Editor’s note: Film historian Joseph McBride was a cast member on The Other Side of the Wind in the 1970s. He worked on a failed attempt to complete the movie for Showtime in the late 1990s.  And he was a consultant on the recent completion financed by Netflix.  As McBride has noted quoting the reporter and Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, “After all, you were with him from the beginning. — From BEFORE the beginning, young fella — and now, it’s after the end.”   A good friend to Wellesnet, he has shared his feelings after attending the film’s U.S. premiere on September 1 at the Telluride Film Festival.

By JOSEPH McBRIDE

My reaction at the end of the Telluride screening of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind  was not melancholy like those I understand and appreciate of Peter Bogandovich and Frank Marshall, my dedicated fellow members of VISTOW (Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles), but a feeling of tremendous achievement by Welles and all concerned in getting the film out and finally showing it to an audience.

It made me feel like the exhilaration I feel when Ethan deposits Debbie on the porch of the home at the end of his epic quest in The Searchers. Much pain and suffering and turmoil and calamity along the way, but Ethan set out to fulfill his promise to bring her home and did so after five years of often futile searching.

Despite it all, I feel a swelling of admiration for his achievement — and this one. I always believed in The Other Side of the Wind and knew it would be good but sometimes feared it would not come out until we were all dead — if ever.

Kudos to the great “job of work” (as John Ford would say to his friend Orson) by Welles in sticking to it and to Gary Graver, Frank Marshall, Peter Bodganovich, Filip Jan Rymsza, Bob Murawski, and the rest of their stellar team for their expert and respectful work in realizing his vision, and to Netflix for making it possible.

The final result exceeds even my high expectations. I will be writing more about it as time goes on and I have a chance to think about it further. It’s a rich film to contemplate in depth, and, as with any Welles film, rewards multiple viewings.  (Below are frame enlargements with me holding the clapper board on the first day of shooting, i.e., the start of our quest, and my favorite shot in all cinema, Laurie [Vera Miles] running out to greet Martin [Jeffrey Hunter] and Ethan [John Wayne] as they bring Debbie home.)

The shot in Other Wind of Norman Foster putting the cans of film on a counter and saying, “Well, here it is — if anybody wants to see it,” resembles Ethan putting the reluctant Debbie onto the porch.

 

__________

Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.

• RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE