Best Orson Welles film (as director)

there was an article in 'vanity fair' a while back about the search for the missing 'ambersons' footage, and there was an interview with a guy welles hired to look through the complete RKO archives about a year before his death -- no luck. heartbreaking.

Actually, all these films are broken save for the first two.

not true -- 'othello,' 'trial,' 'chimes,' and 'immortal story' all came out exactly the way welles wanted them.

By "broken," I didn't necessarily mean "not as Welles wanted them." I'm using it more to denote a kind of "inorganic" quality, e.g. the crummy soundtrack of Chimes which suits the film thematically and makes it all the greater.

But I don't see how you can say that Othello "came out exactly the way welles wanted (it)." For one thing, Welles clearly "wanted" it several different ways as he edited at least two different versions of it in the 1950s. For another, the various 1990s "restorations" created different artifacts, ones that most likely do not conform to how Welles would have wanted it.

All of which only augments the vertiginous pleasures of Welles fandom.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

you know, in retrospect, Kane is the best, and you're all being contrarians.

contrarian, zing thyself

You voted for Othello, Morbs! It isn't even his best Shakespeare film.

Well I voted for Kane, so I win

Alfred likes Macbeth, easily his worst Shakes film!

I haven't seen either his Othello or his Macbeth, but they'd have to be serious best-of-all-time material to be any better than Chimes.

Macbeth is definitely not better than CAM.

the greatest het exchange in Hollywood history

which begs the question ...

You're up at bat, Eric.

ambersons is sooo close, but I have to go with f for fake.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

dude wtf with the low Touch of Evil showing! guess I should've voted but I refrained cuz I haven't seen a bunch of these

Answer: it's not that good.

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/8894/kaneklapqo6.gif

Oh ILX, will your surprise poll results never cease?

I request that from now on all ILX instances of the Welles slow clap be replaced with Heath Ledger Joker slow clap

lol I was going to post both of them

Never seen The Immortal Story. Is this available?

no, but it gets an occasional late-night showing on TCM.

how the hell did i note vote in this

would have voted touch of evil ftw

ilx

Ambersons Ambersons Ambersons. Even what survives of it dwarves most filmmakers entire oeuvres

Touch of Evil = extremely overrated tho

ppl who voted for Arkadin or F for Fake: banned from filmwatching

I'm under the impression both are perfectly respectable choices. In fact, I'm under the impression anything short of The Fountain of Youth or The Hearts of Age is a respectable choice.

no way! The Stranger?!

ppl who voted for Arkadin or F for Fake: banned from filmwatching

I can see maybe saying that re: Arkadin (although I adore the shit out of it) but F for Fake? Please to explain.

it's a cute stunt. Doesn't operate on anywhere the number of levels that Kane, Ambersons, ToE, Othello etc do. Unless you fall for, OHHHH, MAGIC / HOAXES / REALITY, AH'M SOOO KONFUZED...

Touch of Evil doesn't really work on "the number of levels" either, but then again, I partially buy into Kael's pronouncement of Kane as a "shallow masterpiece" and don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

What people often miss when they get het up over Kael's remark is that she italicized "shallow." She wasn't at all denying that CK was a great film deserving all the kudos.

Yeah, me neither. The deeper I think you get into Kane, the less rewarding, but if you just hang out at the surface, yeah, it's one of the greatest movies evah, obv.

ToE is the one I'd call the shallow masterpiece; brilliantly executed, and still "just" a tarted-up dirty-cop grinder. At least Welles never made a horror film. ;)

Kane's biggest weaknesses are in the parts of the dialogue where the Poor Little Rich Man theme is made overexplicit (more OW than Mankiewicz? I'll have to reread that Callow bio to check).

also, Simon Callow points out in his vol 2 that if Ambersons had been released acc to OW's wishes, there still would've been imperfect things about it, starting with the curious casting of Tim Holt.

Yeah, no perfection in this filmography, thankfully.

I don't mind Holt much anymore. His awkwardness helps the character, and he does look chastened at the end.

Other Kane weaknesses: the chronology of the first marriage and meeting Suzie is muddled; "What would you like to have been?" "Everything you hate!"; and Thompson's last speech.

Tim Holt is fine

but he's the wrong kind of (cowboy) actor! Not a persuasive silver-spoon Hoosier brat.

He persuaded me. I wanted to smack the shit out of him.

Seth Rogen for the remake, then.

I bet Holt could have pulled off Mozart in Amadeus.

He's much more in his element in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, sure.

I don't know if F For Fake is all that great a film, but the section with Welles's monologue on Chartres cathedral is one of my favourite things in all cinema.

i've decided to celebrate the new year by rewatching all of OW's films in order. anyone with me?

I don't know if F For Fake is all that great a film, but the section with Welles's monologue on Chartres cathedral is one of my favourite things in all cinema.

― Alba, Thursday, 7 August 2008 16:21 (1 year ago)

pretty much came here to post this

F For Fake is an awesome and compelling mindfuck and OW is like some sort of sly jovial God lumbering with Iberian aspect throughout a maze of artistic deflections

before Morbs leaps on me though I gotta say I need to see more Welles - only seen Othello aside from this

Why on earth are Chimes and Ambersons not available on DVD??? Very frustrating.

in the case of Chimes, rights disputes I'm sure.

This tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2czNzWnkOcI

trying to go through all the ones I haven't seen yet and if there's a worst one I think Alfred is right, it's the Stranger

love everything else to varying degrees. still need to see Othello, the Immortal Story and the Fountain of Youth

The Stranger is the most nakedly commercial, and i always found it totally fine. Mr Arkadin and The Trial, while more ambitious and... stranger, take some getting used to.

it's not that The Stranger is bad, it's just that everything else is better! Or at least has more interesting things going on. Welles' performance isn't remotely convincing, and the rest seems fairly standard.

Mr. Arkadin is bonkers and a lot of the cast is appropriately scenery-chewing (my favorite being Welles drunkenly staggering around on the swaying boat) so although it is a mess in terms of narrative and pacing I give it points for being fitfully engaging instead of just boring.

Visually the Trial is fantastic. The constant jabbery overdubbed Welles' dialogue gets soporific though.

just saw lady from shanghai (part of a double feature — touch of evil is next). as I’m sure everyone agrees, the ending is fantastic. welles’ accent didn’t bother me nearly as much as the sound editing (unless it was just the theater?). I thought the courtroom scenes were probably the weakest part of the movie, and while she is very easy to look at, all the closeups of hayworth were a little distracting, but overall a really good film. agree with clemenza about grisby’s entrance

imo, F for Fake is hugely overrated. The idea was clever, but not enough to carry a full length film, and certainly not a full length film as poorly executed as that one was.

alright touch of evil fucking ruled

the opening long shot, wow, I need to find that and watch it again

some incredible performances in this — welles especially, heston, andthat fortune-teller lady

a really unnervingly charming blend of camp and menace

andthat fortune-teller lady

touch of evil gets better every time i see it, there isn't really another movie that's anything like it

otm

the opening long shot, wow, I need to find that and watch it again

some incredible performances in this — welles especially, heston, andthat fortune-teller lady

a really unnervingly charming blend of camp and menace

― k3vin k., Sunday, June 23, 2019

I had the pleasure of showing it in my film class last Thursday, and I was delighted that half the class rode the groove even when it unnerved them. The idea of Heston playing a Mexican amused them; the quasi-rape scene did not.

I was a little more nagged-at by The Lady from Shanghai's filler when I watched it last night: the courtroom stuff (although Everett Sloane's soliloquy about Welles's fate is memorable), and, if I'm honest, just a lot of the film when they're not in the aquarium and not in the funhouse. The story is convoluted and absurd (hardly an anomaly in the world of noir). But those two scenes and Glenn Anders as Grisby make up for everything (Rita Hayworth in a sailor suit, too). Grisby is like Timothy Carey in The Killing, or Joseph Wiseman in Detective Story (or Dennis Weaver in Touch of Evil)--it's hard to say if Anders is even trying to remain in sync with the film you're watching, or if he's simply off doing some other movie known only to him, and if the two happen to intersect, all the better. Visually, the aquarium scene is somewhat of a practice run for the funhouse later on, and the funhouse sequence was the clip I showed my last few primary classes in trying to demonstrate what a film director did. The original trailer for the film is on YouTube--there is conspicuously nothing from the funhouse sequence, suggesting that Welles wanted to extract every last iota of astonishment from anyone who went to see the film. (There's a fan trailer that uses the funhouse liberally.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3lW5UKsbP4

k*r*g*rg* has The Other Side Of The Wind

Strange way to spell "Netflix".

Tbf that post was made 10 years before it was on Netflix.