Director: Morgan Neville
Cast: Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Orson Welles, Steve Ecclesine
Have I Seen it Before: Pieces of F for Fake (1973), The Other Side of the Wind (2018), and The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996) abound, so ultimately, if you’ve seen one (or in this case, three) documentary about or inspired by Orson Welles, then you’ve probably seen them all.
Did I Like It: I’m on the record not thinking much of The Other Side of the Wind. I’m prepared to write most of it off to the film being just too experimental for its own good, and even more prepared to write off the parts of the film that don’t work to the fact that the finished product is only partially Orson’s. It also doesn’t help that a the cavalcade of egos haunted the film long after Welles’ “death*” and the byzantine path the film took to release may have diminished any true auteur quality the picture might have hoped for in a world when it was released in Welles’ lifetime.
And so I come to this film with a lot more interest than I did in that which inspired it. There’s much more drama in the failing of the film than in the film itself. Fusing Fake and Wind, this film comes together much more coherently than either. As a byproduct, It becomes it slightly less magical than Fake, but a little easier to swallow than Wind.
What’s more? It makes me want to watch Wind again. If this is truly the way to understand Welles in his own voice, then it might be necessary. Maybe that makes this movie nothing more than an extended trailer for Wind, but if that is the beginning and end of its ambition, then it more than ably attained its goals.
*What one of my books presupposes is… Maybe he didn’t? #stayonbrand