The Resurrection of Orson Welles

Orson Welles lives. 

The consuming film project of his final years, “The Other Side of the Wind,” is finally getting an airing on Netflix, more than 40 years after he shot it – freed at last from a tangle of lawsuits, international complications, money problems, and even the grave. How does it stack up with the other films of Welles’ career? How close is this finished product to whatever his artistic vision would have been? In some sense we can never know, but as one character in this newest film says, “Half a man is better than none.”

Orson Welles, of course, dwells now on the other side of the wind himself, dead since 1985. Yet somehow, it seems appropriate that the final act of his directorial career should play out in this way. He managed to yet again create a movie out of time that plays to any particular moment, despite the fact that it captures a Hollywood which supposedly disappeared four decades ago. I say supposedly because the story is larger than Hollywood, larger even than Welles.

The story of “The Other Side of the Wind” – how it was made, why it has taken so long to be seen – is told very well in “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” a Netflix documentary released as a companion piece. It places “Wind” within the context of Welles’ life and explains how he shot it haphazardly, over many years, as he got the money. When you know that story, it makes the story you end up seeing that much richer and, weirdly prophetic. 

But the actual plot of the film follows the final day in the life of Hannaford (John Huston), which turns out to be his 70^th birthday. It is the seventies, and we are in the “New Hollywood,” when the old studios temporarily gave way to the crop of young auteur directors influenced by the freedom of European cinema. Hannaford’s birthday party is a meeting of these directors – Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky – and a gathering of film critics and documentarians who have come to chronicle the occasion. Mingled in the background are hosts of full-size dummies. The evening also offers a special screening of Hannaford’s latest movie, also titled “The Other Side of the Wind,” which resembles a highly-stylized European-influenced film. Cuts of the film play within the action of the larger movie, as Hannaford’s story unwinds.

“What happens here?” asks someone watching Hannaford’s movie. “I’m not really sure…” says another. We get the impression from the cuts, and the “missing film” titles that occasionally interrupt the action of Hannaford’s film, that his work is incomplete. It should be said that, like some of other late-period Welles, “The Other Side of the Wind” shows the hallmarks of its construction. Some scenes play out occasionally like a cross between 70s era porn and a home movie with stars, one character giving barely coherent readings of dialogue in grainy-washed out film.

But you can argue this is intended. What Welles is doing, as the movie advances, is something like what Oliver Stone did in his “JFK” era films; simulating real life through documentary forms with various film stocks, black and white photography mixed with color, giving the audience the illusion that they are seeing the authentic last hours of Hannaford’s life. (Oja Kodar, Welles' collaborator, later accused Stone of stealing the look after he saw an early print.) Because, like “Citizen Kane,” “The Other Side of the Wind” begins with death – Hannaford’s death in a suicidal car crash. So our first question is why such a man would kill himself.

Like “Kane,” Hannaford’s character seems based on fact. One can draw the obvious parallel with Welles, with a little bit of Ernest Hemingway thrown in. (The car crash reminded me of Camus.) Hannaford is a mythic, mystic figure in the eyes of the cineastes that follow him around, asking for his every utterance. One of those is his young protégé, Brooksie Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich) a hot young director who is Hannaford’s friend, confidant, some would say imitator, and whipping boy. Hannaford is also surrounded by his long-time cronies – Billy (Norm Foster), his fixer; The Baron (Tonio Selwart), his financier, and his lover Zarah Veleska (Lilli Palmer).

But Hannaford is not Welles, because he’s still working. He hasn’t had to beg for money. He is presumably not, as Welles was, forced to go hat in hand to these young would-be artists for money, but is still creating. However Huston is obviously not happy. This is the sinister John Huston of “Chinatown” – boozy, bored, brooding, growling at anyone within earshot, always performing for cameras and expectations. Why isn’t he happy? For one thing, he’s broke. Perhaps he will have to go begging, but there’s something deeper. We suspect that his film doesn’t work, and he knows it. What’s more, the male star of his film, John Dale (Robert Random), ran off the set.

No, there’s something deeper devouring Hannaford. More than the money, more than the movie. In “Citizen Kane,” it is the moment of Kane’s party to celebrate the Inquirer becoming New York’s most widely read paper that we begin to sense that something is wrong with his life, through the observations of Jed Leland. In “Wind,” with its ghastly “Day of the Locust” vibe, Welles’ gives us a kind of sour grapes observation. His life is not Hannaford’s, and thank God! Because Hannaford’s success is really just mind-numbing failure, soul extinguishing and absolute – Pharoah in the palace, fingering dim rubies over the corpse of his first born. Welles gives us a lovely image – the lights of Hannaford’s birthday cake, reflected in the lenses of Otterlake’s glasses, his face wrapped in an adoring, worshipping smile. But all these disciples, his audience, are just a bunch of mannequins, or dummies, and all these colored lights and pretty pictures are meaningless.

“The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going,” Jesus is quoted as saying in the third chapter of John’s Gospel. “So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” In the film, Hannaford says, “the Truth shall set us free,” another paraphrase from John. During the party, Brooksie has an extended comic dialogue about how the Apostle Paul created Christianity from Christ’s teachings. There is a sense that beyond the cameras and mics, the action in the picture is taking place “in the sight of God.” Hannaford tells Brooksie, “Always remember that your heart is God’s little garden.” Later he says, “We’re all ruled by the wind.”

The idea of God as the ultimate director gets an airing. Hannaford’s power as the director to shape a story and a vision seem godlike. But he’s a twisted deity, and we sense from the movie-within-the-movie that Hannaford may have had an unhealthy interest in his male star. (There is something eerie in the way that the film references pedophilia in light of recent teacher and priest abuse scandals). Despite the way Hannaford’s film is dominated by the frequently nude figure of Oja Kodar, as our unnamed actress, Hannaford’s directorial attention is focused on John Dale, the frequent object of his criticisms and even his self-lacerations. Hannaford talks of “creating” him, but his creation has betrayed him by not conforming to the vision. And what was Hannaford’s vision? Something that seems obliquely emasculating.

A word here about the film within: We are treated to a series of lovely, powerful, beautifully filmed sequences involving Kodar and Random. Occasionally, they meet, as in a car for a highly charged coupling, the rhythm provided by windshield wipers in a torrential rainstorm. The film’s wordless action occasionally feels like a chase, only we are unsure of the identities of the pursuer and the pursued. Random’s face is expressionless, while Kodar frequently seems a devouring sphinx, her conquering step unchanged whether the action shifts from a desert to a deserted movie set. The overt Freudian tones, and the phallic imagery of the closing scenes, seem ridiculous enough that we suspect Welles is letting us in on a secret – Hannaford, rough-and-ready man’s man, is really just fooling himself, but he isn’t fooling us. The fact that Kodar’s character is often referred to as “the Indian” also gives us the impression that this is another Western, and Kodar is, like the Natives of the Plains, being exploited.

But Hannaford’s movie is stubborn, and refuses to be seen in one venue. The screening keeps breaking down (the power is cut) and the scene keeps moving, until the final sequences are relocated to a local drive-in. The desert vistas around the screen mix with the picture within the screen. But everyone leaves before the movie ends, even its director and stars, and all we hear is the beleaguered voice of the director in voiceover. “Who knows, maybe you can stare too hard at something, drain out the virtue, suck out the living juice. We shoot the great places, the pretty people, all those girls and boys,” Hannaford says, before adding, in a sepulchral voice, “Shoot ‘em dead.”

The last of his films released in Welles’ lifetime,” F For Fake,” explored the question of authenticity and expertise. How much is something worth, based on the name attached to it? What is the value of an artistic vision? And is artistic identity a kind of con?

Welles is commenting on his own life, and his profession, we sense. Welles himself emerges, in his own biography, like a figure out of legend. A boy genius, a grand huckster, peddling Shakespeare for the masses on Broadway and a fake Martian invasion before being whisked away to Hollywood. His life, up to “Citizen Kane,” was a series of rapid movements conquering different disciplines, seemingly on his way to some other far horizon. There was illusion in this, something Welles admitted himself. He was talented, but he also carried the illusion of effortless brilliance. He sometimes was able to carry off the impression of an erudition he had probably not yet earned, and his legion of critics suspected this. No one’s that good, you can sense the masses of Tinseltown musing when he steps off a plane from New York with a contract in the late 30s.

Hollywood stopped him dead in his tracks. He continually made the mistake of inflaming the money men, and paid the price of it for the rest of his life. No amount of artistic vision can ultimately save the artist from himself. But he never went on to the next thing once he tasted cinema. It devoured him, and gave him the curious position of being both inside and outside it, a participant and a spectator.

So we can perhaps see “The Other Side of the Wind” as his comment not just on the movie business, but on the medium itself. Directors can, through their own personal visions, assume unto themselves enormous power. But to what end? The assembling of that kind of power has the effect of both drawing people to Hannaford, and isolating him. The director exploits his actors, rendering them practically mute. The director wants to tell a story, but what good is the story, other than pretty pictures, if no one can comprehend it? And what if the vision itself is just a replay of another, earlier triumph, this time in self-parody. The worst offense, Hannaford says, is borrowing from oneself.

One senses, even from the grave, an amused smile on Welles’ face as the film plays out, almost a lifetime after his lifetime, an entertainment about entertainment, a stink bomb at a party, a lacerating valentine to his life’s work, an indictment with a smile, delivered from one huckster to a multitude of them, played out before an audience of dummies.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

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