The Tartars - How much Welles in...

[catbuglah]

Got a Tartars DVD - bad video transfer - Did Welles have directorial input? Looks like it - It's the same director as David and Goliath (similar peplum formula) and it looks like a similar involvement on Welles' part, therefore fairly extensive.Right off the bat the opening credits have water scenes (similar to LFS and Treasure Island) which is a tip-off right there. Discounting the you stab me, me stab you - you steal me woman, me steal you woman scenario, it comes across as having strangely strong cinematography and mise-en-scène with lots of nice Wellesian creative bits. Maybe not quite as interesting as David but less dubbing problems and better quality color.

[Store Hadji]

I taped it off TCM back during their Welles' fest. They have a superb widescreen print.

Yeah, I think Welles did have some directorial influence on his scenes...

I thought there should have been some shots of Rita, so we'd know what Welles and Mature were really fighting about.

Greatly villainous performance by Welles. Not bad, as bad films with Welles in them go...

[Harvey Chartrand]

It's sad that we have to go scraping around for tattered fragments of Welles-directed cinema, looking for scenes in dreck like THE TARTARS and DAVID AND GOLIATH that may bear his unique stamp. I've seen both films and they are dreadful, of interest only to those willing to see how far Welles had fallen in the 20 years since CITIZEN KANE (or even in the 12 years since THE THIRD MAN). I'm sure Welles just took the money and ran (or waddled off). As mentioned in an IMDB user comment, there is one scene where a wounded Welles (actually a double) falls into the river, and this might be an absurd echo of TOUCH OF EVIL. The New York Times critic wrote about THE TARTARS: "Big it is—and loud—and gory, and the biggest thing in sight is Mr. Welles as an evil barbarian chief. At this point in his career he looks like a walking house." Arnoldo Foà, who would later act for Welles in THE TRIAL, is said to be quite persuasive as a Mongol. Foà also narrated Welles' IN THE LAND OF DON QUIXOTE for RAI. Foà is still working at age 90. Someone should interview that guy! What a career!

[Store Hadji]

When you're done wiping your own refuse on the cell wall, let me know, and I'll go get the fire hose.

[catbuglah]

It's sad that we have to go scraping around for tattered fragments of Welles-directed cinema, looking for scenes in dreck like THE TARTARS and DAVID AND GOLIATH that may bear his unique stamp.

It is sad, but I like Welles, so I'll take what I can get. The formidable Welles hubris is not my problem to be honest, I just enjoy his artistry. So really, I have fun picking out the flashes of brillance. (I'll take low-budget Welles over many a flashy, expensive Hollywood blockbuster). To me, it's worth it. I just wish they had quality domestic DVD releases of this stuff.

both films and they are dreadful

Sure, they're B-flick peplums- I think Welles tried to save them, but you can only do so much. I enjoy them as a purely visual experience, and there is a goodly amount of visual quality, but I can't suspend disbelief and follow the stories.

Arnoldo Foà, who would later act for Welles in THE TRIAL, is said to be quite persuasive as a Mongol. Foà also narrated Welles' IN THE LAND OF DON QUIXOTE for RAI. Foà is still working at age 90. Someone should interview that guy! What a career!

The defiant priest character? He was good. Maybe Welles wrote some of their exchanges? I'd like to see an interview with Ferninando Baldi, who apparently worked very closely with Welles on fairly big productions.

Welles (actually a double) falls into the river, and this might be an absurd echo of TOUCH OF EVIL.

Interesting point. As I recall, the battle scene of which that is the climax is quite well done, although the finale seemed a little too rushed, ending somewhat too swiftly and abruptly.

[mteal]

It is sad, but I like Welles, so I'll take what I can get. The formidable Welles hubris is not my problem to be honest, I just enjoy his artistry. So really, I have fun picking out the flashes of brillance. (I'll take low-budget Welles over many a flashy, expensive Hollywood blockbuster). To me, it's worth it.

I agree with you, Catbuglah. THE TARTARS is a bad movie, but no film with Welles can be completely bad. Or if it is, it's at least bad in an entertaining way. As I've mentioned before, I edited DAVID AND GOLIATH down from 95 to about 60 minutes for my own amusement, and I find it much more entertaining that way. I think the same thing could be done with THE TARTARS. A nice, neat little 1-hour package where Victor Mature is reduced down to a cameo. Just a question of taking a lemon and trying to make some lemonade out of it.

[catbuglah]

That'd be cool. Maybe call it Tartars 2.0 - the Burundai cut - Didn't someone edit down Revenge of the Sith which became quite popular... Release all four versions on a DVD...

"Hordes storm fortress!" "Tartars Abduct Viking beauty!" "Orgy celebrates conquest!" These were some of the tag lines used to promote the period epic The Tartars (1961), one of many European imports that reached American shores during a brief "sword and sandal" craze in the late fifties/early sixties. The Tartars, however, had a different pedigree and a more distinctive one. Not only was it helmed by Richard Thorpe, one of MGM's most dependable directors of costume epics (Ivanhoe (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Knights of the Round Table, 1953), but it sported two high profile marquee names - Victor Mature and Orson Welles.

Set in medieval Russia, the film quickly establishes a growing animosity between two neighboring clans, the Tartars and the Vikings. The Tartars, driven by a desire to conquer and control the region, force the Vikings into a bloody confrontation that ends up with both tribes taking a female hostage from their rival. Oleg (Victor Mature) is forced to deal directly with Tartar chief Burundai (Orson Welles) who has imprisoned his wife Helga (Liana Orfei), while the Vikings place the beautiful Samia (Bella Cortez) in high security confinement. The difference between the two camps is demonstrated by how they treat their respective "guests." Helga is drugged, ravaged by Burundai and then tossed to his soldiers for a gang rape; Samia is treated with respect and soon falls in love with her captor Eric (Luciano Marin), the son of Oleg. The end result? A climactic battle on the banks of the Volga River with the Viking village in flames and a mounting death toll on both sides.

It must be said that The Tartars is not Orson Welles's finest hour. Dressed in outre barbarian garb and looking like a larger than life helium-filled balloon character, he delivers his often risible dialogue fearlessly: "When I have conquered the West the world will be at my feet and then my wrath will be very terrible." Images of Elmer Fudd singing "kill the wabbit" from What's Opera, Doc? immediately spring to mind. Welles is not much of an action figure either and spends most of the film seated on his throne, glaring at his court. Victor Mature isn't any threat to Steve Reeves either and looks clearly uncomfortable in his toga and sandals costume. He does, however, throw a mean axe and gets to mug outrageously in his big death scene. Whoops. Guess it's too late to post a spoiler alert.

Obviously it wasn't the script that attracted both Welles and Mature to The Tartars. Welles spent a large part of his career taking acting jobs to help finance his own productions and this one was no exception. He was still in the midst of completing his screen version of The Trial, based on the Franz Kafka novel, which would be released in 1962. Mature, on the other hand, was at the end of his Hollywood career and needed the money. In fact, after The Tartars, he would not make another movie until 1966 when he parodied his own screen image in After the Fox, a Peter Sellers comedy that poked fun at the Italian film industry.

What most people don't know is that the on-screen rivalry of Welles and Mature in The Tartars also continued off-screen and on the set. The two men shared an intense dislike for each other ever since a long ago romantic competition over Rita Hayworth (who married Welles). In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich for the book, This is Orson Welles, the actor recalled making The Tartars: "It was a perfectly legible drive-in kind of movie...Victor Mature had been told - incorrectly - by the costume department that I had built up my shoes by two inches to make myself look taller. So he went and got his sandals built three inches high and he could hardly walk. Very funny sandals, too - you look like a brassiered carioca girl in a carnival. And he could barely get across the stage in those things - just so he would be taller than I was, you see, neglecting to look at the script and see that in all our scenes I am sitting on the throne! His whole exercise in who was going to be the highest was a terrible waste of time. And when he came to have the sword fight, his double was definitely shorter than I was..."

According to most reports, Victor Mature was indeed the chief troublemaker on The Tartars set, throwing numerous "I'm-a-big-star" tantrums. In one incident cited in the biography Orson Welles by Barbara Leaming, production assistant Alessandro Tasca (a descendant of Sicilian aristocrat Alexander Pocket of Cuto) rushed "to find Mature engaged in a furious dispute with director Richard Thorpe. "You son of a bitch!" Mature was heard to address the gentlemanly director. "What's wrong, Mr. Mature?" interjected the prince, who deliberately refrained from ever calling him Victor. "You're a son of a bitch too!" he replied. "Well, Mr. Mature," Tasca said calmly, "maybe I am a son of a bitch, but what is this all about?" "In this scene you shot two close-ups of Orson Welles, and the son of a bitch wants to do only one close-up of me!" said Mature, "I want three close-ups!" With which request Tasca loudly advised the director to comply, while more quietly instructing the cameraman only to pretend to film the extra shots. "It was a terrible picture!" the prince wryly admits of The Tartars."

Terrible seems far too severe a rating for The Tartars, however, since the film does have its entertaining aspects. One memorable highlight is an elaborate production number staged for Burundai's amusement where a troupe of bare-chested men do a saber dance, complete with Las Vegas style high kicks and cartwheels, that culminates with a male and female dancer wrestling and rolling across the marble floor in some Tartar version of the "Apache" dance. The action sequences - and there are plenty of them - are well staged and include a somewhat suggestive battering ram attack and such audience-pleasing deaths as flaming arrows in the back, spears in the neck, and boulders on the head. Even the costumes look authentic and the settings are postcard perfect - it was filmed in Italy and Yugoslavia. But what you'll remember most is the great Welles in mock Asian makeup delivering lines like "Oleg, I will destroy you" as if it were written by Shakespeare.

Producer: Riccardo Gualino
Director: Ferdinando Baldi, Richard Thorpe
Screenplay: Sabatino Ciuffini, Julian De Kassel, Gaio Frattini, Ambrogio Molteni, Oreste Palella, Domenico Salvati
Cinematography: Amerigo Gengarelli
Film Editing: Maurizio Lucidi
Art Direction: Oscar D¿Amico
Music: Renzo Rossellini
Cast: Victor Mature (Oleg), Orson Welles (Burundai), Liana Orfei (Helga), Arnoldo Foa (Ciu Lang), Luciano Marin (Eric), Bella Cortez (Samia).
C-83m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Jeff Stafford

Welles and Richard Thorpe

[mteal]

That'd be cool. Maybe call it Tartars 2.0 - the Burundai cut - Didn't someone edit down Revenge of the Sith which became quite popular... Release all four versions on a DVD...

No, that was THE PHANTOM MENACE, the first film of the second Star Wars trilogy and without question, the worst film of the entire Star Wars series. The mysterious re-edited version was called THE PHANTOM EDIT and it was 20 minutes shorter, and reportedly much better then the version that was released to theatres. I'd love to get ahold of a copy if anyone knows how to get one.

That's funny that Mature was more of a Prima Donna on the Tartars set then Welles, since his performance seems so utterly phoned-in. I do remember him being pretty funny in AFTER THE FOX though, which I haven't seen in a long time.

[Harvey Chartrand]

In response to mteal's statement that "no film with Welles can be completely bad," I beg to differ.
Don't get me wrong. No matter what crap he turns up in, Welles is always watchable. However, he ended up in two unwatchable films directed by cinema outsider Henry Jaglom: A SAFE PLACE (1971), accurately described by Leonard Maltin as a "spaced-out, waterlogged fantasy" and SOMEONE TO LOVE (1987), an exercise in self-preening such as I hope to never see again on the silver screen – or anywhere, for that matter.
Welles played a Jewish magician in A SAFE PLACE and his aging self dispensing wisdom in SOMEONE TO LOVE. The latter was a hell of a bad show to go out on.
Compared to these "Jaglominations", THE TARTARS is ... well, CITIZEN KANE!

[Tony]

Harvey: I liked both those pictures, especially "Someone to Love"; Welles is really good in that! I always enjoy just watching Welles, and believe that he actually was usually pretty professional, no matter how bad the picture. My favourite 'bad" movie with Welles is "Ferry to Hong Kong"; Kurt Jurgens is playing it straight, and Welles is doing some kind of bizarre accent; Welles's comments to Barbara Leaming on this picture are very funny. I have a little pet theory about Welles acting in other people's pictures: he was such a heavyweight as a director, theatre man, radio man, actor, etc., that no movie could survive him being in it, and not directing- it just screwed up the balance of the movie; "Ferry" would have been an ok picture without Welles, but his presence just unbalanced it. I also have a connected, somewhat more eccentric idea: I believe that in his own movies, Welles had to direct and also had to star, or the picture was unbalanced, and this is why TOSOTW, Don Quixote and Magnificent Ambersons were never truly completed: if he had starred, they would have been finished! (The Deep doesn't count, because it was terrible, and possibly just an excuse to woo Oja, which is what led to the break between Welles and Jeanne Moreau, who had been in his previous 3 films, but who refused to appear in TOSOTW with Oja starring).

You see? An eccentric theory- sometime I'll tell you my strange analysis about why it was Oja who led to Welles's downfall, and how he never finshed another dramatic movie after getting together with her in 1966!:p

[Glenn Anders]

I'm with Tony on this one.

Henry Jaglom is a vest-pocket, indie sort of Orson Welles. A SAFE PLACE got him started (with the help of Welles), and SOMEONE TO LOVE was Welles' farewell. Neither, in themselves, was a great movie, but the latter was in the style which got Jaglom a critical and audience following that continues to this day. And the former was in his more accessible style, like SITTING DUCKS, ALWAYS, or FESTIVAL IN CANNES.

LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS is a kind of OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND for an elderly movie actress (played, in her last appearance, by Viveca Lindfors). I find it, and the movies within movies (SUNSET BOULEVARD-style) quite moving.

Jaglom manages, with the help of an inheritance, I hear, to self-finance a picture on an average of every two years. His latest, HOLLYWOOD DREAMS, with the Jaglom Players (Karen Black, Zack Norman, etc) is due out soon. They are the kind of small, almost essay films Welles said he wanted to make in his later career. Jaglom may have less talent, but he manages his money better.

Besides, a guy who has Welles as his production company logo can't be all bad.

Tony, what's your theory about the influence of the beauteous Oja?

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:

Jaglom's LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS is a terrific film, which had gone almost totally unoticed; I'm so glad you reminded me of that!

As for my "speculative premise", it's something me and a friend put together many years ago, and which I actually posted, perhaps on the previous site to this!

Anyways, here's the short version:

1962: Welles and Olga Palinkas meet in Zagreb while he is making the Trial; he writes a letter to her which he never gives her but which he keeps in his pocket for 4 years until he meets her again; he gives her the letter and their relationship begins. Thier first project together is The Deep which begins filming in 1967, and which continues until 1969; apparently Moreau and Palinkas do not get along and possibly argue on set ( Did Jeanne sense something?) and the project founders, possibly because Moreau refuses to do her looping, and perhaps due to money problems; it is not, of course, due to Harvey's death, which is often given as the reason, since he dies in 1973, long after the film has been abandoned. In 1970 Moreau declines to appear in TOSOTW, even though Welles has a part specially written for her; the rumour is that she refuses to work with Palinkas.

From this point on, OW and OK write countless scripts together and embark on several film projects over a period of almost 20 years, but manage to finish only one film: the documentary essay "F For Fake"; around 1969, Welles, in a Svengali mode not unlike Kane as regarding Susan Alexander and her opera "career", and with a similar blind spot as to her lack of talent, renames Olga Palinkas "Oja Kodar", and becomes determined to make her a star. Indeed, Welles seems to have presented "Oja" as his new star, and may NEVER have come clean on this issue with his wife; at the 1975 AFI award ceremony, it is Mrs. Welles who is sitting beside Welles, and OK is nowhwere to be seen. Welles never divorces his 3rd wife, and NEVER talks about Oja in public other than in a professional, collaborative sense.

In 1970, an Italian newspaper publishes an expose of the affair, with pictures of both Oja and Mrs. Welles; Welles himself has been editing Don Quixote for more than a year with editor Mauro Bonanini, but when the story hits the scandal papers, Welles angrily leaves Italy forever, and Quixote is never finished. Welles then rents his house to actor Robert Shaw, who promptly burns down the wing of the house where Welles has stored many mementos and unfinished/unrealized works, including the film of his play "Moby Dick".

The number of projects left incomplete/unrealized by the Welles/Kodar partnership is stunning in it's volume; here is just a partial list:

"The Heroine" (starring Olga Palinkas):part 2 of a projected anthology of Dinesen stories is halted after one day's shooting in Budapest when money dissappears; the other parts were to be "A Country tale" and "Deluge at Nordernay"

1968: -script based on Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Masque of the Red Death" intended for the film anthology "Spirits of the Dead"

1969: -"Because of the Cat" based on a story by Nick Freeling
-" The Merchant of Venice": Olga Palinkas refuses to play the part of Portia; nevertheless, the film can never be shown as some of the sound elements are stolen

1970: -"The Other Side of the Wind": script by OW/Oja Kodar (formerly "Olga Palinkas), based on OW's 1966 script "The Sacred Beasts"; principal photography is completed in 1976, starring OK

1971: -"Surinam": adapted from Conrad's "Victory"
- untitled script about Dumas

1972: -"F For Fake": script by OW/OK (Picasso episode is based on a short story by OK written in 1962 called "Girl Watching")
-"Crazy Weather" by OW/OK, adapted from a short story by OK
- "Saint Jack": an adaptation of the book by Paul Theroux

1976: OW begins filming "The Magic Show": Ok helps as assisstant director and performer
- "F For Fake Trailor": Welles films a 9 minute trailor which is never processed by the producers of "F For Fake"

1977: -"The Other Man": adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Honorary Consul"
-"Dead Giveaway":adaptation of Jim Thompson's "A Hell of s Woman"
-"The Assassin: adaptation of donald freed's biography of Sirhan Sirhan

1978: "Da Capo" (later entitled "The Dreamers"): based on two stories by Dinesen: "The Dreamers" and "Echoes"; tests are filmed with OW and OK

1982: "The Big Brass Ring": script based in part on a short story written by OK in 1974 called "Ivanka"; part of the script comes from the letter from OW to OK that he carried around in his pocket for 4 years; the central character is based on an old idea of OW's.

1985: "Mercedes": script by OW based on a short story by OK
-OW plans "King Lear" with OK as Cordelia

I find it haunting that just as Welles found his one true love, he found that he could not sacrifice his 3rd marriage for this love, and never again finished a dramatic film; somehow, everything they touched together turned to ash. One would have to be able to read all their scripts together, and to see all the film they did, in order to come to the conclusion that either they were a great creative team who were continually stifled, or that Welles became blinded by love. But one thing is for sure: from the moment Welles and Kodar began their personal/creative relationship in 1966 and they began filming "Heroine" (which lasted just one day) theirs was a relationship seemingly star-crossed; or perhaps they had crossed the stars? Was there some kind of cosmic payback for Welles having an illicit affair? I'm sure that Mrs. Welles and Beatrice thought that OK was the worst thing that ever happened to him, and that he stopped being able to make films after getting involved with OK; furthermore, they might well have thought (and think) that the quality of his work went down during his years with OK, and that he, like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Charles Foster Kane, was blinded by love into believing that his sweetheart was as talented as he was.

If it was a cosmic price, then it was a heck of a price to pay; I've often wondered what Mrs. Welles and Beatrice were was thinking and feeling that evening when Welles was being celebrated by the AFI: what did they think when they saw the "Other Side of the Wind" footage starring Oja? Did they think "This garbage will never be finished?" Did they hope it never would be? Is Beatrice to this day doing all she can to stop TOSOTW from ever being finished as a tribute to the memory of her mother, and as a final payback to Oja?

And was Oja somewhere in the wings, wondering if she would ever become the 4th Mrs. Welles?

A few years after OW's death, Mrs. Welles and Oja finally agree on the settling of Welles''s will, but on the way to their meeting to sign the papers, Mrs. Welles is killed in a car accident.

It's a strange, haunting story; it might make a really good script.






:;):

[Harvey Chartrand]

That is a remarkably inventive and very elaborate theory.
I lost all respect for John Lennon after Yoko Ono cast her spell on him. Maybe Lennon was a happier person for having met Yoko, but his talent suffered for it.
Same goes for Paul McCartney and his efforts to promote his wife Linda as a singer/musician. I gave up on Macca after WILD LIFE.
Great artists should not subject their fans to their infatuations.
After three very productive years as a director in the 1960s, Welles again created his own bad luck by alienating Jeanne Moreau. He only released 2 cinematic essays between 1970 and 1985. These films were very hard to find in the pre-VHS era. F FOR FAKE played one night at the National Archives in Ottawa and wasn't screened here again for 15 years. It was broadcast one time only on Radio-Canada TV, years after its spotty release. FILMING OTHELLO was only seen on German television. I still can't find a copy of it. Nor has it ever been televised in Canada.
Welles was more than just box office poison back then. His work as a director went virtually unnoticed. The average person seemed to think Welles was an actor who directed one great film and then went back to acting.
Was it the maitre d' at Ma Maison who (when interviewed after Welles' death) said that Welles could have made a lot of money if he had dissociated himself from his entourage of Hollywood fringe types like Jaglom and Oja? This maitre d' discreetly tried to coax Welles into doing highly paid television assignments that would improve his financial situation. He suggested a documentary on ORSON WELLES IN CHINA.
Perhaps, nearing the end, Welles realized that his good friends were of no help to him career-wise, as one of the last things he did before his death was try to get a job directing an episode of Steven Spielberg's AMAZING STORIES.
Jeanne Moreau always had nice things to say about Welles when his name came up in interviews, but she never worked with him again after THE DEEP. If memory serves, Moreau didn't even show up for The American Film Institute Salute to Orson Welles in 1975. And wasn't she then in L.A. shooting her scenes for Elia Kazan's THE LAST TYCOON? She could have quite easily attended the gala. So if Moreau was in the neighborhood, so to speak, what would account for her absence from this very important soirée that Welles hoped would restore his lustre in Hollywood?
Perhaps Welles later realized he'd made a terrible mistake losing Moreau – talented, intelligent, beautiful and a box office draw who was able to coax European moneymen to invest in his directing projects. Tragic, really.

[catbuglah]

12 Screen Grabs

The obvious Welles-directed scenes are the ones he's in. The others are not as barouqe but are well-done and show some minor Wellesian touches (Good cavalry shots, busy framing, busy character movement). Editing's good - tight, quick, smooth.

[tonyw]

I first saw "Ferry" when it appeared and went to see it several times. Welles was hilarious and at that young age I somehow discerned that it was a comic performance, something he admitted in the Bogdanovich interview. Welles saw the humorous side of the situation and had the technicians laughing. Unfortunately, dour Curd Jugens and the less-talented director Lewis Gilbert could not see Welles's perspective and turn it into a comedy. Despite, its uneven and flawed nature, "Ferry" contains Welle's
s most accomplished comic performance. It also features future King Hu star Roy Chaio who made a distinctive impression on me as "Johnny One-Note" long before he would appear in martial arts epics such as A TOUCH OF ZEN, THE VALIANT ONES, and Hu's chamber drama ALL THE KING'S MEN.