Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind

If his final film had been released in his lifetime, Orson Welles might also be known as the father of found footage, but should’ve-could’ve-would’ve was pretty much the story of his later career. Over forty years after Welles’ on-and-off-again, on-the-fly 1970-1976 shooting wrapped, his acidic Hollywood satire has finally been cut together and unveiled with the fanfare the old master was due in his lifetime. However, Welles fans should temper their expectations when The Other Side of the Wind (trailer here) finally arrives tomorrow, both in theaters and on Netflix.

Jake Hannaford is a crusty old filmmaker, who is considered a “living legend” due to his early work, but has just returned to Hollywood after a long, semi-self-imposed exile—or at least he was. This will be his final night on earth, but at least he will go out with a bang. All of Hollywood has flocked to his homecoming party, so they can gawk at his latest film: a self-indulgent attempt at sexually frank European art cinema—and a rather spot-on send-up of Antonioni. Out of eccentricity or indifference, Hannaford has allowed every journalist or amateur videographer with a handheld camera to document his snarky, drunken soiree.

Despite Welles’ protests otherwise, Hannaford certainly sounds like his alter-ego. The fact that he is played by the spectacularly craggy John Huston adds further layers of psycho-biographical significance. In fact, it is one of the more meta films of its era, with Peter Bogdanovich playing an analog of himself, Brooks Otterlake, Hannaford’s former protégé, whose current Hollywood success has eclipsed his former master. Hannaford has become unhealthily obsessed with the cast of his film-within-the-film, most notably his would-have-been discovery, John Dale, who bolted from the production before Hannaford could complete it for murky reasons. Pauline Kael-esque critic Juliette Rich, who hypothesizes Hannaford seduced Dale’s girlfriend as a surrogate for Dale himself. Dale’s leading lady, condescendingly referred to as “Red” (portrayed by Welles’ lover, Oja Kodar, naturally enough) is still present and accounted for, but she clearly is not happy to be there.

Editor Bob Murawski did a flat-out brilliant job shaping together all the footage, while doing his best to respect Welles’ original intentions. The result is a visually kinetic kaleidoscope of hedonism and bedlam. The often rapid-fire cuts are not classically Wellesian, per se, but we can still see his masterful eye composing each shot. It also features a wonderful score composed by the legendary-in-his-own-right Michel Legrand (seriously, his name also ought to be on the key art, because LeGrand scoring Welles again is an event). In all honesty, it is one of Legrand’s jazziest scores and one of his best, which is saying a lot (considering the themes he composed for F for Fake, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Thomas Crown Affair, to name just a few).

So why the warning to keep your enthusiasm in check? Unlike every other Welles film, Wind feels like a dated relic of its era, even though we are just seeing it now. Some of party dialogue has the sly acidic bite of the nattering gossipers in Citizen Kane or Magnificent Ambersons, but Otterlake’s pontifications sound like the shallow group-think of the time. Particularly cringe-worthy are his jibes at then Governor Reagan, who would go on to be the last president who unified the nation, in a positive way. There is also a phallic sight gag late in the picture that should have been considered beneath Welles’ dignity. More fundamentally, it is simply impossible to get around the fact that Welles & Kodar’s narrative is really just a sketch-like premise stretched to its absolute limits.

Wind is further notable as Welles’ most sexually explicit film, but the nude scenes in Hannaford’s film are actually work in their on-screen context. Frankly, there is an energy to these scenes that the rest of the proper film could have used. The dramatic, saturated colors also really pop off the screen, providing a vivid contrast with the black-and-white or dingy 16mm color of the party footage.

Those scenes also give us an idea of what might have been for Kodar, who was always (fairly or unfairly) dismissed as Welles’ lover, and Robert Random, who is best known for guest-starring on episodic TV (seven appearances on Gunsmoke, each in a different role). They are terrific together, generating some legit heat on screen. The mood is further heightened by Gary Graver’s striking color cinematography.

There is definitely stuff to see here, including Lilli Palmer, who is a delight playing the Marlene Dietrich-like Zarah Valeska. However, with a running time just over two hours, Wind is way too long and self-serious for what should have simply been a larky middle finger extended in Hollywood’s face. Still, the Legrand sounds great (there is also some Jaki Byard in there, along with some other jazz greats). It is too bad Welles’ unfinished The Deep will most likely always remain so, because it is more likely to be the lost masterpiece we crave from him. Recommended as a curiosity rather than a revelation, The Other Side of the Wind opens tomorrow (11/2) in New York, at the IFC Center and also starts streaming on Netflix.

John Huston at UCLA: The List of Adrian Messenger

Think of it as the inverse opposite of Robert Altman’s The Player. The gimmick for this larky noir was the unrecognizable presence of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars playing minor roles under heavy make-up. It is the sort of in-joke that would appeal to its legendary director, John Huston. Best of all, the Hemingwayesque auteur had the chance to get in some fox-hunting during the production of The List of Adrian Messenger, which screens during the John Huston retrospective at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Sort of, but not really retired MI5 agent Anthony Gethryn is enjoying his new quasi-emeritus status with his friends, Lady Jocelyn Bruttenholm and her family, when her cousin, Adrian Messenger takes him into his confidence. He believes a sinister villain has been knocking off all the names on his titular list, for nefarious reasons he suspects, but does not care to reveal without proof. Tragically, before Gethryn can begin his inquiries regarding the individual names, Messenger is killed in plane bombing.

Obviously, Gethryn concludes Messenger was in fact the final name on his list of death. However, as luck would have it, there was a sole survivor of the bombing, who happened to hear Messenger’s dying words. Gethryn even knows him—at least his voice. He and Raoul Le Borg often communicated via shortwave during WWII as French Resistance and British Intelligence counterparts, so they inevitably team up to track down the killer.

Frankly, it is no secret who the killer is. It’s Kirk Douglas in various disguises. He even plays the nefarious George Brougham in his own, unaltered, cleft-jawed features. Playing against type, Douglas is an eerily charming sociopath, but his terrific villainous turn was overshadowed by the stunt cameos from Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum (who really isn’t that hard to spot, possibly because he looked pretty much as he would in real life thirty years later).

George C. Scott is appealingly world-weary and cerebral as Gethryn, the spook-turned-sleuth. In fact, one of the greatest pleasures of the film is the sophisticated men-of-the-world buddy chemistry he forges with Jacques Roux’s Le Borg, who in turn develops some rather engagingly chaste romantic chemistry with the alluring yet ever so proper Lady Jocelyn, nicely played by Dana Wynter.

So yes, there is more than the gimmick to commend List to your attention. In fact, it boasts some of the best fox-hunting scenes ever shot. Old Man Huston wouldn’t settle for anything less. As it happens, those scenes were filmed in Ireland, where any subsequent remake would also probably be forced to go, due to the UK’s misconceived fox-hunting ban. As a further bonus, List also features one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best scores, which manages to be both zippy and upbeat, but somehow noirish as well. Recommended for fans of Huston’s wry capers, The List of Adrian Messenger fittingly screens with the complete restored print of Beat the Devil this coming Friday (6/30), at the Billy Wilder Theater.

Five Came Back: To Serve and Document

There are notable exceptions, like the tireless Gary Sinise and his Captain Dan Band, but it is almost impossible to imagine today’s Hollywood celebrities appearing at War Bond rallies and hobnobbing with average GIs at the Stage Door Canteen. It is even more unlikely any of the top-tier tent-pole directors would put their careers on hold to help the government make their case for war and document the subsequent battles. Yet that is exactly what Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston did during World War II. Their wartime experiences are chronicled in Five Came Back (trailer here), a three-part documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau and adapted by Mark Harris from his nonfiction bestseller, which premieres this Friday on Netflix.

Arguably, Capra, Ford, Wyler, and Stevens were at the top of their games when they joined the war effort, while Huston had just scored his first surprise breakout hit (a little film called The Maltese Falcon). They would lose several productive years, but they were more than willing to serve. Aside from Capra, who was something of a moviemaking field marshal, mostly working in Washington on the Why We Fight series, all risked their lives amid real and frequently bloody warfighting.

John Ford was the earliest into battle, recording the first American victory captured on film in the Oscar winning documentary short, The Battle of Midway. Eventually, Ford and Stevens would combine forces to document D-Day, which incredibly was not the latter’s most harrowing assignment. Huston supposedly documented plenty of action in Battle for San Pietro and Tunisian Victory, but his reliance on recreated scenes raises ethical issues Harris and company do not ignore. However, his long-suppressed PTSD documentary Let There Be Light is presented as a redemptive masterwork. Wyler’s Oscar winning The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress could very well still be the most popular of the wartime documentaries under discussion, but George Stevens’ journalistic record of the liberation of Dachau clearly had the most far-reaching influence. It was even presented as evidence at the Nuremberg military tribunals.

Yet, that is just a part of the story. Harris also traces the lasting influence of the directors’ wartime experiences on their subsequent studio films. To take stock of their legacies, five contemporary directors serve as resident experts on their particular WWII-era filmmakers. Some of the pairings are not exactly obvious, but Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greenglass, Stephen Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan, and Francis Ford Coppola all have significant insights to offer on Capra, Ford, Wyler, Stevens, and Huston, respectively.

There is some pretty amazing footage in FCB (and almost all of it is totally legit, notwithstanding Huston’s occasional fudging). Having distribution through Netflix also allows Bouzereau sufficient time and flexibility to fully tell the five men’s stories. As a result, the complete series actually exceeds three hours, with the individual episodes clocking in at fifty-nine, sixty-seven, and sixty-nine minutes. The contemporary directors also engage in some respectable film criticism, which is certainly not a pursuit for the faint of heart. Yet, what is most refreshing about FCB is the unabashed patriotism of its subjects. These were men with larger-than-life personalities and a great love of country, who were not afraid some snide hipster might call them “jingoistic.” Very highly recommended, Five Came Back starts streaming this Friday (3/31) on Netflix.

John Huston’s Restored and Uncensored Beat the Devil

It has been the African continent’s great misfortune to be blessed with extensive mineral wealth. Since the end of colonialism, the natural resource economy has been ripe for dictatorial exploitation. During the prior colonial days, it lured plenty of unsavory fortune-hunters. Billy Dannreuther’s associates are about as desperate and unscrupulous as it gets. They intend to grab a stretch of uranium-rich land in British East Africa, but they are their own worst enemies throughout John Huston’s Beat the Devil, which screens as it has almost never been seen—fully restored and uncensored, starting this Friday at Film Forum.

Dannreuther was once rich and extravagant, but now he is just extravagant. He has high hopes of regaining his fortune through the uranium scheme, but to do so, he must work with the dodgy quartet of rogues led by the rotund Peterson. His associates, former National socialist Julius O’Hara and Ravello (named just like the town) have been cooling their heels for a while, but Maj. Jack Ross has just arrived, after presumably murdering a suspicious bureaucrat in the London Colonial office.

The co-conspirators are anxious for the skipper of their tramp steamer to somber up, so they can be on their way, except of course Dannreuther. He always enjoyed the charms of Ravello (the Amalfi town), especially when in the company of Gwendolen Chelm. The Chelms are a distinctive couple. He is a snobby Englishman’s Englishman, while she is a complete mythomaniac. She is also a young, attractive blonde, so Dannreuther would like to seduce her, but she is too interested in him as well for that to be necessary.

Since Harry Chelm and the Anglophile Italian bombshell Maria Dannreuther also get into the extramarital act, it is not hard to see why the Production Code nannies demanded two of three minutes of strategic trimming. Frankly, it is almost a miracle there was anything left. Although there is certainly no sex or nudity in Beat the Devil, it is crystal clear what kind of monkey business is going on behind closed doors.

With that healthy lustiness restored, the film does not quite seem as larky as its reputation suggests. Reportedly, it was scripted by Huston and Truman Capote on-the-fly, day-by-day, almost as a series of dares or screenwriting Madlibs. Granted, the ensemble’s tongues definitely find their way into their cheeks, but there is still some terrific film noir business going on. Clearly, Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris were inspired by the Amalfi settings, utilizing some dazzling crane shots that fully exploit the cinematic backdrops.

Humphrey Bogart could play a picaresque anti-hero like Dannreuther in his sleep—in fact, he may have, but still flashes the old charm in his scenes with Jennifer Jones’ Ms. Chelm. As one would expect, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and Ivor Barnard (recognizable from The 39 Steps) make up a deliciously seedy rogues gallery of Dannreuther’s would-be accomplices. Comparatively speaking, Gina Lollobrigida’s Maria Dannreuther counts as the grounded commonsensical one in this farcical caper, but she still adds plenty of allure and elegance. Yet, the most surprising work comes from British character actor Edward Underdown, who makes Harry Chelm quite the wildcard of the film.

It is just great fun to see legends like Bogart, Lorre, and Morley hamming it up and savoring the film’s skulduggery. However, the fully restored version offers a happy opportunity to revisit what many call the original camp classic. It might have been played for laughs, but Huston executed the caper with tremendous style. Many, many scenes have a tremendous sense of composition (and they were shot by camera operator Freddie Francis, who would go on to direct several classic Hammer Horror films). Very highly recommended, the fully restored Beat the Devil opens this Friday (2/17) at Film Forum.

The Visitor, Because Life Wasn’t Weird Enough Without It

Atlanta is a sinful city, where every damn street is called Peachtree.  A cosmic warrior has come to straighten things out here.  He will do battle with the pre-pubescent girl who has made the world such a crummy place in the ever-so strange 1979 Italian-produced sci-fi knock-off, The Visitor (trailer here), directed by Giulio Paradisi as Michael J. Paradise, which has been re-mastered and re-released by Drafthouse Films.

In a dimension “beyond imagination,” a mysterious old man seeks out the remnants of the evil Sateen, a demonic entity he vanquished eons ago.  Evidently, some of his old foe’s essence ended up on earth, specifically within Barbara Collins’s ancestors.  She is one of the rare carriers who can give birth to his malevolent offspring.  Unfortunately, she already has one child, the dreadful little Katy.  Her boyfriend Raymond Armstead is pressuring her to get married and have more children, because he is part of an apocalyptic secret society that frequently holds awkward board meetings devoted to promoting evil.  Collins resists, ostensibly for the sake of her freedom.  However, she is also instinctively against anything Katy is for.

You might think the bad guys would do anything to protect the birthing abilities of the only woman who can deliver Sateen’s bad seeds.  Well, obviously you are not part of an international satanic cult.  Poor Collins is shot, partially paralyzed, run off the road, and attacked by a falcon.  Yet, despite all the stress, her skin remains remarkably clean and radiant.  As Armstead and Katy plot against her, the gaunt Jerzy Colsowicz arrives to do battle with Sateen’s spawn.  That’s right, it’s a frail septuagenarian versus an eight year-old, so get ready to rumble.

It goes without saying The Visitor is a strange film.  Everyone compares it to The Omen and Close Encounters, but Paradisi/Paradise probably rips-off The Birds more than anything else. For whatever reason, bird attacks seem to be the weapon of choice for good guys and bad guys alike. It is just plain baffling anyone thought this film could cash in on the late 1970’s sci-fi craze, but it boasts a truly once-in-a-lifetime cast, including John Huston (the John Huston), Lance Henriksen, Glenn Ford, Franco Nero (uncredited as the Christ-like figure), Shelley Winters, Switchblade Sisters’ Joanne Nail, Mel Ferrer, Sam Peckinpah (the Sam Peckinpah), and future Libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz.  Get your head around that ensemble.

Frankly, Huston looks rather bemused in each of his scenes as Colsowicz and it is a good bet he never saw bothered to watch the finished product.  Ford and Winters soldier through like the old pros they are, playing the cop and the nanny, respectively.  Eventual fan favorite Henriksen also shows an early affinity for scenery chewing as Armstead.  In truth, aside from maybe Huston and Nero, nobody really phoned The Visitor in, but it is anyone’s guess what they thought they were doing in this convoluted, New Agey plot.  There are times the film appears to be conceived as a showcase for Atlanta’s modernist architecture, which makes as much sense as any other explanation.

Visitor’s special effects are crude and confusing, even by 1970’s standards, but in its straight-forward dramatic scenes, the picture looks surprisingly slick.  Naturally, even the music “borrows” from another film, but it must be conceded Franco Micallizzi’s riff on Strauss’ “Zarathustra” is oddly catchy, in a funky (arranger) David Matthews-Kudu Records kind of way.

If you don’t get The Visitor by now, you’re on your own.  If you enjoy completely cracked cult cinema, this is your catnip.  Impressive in its way, it demands to be seen to be believed.  Recommended for those who can appreciate the sheer defiant spectacle of it all, The Visitor screens this weekend (11/8 & 11/9) at the IFC Center in New York.