When you see a movie directed by Orson Welles released in 2018, it's going to raise some questions. Welles, if you didn't know, died in 1985. Welles was infamously plagued by money troubles throughout his career, constantly struggling to complete pictures. He would supplement his income from acting, which helped, but he always threw all his money into making the next picture and would still have to borrow money from elsewhere.
Nowhere is this more evident than The Other Side of the Wind, which began production in 1970. It was Welles' return to Hollywood with his last American film being made in 1958. In the middle of production, his production company was saddled with a huge tax bill from the government, which caused him to cease filming. He sought filming elsewhere, which he found from a Spanish producer and a French-based Iranian group, headed by the brother-in-law of the Shah.
Filming continued, but the Spanish producer was the connect to the Iranian group and conned both of them. He would take money from the Iranians, pocket it himself, and then claim to Welles that he never received the money. The Spanish producer disappeared, and there were further squabbles with money between Welles and the Iranians, who wanted to own a greater percentage of the film.
Anyway, Welles was forced to edit the film on his own time, and by 1979, he had edited about 40 minutes of the movie. But the Shah of Iran was overthrown, which caused a decades-long legal battle over who owned the film, and suddenly Orson didn't have access to his own film that he shot. In 1998 Showtime stepped in and at various times, his daughter Beatrice Wells was the impediment, then his long-time girlfriend Oja Kodar, and then the Showtime executive pushing for this to get made retired and well you get the idea.
Netflix stepped into the game in 2017, offered a two-picture deal to make this movie and a companion documentary and then there was the hard work of trying to edit the rest of the movie in Welles' style, and they at least had 40 minutes of a finished film to work off of to figure that out.
All of this information would threaten to overwhelm the the movie itself, except that the movie itself is, in a strange twist of fate, basically about exactly this. A Welles stand-in, played by John Huston, is struggling to finish his last work, because his star walked off the set in the middle of filming. It is announced at the beginning of the movie that this is the last day of legendary director Jake Hanneford (Huston), so we know that the work ultimately remains unfinished.
Hanneford is not exactly Welles, but apparently a composite of directors, including Huston himself. We know it's not exactly Welles, because in the film within the film, Welles never did anything remotely close to what Hanneford did in his last, uncompleted film. It is argued that the film is a compromise of Hanneford's vision, that he's trying to directly appeal to young people.
This film within the film, called The Other Side of the Wind, is apparently a parody of arthouse movies during that time period. I say apparently, because I'm very unfamiliar with whatever it's parodying. But it becomes clear, pretty quickly, that it's not really meant to be good. There's not a single line of dialogue in the fake film, and most of it follows a nude Oja Kodar being chased by a guy. The movie is shown mostly in order throughout the film, and it's completely incomprehensible.
And yet, it's strangely compelling. The rapid cuts of the party and showing of the movie, shown in a kind of mockumentary style, are kind of exhausting and the slow-paced, absolutely gorgeous cinematography of the fake movie is a nice reprieve. While the movie is incomprehensible, it's extremely well-shot. We obviously know that Welles shot the fake movie himself, but the style of that fake movie is unmistakably Welles, so the Hanneford character maybe has Welles' backstory in inventive filmmaking.
Insomuch as there is a plot, it's this. Hanneford, struggling to finish his movie, has a party and plans to show the movie to secure financing for the film. Journalists, a studio boss, his protege, and a whole lot of young people are invited to this showing. The showing keeps getting interrupted by the projector not working. When it does work, we are shown the film within the film.
In the "real" film, the movie is shot in universe through a constant barrage of editing. There are visible cameras all over the scenes, because it's purporting to look like a documentary. I think it could be called mockumentary style except there are no talking heads, it just follows Hanneford throughout his last day. Sometimes, you'll see a shot in color, sometimes black-and-white to reflect the quality of camera of whoever is shooting it.
I cannot stress enough that this is an altogether strange movie. It, however, does not feel like a movie that went unfinished for 40+ years. The modern day editor, Bob Murawski, did a miraculous job making it feel like this entire movie wasn't edited by two different people. So the strangeness of the movie appears to be Welles' true vision.
In case this movie wasn't hard enough, Welles also casts mainly directors, not actors. There's Huston. Peter Bogdanovich, who later became a regular working actor, but wasn't at all when this movie was made. Norman Foster was an actor turned director who hadn't acted in over 30 years when filming started who died very shortly after filming completed. A lot of the old Hollywood types that surround Hanneford were also directors. A screenwriter plays an awkward film critic. The acting works much better than it should honestly.
I will say that the claims of this being a lost masterpiece may perhaps increase your expectations too much. It is much better than it has any right to be given its history, that's for sure. And I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if I end up on the masterpiece train with repeated viewings. But there is no way in hell you should go in expecting one, or you'll probably be disappointed.
And really that will be reflected in my grade. I enjoyed the movie and will probably be thinking about it long past the time when I would think about better movies than this. Hence my thinking that I may change my mind about this later. But it's only two hours, and it feels quite a bit longer than that, and part of that is that the film within the film could perhaps be trimmed and the overall style of the mockumentary becomes tiring after a while.
2.5/4 stars
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