Men and a Raft” (a reenactment of a TIME Magazine story about four fisherman who took a thou­ sand mile voyage on a raft of six logs to plead with South Ameri­ can President Getulio Vargas for better living conditions), and a Technicolor segment of Carnivài in Rio de Janiero. This documen­ tary contains some heartrendingly beautiful footage from “My Friend Bonito”—the most impressive work in the film—but the script says nothing about Welles’ deci­ sion, after seeing this footage, to complete the episode himself while assigning Foster the thank­ less task of completing JOUR­NEY INTO FEAR. Welles never reactivated the abandoned epi­ sode. The Carnival footage is buoyant, but like much of this production, it suffers from a loud, surround stereo, postsynch score that is not only too big for such a humble project, but distinctly out- of-touch with the rhythms of the celebrants onscreen. The surviving footage of “Four
Men and a Raft” has been edited together to tell the true story of the four fisherman, as well as a framing fiction conceived by Welles, in which a thirteen year- old bride loses her young hus­ band in a boating accident—a tribute to Jacaré, the leader of the original rafting expedition, who drowned while recreating his story for Welles. The episode contains moments of stark beauty, and is lyrically scored (es­ pecially in its quieter moments), but its editing feels disappoint­ ingly impersonal, having nei­ ther the mad gallop of early Welles nor the delirious, cubist approach of later Welles. It is hard to criticize such a short­ coming, because the alterna­ tive would have been to edit the film in some phony Wellesian way, but it is nonetheless hard to accept. The footage itself looks scrumptious throughout.
Orson Welles’ IT ’S ALL TRUE—neither all true, nor all Orson, but a fine try.
After seeing this account of
IT’S ALL TRUE, one can easily see how the experience of mak­ ing it affected Welles’ art. As en­ riched as it is by the example of Eisenstein (much of it could eas­ ily be confused for outtakes from QUE VIVA MEXICO!), its sunnier, palmier moments foreshadow scenes from THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, and the many refer­ ences to President Vargas re­ minds us of the Mexican hero played by Charlton Heston in TOUCH OF EVIL. In fact, the entire Southern hemispheric slant found in Welles’ later films can be traced to this production and the aftertaste left by its interweaving of tragedy and paradise. But what is most riveting about this documentary is its
(subtitled) on-camera interviews with surviving participants, and with the children of those who have since passed on. Though Welles last visited Brazil more than 50 years ago, it seems that entire generations of local fami­ lies have been affected by the time Welles descended from the earthly Olympus of Hollywood to walk and work among them, to tell their story. The son of one poor fisherman recalls that, be­ fore his father died, he told him that some day the film would come back to Brazil and be­ come his inheritance. Watching these interviews, one has the feeling of witnessing a phenom­ enon not unlike the one de­ scribed by Dennis Hopper’s peyote westernTHE LAST MOVIE
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