By RAY KELLY

For five weeks, the Film Forum in New York will honor the cinematic legacy of Orson Welles with a program marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Respected Welles scholar Joseph McBride is serving as a consultant on the Film Forum series, which runs January 1 through February 3. The series was programmed and organized by Bruce Goldstein, director of Repertory Programming at Film Forum and includes such guest speakers as McBride, director William Friedkin and Welles’ eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder. Youngest daughter Beatrice Welles may take part via Skype.

The festival features nearly three dozen movies ranging from early efforts like The Hearts of Age to his masterpiece Citizen Kane and a new restoration of Chimes at Midnight. There are several appropriate pairings in the mix – Immortal Story with F For Fake; Mr. Arkadin and Orson Welles in Spain; and Compulsion and The Long Hot Summer. Multiple versions of Touch of Evil and Macbeth will be shown over the five-week span. Also, the Film Forum Players will perform a reading of the play Too Much Johnson with the long-lost Welles footage integrated into the action as he had originally intended. (The complete schedule appears at the conclusion of this article).

McBride, who has written three books on Welles and co-starred in the soon-to-be-completed The Other Side of the Wind,  was kind enough to field a few questions about the Film Forum series.

How did you and Bruce Goldstein go about selecting these films? 

Bruce is an ace programmer and came up with the basic structure of the event and most of the ideas for titles. He invited me to serve as a consultant to recommend some additional features and shorts and to work on the programs and advise him on other aspects of the event. I am putting together my “Wellesiana” program with Bruce’s guidance. It is great working with a programmer who knows all the ins and outs of the profession and has superb artistic taste and judgment. I first met Bruce at the Bologna “Cinema Ritrovato” festival and immediately felt simpatico with him. He has done much over the years to help promote film scholarship and preservation. Among his innovative projects are producing and writing the intertitles for the first-ever public performance of Welles’s Too Much Johnson footage with a live reading of the William Gillette play, which the Film Forum will stage on February 2 (William Hohauser is editing the footage for the program; Allen Lewis Rickman is adapting and directing the play portion of the event); and, for other programs, producing a live reading of the dialogue for Frank Capra’s 1929 feature The Donovan Affair, along with the film itself, whose soundtrack is missing or unavailable.

Chimes at Midnight gets rare public screenings on January 26 and February 1. Was this difficult to arrange?

Bruce expects this revival of Chimes to be one of the major events of the retrospective. He obtained what is said to be a newly restored print from the Filmoteca Española. As Wellesnet readers know, the film was made in Spain, so it is fitting that it is being restored there. I actually don’t think it needs restoration; I don’t mind a little being out of synch, and it has a magnificent soundtrack. So I hope the restoration is what I first saw in 1967 when I watched it three times in a row on one night at a Chicago theater, the Town Underground, before it was changed back into a softcore porno theater. I hope the legal tangle that has kept Chimes out of theatrical and archival showings for years will be solved. This film, which Welles considered his finest (I agree), has had shamefully little distribution in the U.S. That is due largely to the animosity of the notoriously idiotic New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, who attacked it twice and discouraged the American distributor, Carl Peppercorn, from doing much with it after the New York opening (as Mr. Peppercorn told me at the time). So it is a film few Americans have seen. Of course, it has reached more of an audience in Europe. And from time to time, DVD copies have been put on sale, so it has been visible to those who seek it out. But it gains much from being seen in all its glory on the big screen. And I always thought that if properly distributed, Chimes could reach both an art house and a more popular audience; it has that dual appeal. At the Town Underground, it was boffo with both intellectuals from the University of Chicago and elderly winos from off the streets.

What are you personal favorites?

As mentioned, Chimes, and also The Magnificent Ambersons.  I put those two on my Top 10 list on the recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll. I felt bad that I didn’t have room for Citizen Kane, my cinematic textbook, the film that changed my life when I first saw it in a film class at the Unviersity of Wisconsin on September 22, 1966, and decided to dedicate my life to writing about films and making films. But Ambersons is my favorite film of all, partly because it is so profoundly moving, so personal for Welles, such a rich meditation on family troubles and the history of my native Midwest, and stylistically so audacious and original; and partly because it is a film maudit. I always have a soft spot for a film maudit. One of my projects, which I am trying to find time to get to and have been laying the foundation for, is to search for the missing print of Ambersons Welles may have left in Brazil. It is a long shot, but stranger things have happened – who would have thought that Too Much Johnson ever would have been found, and in a warehouse in Italy? I discovered The Hearts of Age  in 1970 with a tip from my University of  Wisconsin film professor, Russell Merritt, in a collection at the Greenwich, Connecticut, Public Library. I helped rescue the F For Fake trailer from disappearing. I think part of our job as film historians is to search for and rescue missing films. I found a lot of Capra and Ford films in the National Archives that no one had written about before, and many of those have since been distributed.

What will makes up Wellesiana on January 15 and 17?

We are keeping that largely a surprise for various reasons, including showmanship. But The Hearts of Age will be a part of it. We hope to show a better print than has been shown before. We are putting together many rare and fascinating odds and ends to represent different aspects of Welles’s widely variegated career, from theater to magic to film and television, and including some of his little-seen, recovered, and unfinished film projects, as well as some other fun material that is out there but hasn’t been seen enough. There will be delights both for general audiences and for hardcore Welles aficonados. Suffice to say that we are covering a lot of territory and are having trouble fitting it all in!

You have mentioned finding The Hearts of Age, something Welles was not necessarily thrilled with, correct?

Yes, Welles used to moan to his cinematographer Gary Graver every few months, “Why did Joe have to discover that film?” For a while until he found out what happened, Welles had wondered, “I don’t know how it has entered the oeuvre.” It was in the collection of Welles’s young Todd School collaborator William Vance at the Greenwich Library. Welles preferred people to think he had sprung fully developed as a great director with Kane, but in fact he had been dabbling in film for a number of years before that. There were other experiments besides Hearts and Too Much Johnson. I suspect Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson biography (due in May) will have some revelations about his early cinephilia along with many other surprises and important corrections of mythic misrepresentations. That book will be a major contribution to the Welles literature and to our understanding of his development as a youthful prodigy. And his early filmic experimentation doesn’t detract at all from his astonishing feature debut with Kane. Directors usually have their “creation myths” they devise to show what geniuses they are (for example, I spent a great deal of time methodically uncovering all the years of work Frank Capra did in fims before he supposedly talked his way into a directing job in 1921 with no experience). But I find the truth more inspiring – even a genius has to work
hard to develop his or her craft.

Chris Welles Feder, who had a role in the Republic Pictures production of Macbeth as Macduff’s child, will be taking part in a Q&A with you at a screening of the film on January 16. What insights into Macbeth do you hope she will share?

It is wonderful that Chris has become more public a figure in recent years, sharing his insights and memories about her father. Her book In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles  is deeply moving and helps us understand Orson Welles in fresh ways (See McBride’s review in the online magazine Bright Lights). Chris is a wise and generous person who recognizes her father’s imperfections but celebrates his strengths and achievements. She is a champion of wanting all his unfinished work to be seen by the public. She is a fine writer (her profession) and a delightful person. I first met her and her late husband, Irwin Feder, at the Locarno International Film Festival Welles retrospective in 2005, and she and I have kept in touch over the years. It’s a privilege to know her. We are fortunate to have her unique perspective.

Chris has written intriguingly on being directed by her father, including being murdered onscreen in a grisly sequence, and I hope she will give more of her impressions of his daring work on that avant-garde film he made for a low-budget studio eager for prestige. When Macbeth was restored to its full “Scottish version,” with the burrs in the soundtrack and the full-reel long take of the murder of King Duncan, it was a major revelation. I went from thinking the film a failure to regarding it as one of Welles’s great achievements. I was pleased that when I last taught Welles at San Francisco State University, Macbeth was one of the films that most impressed my students.

Were there any films you wanted to screen, but were unable to secure the rights?

Well, I guess we could say The Other Side of the Wind, but that’s still in the works! Hopefully we will see it before long! I’ve been waiting only 44  years now. I always thought I’d have to go to the premiere hobbling on a walker, but perhaps now that won’t be necessary.

I am one of the last surviving cast members. We cast and crew called ourselves members of “VISTOW,” or Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.

 

The Film Forum kicks off the Welles centennial celebrations. What are you looking forward to most this year?

This is what I call “The Year of Welles.” Many archives and theaters and universities and other institutions around the world are celebrating him. I expect to attend the conference at Indiana University and the one in Barcelona, and I will be speaking in Woodstock, Illinois, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. And maybe other places. We can all agree there can never be enough celebrations of Orson Welles. All of these events promise something different – there are so many facets to Welles that need to be explored. As he once told a small lecture audience,”It’s a pity there are so many of me, and so few of you.”

This is also the year when we will have at least two major books on Welles – I am looking forward to Pat McGilligan’s bio as well as to Josh Karp’s richly revealing history of what he’s calling Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind  –  and maybe to the third volume of Simon Callow’s biography, as well as some other works. Esteve Riambau, who wrote an important book on Welles in Spain, is completing a book on Chimes at Midnight as well as running the Barcelona conference.

I am in five documentary films on Welles already, starting with Chuck Workman’s Magician and Robert Fischer’s Perspectives on Othello: Joseph McBride on Orson Welles, a 45-minute interview I did in English last summer in Berlin for the French Blu-ray of Othello (I was in Berlin researching my book dealing with Ernst Lubitsch); I am also in documentaries by French filmmakers Clara and Julia Kuperberg and by Elisabeth Kapnist. No doubt there is much more to come on Welles that has not yet been announced.

So Welles is bustin’ out all over. High time, isn’t it? Maybe some of those ill-informed people in the media and elsewhere who like to think of him as a tragic failure will finally recognize him as the roaring success he actually was.

*****
Showtimes: Orson Welles 100 at the Film Forum

The Film Forum is located in the West Village near Soho at 209 West Houston Street. Visit the Film Forum website for times, ticket prices.

FILM FORUM SERIES

Jan. 1-8 – Citizen Kane (4K restoration) – with William Friedkin on Jan. 7 at 7:30pm
Jan. 9-10 – The Magnificent Ambersons – with William Friedkin on Jan. 9 at 7:50pm
Jan. 9-10 – The Stranger
Jan. 11 – The Muppet Movie
Jan. 11-12 – The Stranger with Journey Into Fear (double feature) – with William Friedkin on Jan. 11 at 1pm
Jan. 13 – Man in the Shadow (new restoration) and Black Magic (double feature)
Jan. 14 – Touch of Evil (preview version) introduced by Joseph McBride
Jan. 15-17 – Macbeth (“Scottish” version) – Jan. 16, 7:10pm introduced by Joseph McBride with Chris Welles Feder
Jan. 15 and 17 – “Wellesiana” including The Hearts of Age introduced by Joseph McBride
Jan. 17 – The Magnificent Ambersons – post-film analysis of original cut by Joseph McBride
Jan. 18-19 – Jane Eyre and Tomorrow is Forever (double feature)
Jan. 20 – Compulsion and The Long Hot Summer (double feature)
Jan. 21-22 – Immortal Story and F For Fake (double feature)
Jan. 23-24 – The Lady From Shanghai and The Third Man (double feature)
Jan. 25-26 – Othello
Jan. 25 – It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film By Orson Welles
Jan. 25 – Macbeth (original release version) and Return to Glennascaul (double feature)
Jan. 26 – Chimes at Midnight (DCP restoration courtesy Filmoteca Española)
Jan. 27 – Prince of Foxes and The Black Rose (double feature)
Jan. 28 – It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film By Orson Welles
Jan. 28-29 – Mr. Arkadin and Orson Welles in Spain (double feature)
Jan. 29 – Touch of Evil (release version)
Jan. 30-31 – The Trial (new restoration)
Feb. 1 – Chimes at Midnight (DCP restoration courtesy Filmoteca Española)
Feb. 1-2 – Touch of Evil (reconstruction)
Feb. 2 – Too Much Johnson with a live reading of the play
Feb. 3 – A Man For All Seasons
Feb. 3 – Someone to Love

_________
[br]
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.

 

 

• RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE
  [br]