary hippie touches, which
echo the worst of Antonioni’s Zabriskie
Point.
The Other
Side of the Wind seems written on the
wind, spraying its confetti about insurgent filming, industry politics, macho
gayness, vamp-ad chic and auteurist cultism. It lacks force and focus. Perhaps the artist praised by Andre Bazin as "the fastest director in the world" simply got slowed, becalmed and stymied by the many frustrations. It’s a
time capsule holding too much dust and
ash, less art than archeology. Released in its day, it would likely have been
panned as an indulgent echo of Fellini’s 8½,
or even (given the sex) a wan attempt at Citizen
Hefner. But an ironic footnote soon emerged. Welles achieved mini-budget
magic by uniting witty cutting, conceptual collage and a sly, sexy salute to
Kodar in his bravura essay movie F for
Fake. He one-upped the unseen Wind.
Which, in a Netflixed era, should now be seen if not revered. (Netflix viewers
can also find Morgan Neville’s
documentary on the history, They’ll Love
Me When I’m Dead).
SALAD (A List)
Orson
Welles’s Movies Ranked by Quality
As chosen by (what else?) my discriminating taste:
1. Citizen Kane
(1941), 2. Chimes at Midnight (1966),
3. The Trial (1962), 4. Touch of Evil (1958), 5. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), 6. Mr. Arkadin (1954),7. F for Fake (1975),
8. Othello (1952), 9. The Lady from Shanghai (1948), 10. The Immortal Story (1968), 11. Macbeth (1948), 12. The Stranger (1946), 13. Journey
Into Fear (Welles-Foster,1942) and … posterity will find a number for Wind.
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
The
heartfelt guide to Orson’s last, productive but ill-financed years is What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?
(2006), a nuanced memoir by scholar and friend Joseph McBride, who appears
briefly in Wind. His thoughts on the
movie’s eroticism: “Welles joked, ‘All I can say is that compared to
(Bertolucci’s) Last Tango in Paris,
which incidentally I liked very much, my production will be a nice family
picture.’ But in fact Wind offers an
especially searching and complex portrait of sexuality for a director whose
earlier work had tended to treat sex discretely. When Welles turned down, on
moral grounds, an offer to appear in Gore Vidal’s Caligula (he suspected) that the Penthouse production would become
a pornographic extravaganza. Kenneth Tynan told Vidal, ‘You must never forget
what a Puritan he is when it comes to sex.’ Welles told me (McBride) that he
had always wanted to shoot erotic scenes but was uncomfortable doing so until
he could pass them off as somebody else’s work.”
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
As
a film stylist, Welles was no Puritan. In the baroque Kafka mazes he created
for The Trial, most at the derelict
Gare d’Orsay in Paris, “form followed fantasy, and every space is charged for
cinematic effect. ‘Distaste for a richly rhetorical style may be an intelligent
and well-earned sensibility,’ notes Robert Garis, ‘but it may also be a
puritanical refusal to allow art its full range. No one has ever accused
Welles’s flamboyance of being puritanical.’ ” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon,
Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a
still, it’s a distillation.
Their
noir nightmare shatters in a mirrored “funhouse” for Everett Sloane (left),
Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in The
Lady from Shanghai (Columbia Pictures 1948; director Orson Welles,
photographed by Charles Lawton Jr. and others).
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