Orson Welles

Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab [Ten Little Indians aka And Then There Were None] (1974)

Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab [Ten Little Indians aka And Then There Were None] (1974)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2019) As murder mysteries go, And Then There Were None is one of the darkest ones and it remains one of Agatha Christie’s best-known novels. I first read it in high school, so it keeps that timeless aura that, paradoxically, makes its various film adaptations more interesting. In the case of this 1974 version (a multinational collaboration, but shot in English), the appeal here is in a very specific 1970s take on the material, not particularly faithful to the original text but interesting in its casting and audience-friendly choices. It’s obvious from the first few frames that it’s going to be a very 1970s kind of film—the fuzzy colour cinematography, the fashions of the day played up and the actors being a multinational bunch of then-celebrities. Take a look at that cast: Charles Aznavour, Elke Sommer, Gert Fröbe, Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough and Orson Welles. But it’s in the changes to the story (many of them reprised from the 1965 version by the same producer) that the film ends up being most interesting. Dispensing with the traditional island location, this one ends up in the Iranian desert prior to the revolution—the impact still being isolation in the middle of nowhere. Thus transplanted in a sand ocean, the story largely goes about the same way until it hits its third act, at which point the plot is rejigged in most Hollywoodian fashion to allow for foiling the book’s entire plot and allowing some characters to survive the events of the film. As a Christie enthusiast, I suppose I should be aghast at the way the entire harsh point of the novel is softened into crow-pleasing pablum. But in the end, I’m not particularly bothered by the changes—I find them interesting in the way they alter the premise, and I’m never totally opposed to happy endings anyway. The original novel remains available for all to read if you want the real deal—and considering its enduring popularity either now or in the 1960s–1970s, there’s a fair case to be made that the filmmakers were able to give something new to audiences expecting a straight-up retelling of the book. Add to that the now-delicious patina of 1970s style and the 1974 version of Then There Were None remains worth a look.

F for Fake (1973)

F for Fake (1973)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, November 2019) We could easily rename F for Fake to F for Fascinating and it wouldn’t change much. Abandon any preconception of a standard narrative or documentary film, because from the first few minutes (which feature a suspiciously specific disclaimer that “everything we will tell you in the next hour is factual”), Orson Welles is clearly having fun playing with cinematic grammar, placing himself front-and-centre and messing with expectations. The subject matter, as we gradually discover (Welles doesn’t make it easy) is to talk about four fascinating personalities: Elmyr de Hory (celebrated art faker), Clifford Irving (journalist and de Hory biographer, discovered during filming to have faked an autobiography of Howard Hughes), Howard Hughes (mogul turned mysterious hermit, then far more mysterious than now) and finally Orson Welles himself (no stranger to fakery as a filmmaker and radio broadcaster). F for Fake a feature-length series of impressionistic digressions on fakery leading to a final fifteen minutes that goes somewhere unexpected. This is a film best seen with Wikipedia on hand, though, as it assumes quite a bit about what an early 1970s viewer would know and find interesting. My favourite part of the film is easily Welles’s larger-than-life presence himself, as the film allows him to charm the viewer and even witness as he holds court in a restaurant—if anyone ever wondered how much fun it would be to hang out with later-day Welles at his storytelling best, then wonder no more. Otherwise, there’s quite a bit of fun to see Welles subvert expectation and mislead his audience (as he tells us he’s going to do in the first few minutes). Welles buffs will also come away from the film far better informed about Oja Kodar, something that’s probably essential to understand Welles’s last few years and the tortuous path that The Other Side of the Wind took to its final release. There’s an entire film’s worth of supplementary material to be read about F for Fake, so keep that Wikipedia link close by.

The Stranger (1946)

The Stranger (1946)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) In Orson Welles’s filmography, The Stranger is often regarded as one of his least remarkable efforts. An early film noir set in a small town where a Nazi-hunter comes to investigate, it was (at the time) an attempt by the disgraced Welles to prove that he could be counted upon as a dependable actor/director, free from the drama that punctuated the first few years of his career. We all know how Welles’s career eventually turned out when driven away from Hollywood, but he was successful in turning out a competent and profitable result with The Stranger. Alas, this work-for-hire means that the film has far fewer of the distinctive touches we associate with Welles at his best: while highly watchable, the result seems rote. The action moves efficiently through stock characters, and Welles even at his most commercial is still a cut above most directors of the time. The dialogue has some great moments (such as the magnificent speech about the nature of Germans, as horribly stereotyped as it may feel now) but the film’s biggest distinction is how closely it engages with the immediate aftermath of WW2: Never mind the film’s interest in escaped Nazis living in the States: it also features then-new graphic footage of concentration camps … including a pile of bodies. Just to make it clear what this is about. You can certainly see in The Stranger a transition film in between the domestic thrillers of the early-1940s and the more fully realized noir aesthetics of the end of the decade. The result is still worth a look, not least for the compelling performances of Welles, Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson. It’s a striking illustration of what happens when a great artist is given familiar material.

Le procès [The Trial] (1962)

Le procès [The Trial] (1962)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2019) I generally enjoyed watching much of Le procès, but it’s clear that I’m not smart enough to understand this film. Coming from writer-director Orson Welles’s middle-years phase, it’s an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and it plays up the disorienting nature of the original text. As a man is accused of some unspecified offence, his attempts to understand the charges and defend himself are constantly rebuffed by an uncaring system that barely seems human. The story is not meant to be understood—it’s meant to be felt, and Welles gets to work in splendidly visual fashion, putting his characters in vast cavernous spaces, confronting them with early computers and nightmarish bureaucracy. From a purely cinematographic standpoint, there’s a lot to like here. The casting is also nothing short of amazing, in between names such as Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Michael Lonsdale and Orson Welles himself. Where the film intentionally falls apart is in making sense of it all. It’s not supposed to, and yet at times it feels like anything for anything’s sake. Many shots are arresting; some of the absurdity is funny; but eventually, Le procès hits a point where the whole thing feels too long and undercooked. Nonetheless, it clearly remains an Orson Welles film, and one where he really gets to work his magic.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2019) If Citizen Kane is Orson Welles’s biggest hit, then The Magnificent Ambersons is the one that got away—a favourite of those willing to start digging into the filmography of the famously difficult writer-director and see where, arguably, it all started to go wrong. What’s on screen is easy to admire. There’s something admirably modern in the way the story begins, with directing and editing well in advance of its time with voiceovers, visual segments and droll vignettes combined in order to adapt a novel on-screen in an efficient, dynamic fashion. This is really Orson Welles at his best, immediately following on the success of Citizen Kane. The Magnificent Ambersons rolls on good acting, good themes, exceptional direction and great sets, with the camera moving into them to track the characters in long shots. But there is a catch: the ending really isn’t as satisfying as the beginning, and trying to understand why it is will quickly get you reading about Welles’s clashes with the studio—a pattern that would repeat itself for the rest of his life. Perhaps more has been written on what’s missing from the film than what remains, but what remains is impressive—even though the unsatisfying and rushed ending clearly demonstrates the meddling even to those uninterested in reading about the film’s production.

Catch-22 (1970)

Catch-22 (1970)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2018) Coming in toward the end of the Vietnam quagmire, 1970 was a strange year for war movies. On the one hand, you have the blockbuster example of Patton, with its portrayal of a grander-than-life soldier’s soldier against the noble backdrop of World War II and sweeping tank battles. Then there is the satirical trio of Kelly’s Heroes, MASH and Catch-22, all of which took a jaundiced satirical look at war, taking potshots at the very ideals that earlier movies such as The Longest Day would have promoted a few years earlier. (Even Patton isn’t immune to the critical re-evaluation, as Patton himself is portrayed as exceptionally flawed and prisoner of his own nature.) Catch-22 betrays its literary origins through elaborate dialogue sequences often taking over the cinematic qualities of its sequences—most spectacularly during a sequence in which some inane dialogue takes place over the crash landing of a plane behind the characters. This being said, there’s an admirable commitment to historical recreations in Catch-22—the film put together a bomber air base just for shooting, and the results are some impressive sequences with real military hardware and none of that fluffy CGI stuff. An all-star cast is enough to keep things interesting—from Alan Arkin’s too-sane protagonist to Orson Welles turning up as a military commander. Much of the film has a compelling twisted logic to it, pointing out the limits of military thinking in exceptional situations. While the result could have been tighter, more focused and perhaps just a bit less talky, it still amounts to a compelling anti-war statement.

Casino Royale (1967)

Casino Royale (1967)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second viewing, On Cable TV, September 2018) On paper, I’m sure Casino Royale was a great idea. In fact, the film does work better from a conceptual viewpoint than a practical one … which is a fancy way of saying that the film is a mess. From a cold viewing, the film makes no sense: it’s an attempt to satirize Bond, and it goes off in all directions at once, making failed jokes in multiple segments that barely relate to whatever plot we can identify. Some moments are funnier than others, and the high-spirited finale is pure comic chaos (in the good sense of the expression), but much of the film simply falls flat. Coherence is a major issue when entire scenes have their own idea of what humour is, and when the actors aren’t following the same plan. And what a list of actors! A young Woody Allen, a remarkably fun Orson Welles goofing off with magic tricks, First Bond Girl Ursula Andress playing (a) Bond, David Niven as “The original” Bond (before Connery ruined the name), Jean-Claude Belmondo for thirty seconds and a bunch of other cameos. Peter Sellers is occasionally fun, but he seems to be acting in another film entirely. The film’s production values are high enough that we’re left to contemplate a bizarre result, clearly made with considerable means but without a coherent plan. What to make of it? The key to understanding Casino Royale is to read about the film’s unbelievable production. It started with the intention of copycatting Connery’s Bond film series through the rights of Fleming’s first Bond novel, but was realigned to a satirical comedy once Connery made himself unavailable. Then, for some reason, the film became a creation from five different directors, with a sixth trying to patch the gaps between the sequences. Then Peter Sellers, who wanted to play a dramatic Bond, started sabotaging the production before leaving it entirely before his scenes were completely filmed. Given all of this, it’s a minor miracle if Casino Royale makes even the slightest sense. That doesn’t make it a good movie (although there are maybe twenty minutes of good comedy here, as long as you keep only the scenes with Sellers, Welles and Allen) but it certainly explains how we got there. There may have been messier productions and movies out there, but Casino Royale is a case of its own. (I saw the film as a young teenager, but the only moment I remembered from it was Allen’s line about learning how to tie women up in the boy scouts. Go figure. Or don’t, given that I was a boy scout.)

Touch of Evil (1958)

Touch of Evil (1958)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, June 2018) Much has been written and said about Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, and nearly all of it supports the assertion that it is a late film-noir classic. I certainly won’t dispute the critical consensus: From its landmark first extended shot, Touch of Evil is the work of a master filmmaker, deftly guiding us through a familiar plot with enough energy and precision to make it look at fresh and new. By the late fifties, film noir was growing aware of its own stylized approach, and Welles had ballooned up to his late-day persona. Both are used effectively, with Welles delivering plenty of visual style as a director, while turning in a remarkably disquieting performance as a deeply corrupt police officer. The film effectively uses actors such as Marlene Dietrich, but somehow convinced itself that Charlton Heston would make a convincing Mexican under layers of makeup. This misstep stands out but does not really damage the film, which is good enough to stand on its own. The sense of palpable desperation certainly associates Touch of Evil with prototypical film noir—it remains a must see for fans of the genre.

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) Orson Welles does film noir in The Lady from Shanghai, a fairly standard thriller that becomes a great movie through great direction. Welles stars as an everyday man who meets your usual femme fatale, not quite grasping that he’s being framed for murder. Things go from New York City to San Francisco in a flash, and before long our protagonist is unjustly accused, dragged in court and forced to escape to prove his innocence (does that stuff ever works out in real life?)  The plot is familiar, but it’s Welles’ eye for the camera and caustic sense of humour that sets the film apart. There’s a climax of court during the trial sequence, during which the camera can’t seem to stop focusing on tiny inconsequential details rather than the (very familiar) argument being presented to the course, exactly as if the chatter was a foregone conclusion and not worth our attention anyway. The famous ending shootout takes places in a half-of-mirror, something that has been appropriated by at least two other movies already. It all amounts to a very stylish, very competent film noir in the purest tradition of the genre. Legend has it that Welles accepted to do the film because he needed money, and the final result was butchered by studio executives. Still, the film shows a clever craftsman at work: San Francisco looks great, Welles has one of his final “thin Welles” roles, and Rita Hayworth makes for a near-perfect femme fatale. The result, however, is definitely weird and has occasional shifts in tone that can catch viewers unaware—whether deliberately through Welles’ intentions or accidentally through studio interference, The Lady from Shanghai sometimes works best as vignettes rather than a sustained narrative. But it’s still worth seeing.