Back From the Dead
Orson Welles in 1970 began work on The Other Side of the Wind. Forty-eight years later we can finally see it. This film, for many years mostly unedited, with 100 hours of footage to work with, was finally shaped into a version mainly by director Peter Bogdanovich (one of the movie's main stars). Welles had left behind, after his death in 1985, notes and plans for how he wanted the film to be edited and arranged as a whole.
In the 1980s, I first read of this film in books about Welles. It was mired for years in a weird legal bind I didn't fully understand, something about Iranian money financing part of it; thus, due to the post-1979 Revolution political situation between Iran and the U.S., an unfinished film lost in controversy, perhaps irrecoverable.
Recovered, years of work went into its restoration. As it is, the film is still in all likelihood an approximation of Welles's vision for it; nevertheless, it's a remarkable work of art.
A time capsule, The Other Side of the Wind shows us early to mid-1970s southern California--the shooting took place off and on until 1976. An old director (John Huston) struggles to finish a film after his leading man walks off the set. A birthday party at the director's house is thrown--most of the movie covers the time of this one party night, with numerous guests in the film world and journalists and cameramen. The main journalist (Susan Strasberg, looking so foxy she's distracting every time she's onscreen) has an adversarial relationship with the director, enjoys pointing out his history with women, especially his leading ladies. Lilli Palmer, a longtime Hollywood actress, plays the director's long-suffering and resigned wife.
Cameos abound, including by Dennis Hopper, directors Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom, and Claude Chabrol. Gregory Sierra, known later in that decade from the TV cop show Barney Miller, has several scenes; Edmond O'Brien is on hand as a hard-drinking associate of the director's. Paul Stewart, who played Charles Foster Kane's butler in Welles's first film, is as magnetic a character actor as he was in 1941. Mercedes McCambridge, who played the leather-jacketed lesbian in Welles's Touch of Evil is another of the older generation of performers peopling this film. Cameron Mitchell is on hand, so is the director Norman Foster, who directed Welles in 1943's Journey Into Fear. One of the fascinating aspects of The Other Side of the Wind is to hear these old time actors speaking in a naturalistic 1970s manner, swearing, alluding to subject matter forbidden in the Hays Code days of Hollywood.
The party scenes go on and on like in a Robert Altman movie--the film clocks in at 122 minutes. During the first half I didn't have a clear sense of what I was experiencing. The large number of characters contributes to a sense of bewilderment; the first half hour is chaotic, reminiscent of the most confusing scenes in Welles's 1950s film, Mr. Arkadin, a work in his oeuvre I still have yet to understand. After an hour or so, though, I began to get The Other Side of the Wind. It strikes me as a story about an artist (of film) who has always compromised, struggled to make his own vision--he finally gets a chance to do what he wants, but is thwarted by his leading man, his backers, the press, and an audience that doesn't care anymore about his cinematic ideas.
Throughout there are scenes consisting of screenings of the director's film in progress. This film within the film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, features the troublesome young actor and an utterly beautiful actress played by Welles's last wife, Oja Kodar (who was also featured prominently in F For Fake). It's hard to follow what this film within the film is about. I don't remember any dialogue in it. It's a widescreen presentation of images, many of them gorgeous beyond the usual stretch of that word. After equipment failures and power outages at the director's house, they finish watching the film at a rented drive-in theater. There's something poignant and pointed about Welles himself presenting this idea of cinematic art descending to the popcorn and parking lot realm.
The final ten or so minutes of the film within the film, also the Welles film itself, is the most astonishing montage I've ever seen. The images, the editing, the Michel Legrand music score, Oja Kodar, naked and one of the most beautiful women on the face of the earth, the sand dunes, the blue of the sky, the symbolism of what she does, of the structures that tremble in the wind and fall; all these elements form the apotheosis of Orson Welles's art of the motion picture. Devastating, beautiful, and profound. I have never seen anything like it, and have only rarely ever felt such an emotional upheaval, so powerful is the ending of The Other Side of the Wind.
Vic Neptune
Orson Welles in 1970 began work on The Other Side of the Wind. Forty-eight years later we can finally see it. This film, for many years mostly unedited, with 100 hours of footage to work with, was finally shaped into a version mainly by director Peter Bogdanovich (one of the movie's main stars). Welles had left behind, after his death in 1985, notes and plans for how he wanted the film to be edited and arranged as a whole.
In the 1980s, I first read of this film in books about Welles. It was mired for years in a weird legal bind I didn't fully understand, something about Iranian money financing part of it; thus, due to the post-1979 Revolution political situation between Iran and the U.S., an unfinished film lost in controversy, perhaps irrecoverable.
Recovered, years of work went into its restoration. As it is, the film is still in all likelihood an approximation of Welles's vision for it; nevertheless, it's a remarkable work of art.
A time capsule, The Other Side of the Wind shows us early to mid-1970s southern California--the shooting took place off and on until 1976. An old director (John Huston) struggles to finish a film after his leading man walks off the set. A birthday party at the director's house is thrown--most of the movie covers the time of this one party night, with numerous guests in the film world and journalists and cameramen. The main journalist (Susan Strasberg, looking so foxy she's distracting every time she's onscreen) has an adversarial relationship with the director, enjoys pointing out his history with women, especially his leading ladies. Lilli Palmer, a longtime Hollywood actress, plays the director's long-suffering and resigned wife.
Cameos abound, including by Dennis Hopper, directors Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom, and Claude Chabrol. Gregory Sierra, known later in that decade from the TV cop show Barney Miller, has several scenes; Edmond O'Brien is on hand as a hard-drinking associate of the director's. Paul Stewart, who played Charles Foster Kane's butler in Welles's first film, is as magnetic a character actor as he was in 1941. Mercedes McCambridge, who played the leather-jacketed lesbian in Welles's Touch of Evil is another of the older generation of performers peopling this film. Cameron Mitchell is on hand, so is the director Norman Foster, who directed Welles in 1943's Journey Into Fear. One of the fascinating aspects of The Other Side of the Wind is to hear these old time actors speaking in a naturalistic 1970s manner, swearing, alluding to subject matter forbidden in the Hays Code days of Hollywood.
The party scenes go on and on like in a Robert Altman movie--the film clocks in at 122 minutes. During the first half I didn't have a clear sense of what I was experiencing. The large number of characters contributes to a sense of bewilderment; the first half hour is chaotic, reminiscent of the most confusing scenes in Welles's 1950s film, Mr. Arkadin, a work in his oeuvre I still have yet to understand. After an hour or so, though, I began to get The Other Side of the Wind. It strikes me as a story about an artist (of film) who has always compromised, struggled to make his own vision--he finally gets a chance to do what he wants, but is thwarted by his leading man, his backers, the press, and an audience that doesn't care anymore about his cinematic ideas.
Throughout there are scenes consisting of screenings of the director's film in progress. This film within the film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, features the troublesome young actor and an utterly beautiful actress played by Welles's last wife, Oja Kodar (who was also featured prominently in F For Fake). It's hard to follow what this film within the film is about. I don't remember any dialogue in it. It's a widescreen presentation of images, many of them gorgeous beyond the usual stretch of that word. After equipment failures and power outages at the director's house, they finish watching the film at a rented drive-in theater. There's something poignant and pointed about Welles himself presenting this idea of cinematic art descending to the popcorn and parking lot realm.
The final ten or so minutes of the film within the film, also the Welles film itself, is the most astonishing montage I've ever seen. The images, the editing, the Michel Legrand music score, Oja Kodar, naked and one of the most beautiful women on the face of the earth, the sand dunes, the blue of the sky, the symbolism of what she does, of the structures that tremble in the wind and fall; all these elements form the apotheosis of Orson Welles's art of the motion picture. Devastating, beautiful, and profound. I have never seen anything like it, and have only rarely ever felt such an emotional upheaval, so powerful is the ending of The Other Side of the Wind.
Vic Neptune
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