SIDE OF WIND, from which he recalls helping get the director out of a corner he’s wedged himself into while chasing a handheld shot. Actor Keith Baxter (Prince Hal in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT) says Welles considered Shakespeare to be the greatest human being who ever lived and “thought that there wasn’t a human emotion that men are capable of experi- encing that Shakespeare hadn’t experienced.” Welles allowed actors plenty of room in blocking their actions and rarely gave them criticisms.
Intriguing as it is to read about such films as
THE TRIAL, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (Tonguette’s favorite), and F FOR FAKE, the parts most likely to cause debate are those dealing with unfinished, unseen products like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which takes up a great deal of space, while others, like DEAD CALM and DON QUIXOTE, are mentioned only in passing, albeit tantalizingly so. (A form of DON QUIXOTE has in fact been as- sembled by Jesus Franco and released on DVD in Europe, but the result was condemned by Welles’ surviving companion Oja Kodar as haphazard, which is why most Welles buffs still consider the film incomplete.) Editor Frederick Muller says DON QUIXOTE can never be completed because dif- ferent parts of the film were left in different parts of the world—Italy, Mexico, and Spain, and he believes the laboratories probably threw the nega- tives away. (Presumably, Franco’s cut of QUIXOTE contains only the Spanish parts.)
Perhaps the most puzzling of Welles’ elusive
projects is THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which has apparently been screened by Gary Graver and is supposedly the most complete of the unfinished projects. Here Curtis Harrington avers the film is incomplete, while other interviewees involved shed much more light on Welles himself than they do on the film, especially as they tended to work spo- radically on the film and were kept unaware of its overall concept. Harrington calls the unfinished DEAD CALM (a.k.a. THE DEEP) “very poor,” and attributes to Welles a frequently suggested “fear of completion,” saying this was partly instilled be- cause Welles felt the films he was making were “not up to his own standards.” This is as good an explanation as any to why Welles began so many tasks he never finished (the first being THE MAG- NIFICENT AMBERSONS, which he abandoned and left in the care of Wise), but an alternate explana- tion comes from F FOR FAKE co-editor Marie- Sophie Dubus, who asserts, “He was never satisfied, he was a perfectionist” and says that Welles would completely re-edit a film “to make another film. It was not one thing. It was hundreds and millions of things.”
Welles was also rumored to have an outline for a screenplay involving a turn-of-the-century magician. Another unmade project, rejected by a studio in the Forties, was to be an adaptation of THE SMILER WITH A KNIFE, a novel by Nicholas Blake (whose THE BEAST MUST DIE was later filmed by Claude Chabrol). Though he completed the TV special “The Fountain of Youth,” the planned fol- low-up—an adaptation of John Collier’s man- eating plant story “Green Thoughts”—never materialized. Magician Dan Wayne, describes Welles’ TV special THE MAGIC SHOW, which he describes as partially a parody of Fifties science fiction involving handkerchiefs that attacked people, and which he says was ruined by Welles’ editing. There were other unmade films: HEART OF DARKNESS and SURINAM (both based on the writings of Joseph Conrad), THE CRADLE WILL ROCK, and the list goes on.
In addition to Welles the eccentric filmmaker, we also get another side of the man which he him- self clearly felt to be just as important, if not more important: Welles the magician. Illusionist Abb Dickson explains that Orson was uncomfortable around “the usual Hollywood suspects” and pre- ferred the company of magicians. Given the man’s childlike, unbounded love for the art of magic, it would be nice to report that Welles’ stature as an illusionist rivals his status as a moviemaker, but this isn’t quite the case. Mike Caveney says “Orson wasn’t held in very high esteem in the magic world,” where it was thought Welles’ tricks were too complicated. Jim Steinmeyer reiterates this view, saying “he has a reputation among magi- cians of having done some overly complicated tricks... he tended to over-think magic, and when he had doubts about it, he would complicate it in an effort to make it more interesting.” But all agree on Welles’ boundless love for magic and his sense of showmanship.
So much confusion and vague information surrounds his incomplete projects that Welles’ entire post-KANE career seems like one big magic trick. Perhaps he would have found it amusing that the smoke and mirrors of his career still perplex film scholars to this day. Though Welles’ unortho- dox methods often baffled his collaborators and employees, they also tended to be quite fond of him. A few brief mentions are made of his less charitable moments (like the famous incident in which he lashed out at the makers of British com- mercials for fish fingers and frozen peas) but, on the whole, ORSON WELLES REMEMBERED paints an enjoyable, positive picture of a complex, gregarious and energetic figure.
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