THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

film aVailaBlE NOW | NETFLIX

In the lavish canon of abortive Orson Welles projects – It’s All True, Don Quixote, The Deep – The Other Side Of The Wind has always held a legendary place. Stretching across the last 15 years of his life (Welles died in ’85), all-but finished then mired in legal and financial turmoil, it’s the one his fans have longed to see.

And now, thanks to a team assembled by Netflix working on more than 100 hours of footage and annotated scripts, here it is. Is this the film Welles intended? Impossible to say. Is it a lost Welles masterpiece to place alongside Citizen Kane, Touch Of Evil, Chimes At Midnight? No, not really. Is it utterly fascinating? For sure.

The plot is two movies in one. On his 70th birthday a veteran maverick director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), is struggling to complete his final film, called (ahem) ‘The Other Side Of The Wind’. Numerous documentarists are recording the chaotic, squabbly proceedings. Intercut with this we see chunks of the movie itself, shot in what looks like spoof Antonioni-style with copious nudity.

Various recognisable characters show up: Peter Bogdanovich playing a Hannaford acolyte, Lilli Palmer nodding to Marlene Dietrich, Susan Strasberg channelling Welles’ nemesis, Pauline Kael. Welles always insisted the film wasn’t autobiographical. Uhhuh… Backing Wind up is They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (★★★★, available now on Netflix), an invaluable doc that provides a rich fund of info on the troubled production. Philip Kemp