Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s only ever been in any kind of wide release for home video since 2017, long after I had started writing The Devil Lives in Beverly Hills, Orson Welles of Mars or even The Once and Future Orson Welles. I wish I had been able to take it in long long ago.
Did I Like It: My opinion of Welles’ Othello (1951) was, at best, slightly muted (Welles miscast himself, forcing the film to land at the hind end of his Shakespeare features). However, I had a great degree of excitement for this film—produced for West German television and the last feature-length film directed by Welles which he fully completed in his lifetime, it belongs squarely in the realm of his later work. It is cobbled together from material and resources he already had sitting around the house, and thus is footage of a lunch conversation he had with some of the cast members, and footage of him at his moviola.
And I. Am. Here. For it.
Whenever I am writing the fictional Orson Welles, there’s never less than an ounce of anxiety that I wasn’t getting his voice (or, more honestly, his unique syntax) quite correct. But that’s as it should be. My Orson Welles is a fictional creation, pieces of what is knowable about the man coupled with chunks of pulp heroes thrown in to fill in the gaps. It’s a singular and unusual pleasure just to spend time with the man as he talks quite honestly (strengths along with missed opportunities) about one of his films. We may not get any salacious gossip or a how-to diagram to make his films, but a perfect snapshot of his feelings about the larger portion of his work (Citizen Kane (1941) is not mentioned once in the 84 minute runtime), and with just a hint of his hopes for the future. He never stopped thinking that his next film would be the one to finally surpass Kane and if nothing else, that one characteristic is what drew me to the man as a subject all those years ago.