Best Orson Welles film (as director)

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.