STOP WATCH LISTEN
WHAT
The Other Side of the Wind and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead
WHO
Orson Welles
WHY
It’s a part of film history
WHERE
Netflix
In the history of American movies, there is no greater and perhaps no more tragic figure than the oversized, food- and drink-loving bon vivant force that was Orson Welles. At age 23 he scared the US to death with his mockumentary radio production of HG Wells’s novel War of the Worlds, causing widespread panic among listeners who believed themselves to be in the midst of an alien invasion.
Three years later Welles changed the course of cinema history together with cinematographer Gregg Toland with Citizen Kane, a technically innovative and dramatically gripping tale of the hubris of media magnate Charles Foster Kane (loosely based on real-life media baron William Randolph Hearst, who many believed responsible for destroying the young director’s subsequent career).
It is still consistently ranked as the greatest film ever made, and gained Welles a notorious reputation from which he was unable to escape for most of the remainder of his life.
While Welles went on to direct several, mostly posthumously, acclaimed films — including The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial and F for Fake — he was never really reconciled with Hollywood, and so his career was characterised by methods associated with the indie filmmaker movement of the 1990s.
Welles spent much of his time in Europe, raising funds for the piecemeal completion of his many projects, calling in favours from famous friends, shooting what he could when he was able and receiving critical acclaim but little financial reward.
The list of unfinished Welles projects is legend among cinephiles and includes his original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and his adaptation of Cervantes’s classic novel Don Quixote.
But perhaps the most personal of these is his magnum opus, The Other Side of the Wind.
It was a film that Welles referred to as his masterpiece in several interviews towards the end of his life and one that led to a very messy court case involving the director and relatives of the shah of Iran, who had provided some of the funding for the project.
Shot over the course of six years from 1970 and starring legendary director John Huston in the lead role, The Other Side of the Wind now arrives to satiate the appetites of expectant cinephiles, thanks to the dedication of Welles’s one-time friend and protégé, director Peter Bogdanovich, and editor Bob Murawski, some 33 years after Welles’s death.
It and a companion documentary about the long and frustrating journey of the film — They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, directed by Morgan Neville — provide fascinating insight into the work of one of cinema’s undeniable visionaries.
Like the lead character of The Other Side of the Wind, a director by the name of Jake Hannaford, Welles is shown to be a messy but mercurial figure; frustrating, fascinating and narcissistic, but also vulnerable and attuned to the fast-changing creative currents of a medium he had dedicated his life to.
In the style of the 1970s new-wave directors, who all worshipped him, Welles’s final film is a postmodern mash-up of excess and absurdity. It centres on Hannaford’s 70th birthday party — which we are told is also the last day of his life — at which he is surrounded by a cast of friends, hangers-on, sycophants, reporters, enemies and upstarts as he screens scenes from his unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind — a parody of the portentous philosophical European cinema of the era pioneered by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni — while drowning his disappointments and sorrows in booze and self-loathing.
As a film, even in its most faithful incarnation by Bogdanovich and Murawski from Welles’s notes, The Other Side of the Wind is far from perfect — it meanders and suffers from some horribly misogynist representation that sticks in the craw.
However, considered in the light of the struggle to complete it as presented in the documentary, it is an undeniably tantalising portrait of what Welles might have been able to accomplish were it not for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune visited upon him by an envious system hellbent on cutting him down to size so early on in his career.
The release of this film is still important, necessary and a welcome reminder of the singular talent, determination and visionary abilities of a man who remains a giant of cinema and who, it turns out, was right to believe that we would love him long after he had died.