Late Welles

Robert Random & Oja Koda

Looking at the current run of Movie Movies, where characters impersonate stars or go through the motions of making films on screen, it wouldn't pay to ignore the belated arrival of Orson Welles' last, chaotic project The Other Side of the Wind, finally available on Netflix in its posthumously completed version. Some people who saw an earlier version by an academic for festival showing say they prefer that.

What ends up on the screen is surprisingly coherent. I get the impression that Welles just filmed as the mood took him, never expecting to have to deliver a viewable product and then got Peter Bogdanovich to promise on screen to finish the job. As in F for Fake, material is shot in whatever screen shape was on hand but here digital production means that a copy which respects all these formats is possible. The film within the film (lots of the then Mrs. Welles naked - striking features, big butt) is in widescreen colour and the framing incidents of the night, which moves from the party where guests assemble to see fictional director Jake Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind, is covered in whatever form happens to be available - Oscar for the laboratory work?

The restorers have managed to construct what is probably more narrative than Welles intended, as his retinue gathers at Hannaford/John Huston’s ranch party for the screening of his latest movie, which will follow lots of drinking and quote-intended dialogue exchanges among those assembled - one time leads like Edmond O’Brien, Susan Strasberg, John Carroll, Benny Rubin or Cameron Mitchell (first seen as a sound man being fired on camera), old associates Mercedes McCambridge, Norman Foster, Paul Stewart or later generation filmmakers like Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom & Bogdanovich.

Huston, Welles & Bogdanovich

Hanaford is more a portrait of John Huston than Welles - casual about the hardships he creates for co-workers and his one-liners are less resonant (“Movies & friendship, those are mysteries”) than the ones we got from Welles in person. The film also has a truth coming at sunrise as in Huston’s Maltese Falcon and Freud. Huston the actor clearly relishes playing Huston the director.

Material that has no real place is included because someone must have liked it - the interview with Countess Lili Palmer, conducted by an off-screen Welles using one of his radio voices, the ice cube girl or the singalong with John Carroll. Dwarfs deliver liquor and dummies, to be used as targets at the party, and share transport with the actors. I can see Welles making jokes about critics attributing meaning to this.

His fascination with lenses and projectors is very evident with the battery of press cameras. The penile imagery is crude - the microphone introduced into the interview or the plastic-wrapped column in the film within the film material.

Film critics get more than a few sideswipes and Hanaford/Huston explains that it’s all right to steal from others but not from oneself - which doesn’t sit too well with Kodar’s slashing with the scissors in the way that the sword attack is done in Welles’ Othello. Can’t help wondering whether Edmond O’Brien prompted the line lifted from Pete  Kelly’s Blues (the producer who’s so crooked he has rubber lined pockets to steal soup) which commentators who aren't familiar with the Jack Webb movie now quote with relish.

Edmond O'Brien - Pete Kelly's Blues

In with all this, there is a hint of a plot about juvenile Bob Random walking out on Huston’s wide-screen color art movie where he partners with the bare-assed Ojar.

There is so much happening and so much of it resonates with off-screen activities that it is possible to be carried along with the flow. I enjoyed it but I still can’t help wondering whether this one should go onto the list of last films by celebrity directors that they should have pulled up short before undertaking - The Big Fisherman, A Countess from Hong Kong the final productions of Maurice Elvey and James Cruze.

Barrie Pattison 2024