By RAY KELLY

Orson Welles’ long-anticipated The Other Side of the Wind had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in Italy and U.S. debut at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado over the Labor Day weekend, scoring favorable notices from top critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

The gala premiere took place at the historic Sala Grande on the Venice Lido on Friday, August 31. Taking part in a panel there were editor Bob Murawski and producer Filip Jan Rymsza, who read statements on behalf of Oja Kodar, Beatrice Welles and Danny Huston.

The Other Side of the Wind had its U.S. debut on Saturday, September 1, in Telluride with producer Frank Marshall, executive producer/ co-star Peter Bogdanovich and cast member/ consultant Joseph McBride taking part in a Q&A session there.

The initial reviews have been positive, much to the delight of producers. “I thought the film would polarize, so this comes as a very welcome surprise. 10/10 coming out to Venice and Telluride,” Rymsza  tweeted. “[I am] thrilled with the reception.”

Here are the first reviews and reports from the two premieres: 

The critics

The Wrap:  “The Other Side of the Wind, which Welles filmed between 1970 and 1976, and built around a riotous, revealing 70th birthday party for an exiled filmmaker (John Huston) engineering a comeback, was always the unfinished work most likely to see fruition. Now, thanks to producers Frank Marshall (who worked on the initial shoot) and Filip Van Rymsza, Peter Bogdanovich (one of the movie’s co-stars), and editor Bob Murawski (The Hurt Locker), there’s a completed version of The Other Side of the Wind, and the result is a fascinating sprawl of technique, chaos, personality, and legacy. …  As a vinegary clapback against an industry he loved and hated, Wind is a truly kinetic dispatch from a giant in twilight, and, in keeping with Welles’ oeuvre, another inventively realized, no-holds-barred investigation of a complicated man and the environment that made him. How much of it is autobiography should make for spirited debate, but it’s safe to say that if Welles was never going to top “Kane,” we now at least have a final film worthy of being called an ideal bookend.

The Telegraph: (FIVE STARS) “Magic loomed large in the imagination of Orson Welles, and here is the maestro’s final trick: a flabbergasting curveball tossed from beyond the grave, with a Harry Lime-sized smirk. … The whole thing is scorchingly un-PC, with extensive female nudity, Kojar playing her Native American character in redface, double-entendres blaring all over (Hannaford describes a scene in which his leading lady holds a pair of scissors to her male screen partner’s genitals as ‘pure Hitchcock’), and a pair of trouble-making dwarfs as comic relief.”

The Hollywood Reporter:  “The images and scenes hit the screen like cards being swiftly dealt by a master dealer; you have to be quick to keep up with what’s being said. A good bit of it is nasty gossip, snide remarks and aphoristic cracks, and when you add in the insinuating and sometimes lewd insults that are Hannaford’s stock-in-trade, it’s impossible not to note the generally sour and cynical tenor of the proceedings. After all the rebuffs and disappointments of Welles’ then-30-year relationship with Hollywood (a history perpetuated in spades by this very film’s tortuous history), it’s impossible to blame the author for his disenchantment.”

Variety: Considering that it took more than 40 years to assemble Orson Welles’ final film into something that resembles finished form, the first question to ask about it is: Does it play like a fully realized movie? The answer (more or less) is yes. The diligent team of archivists and technicians who labored to complete The Other Side of the Wind, led by the Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski (“The Hurt Locker”), have tackled the 100 hours of footage Welles left behind (along with his extensive notes) as if this were a hallowed cinematic archaeological dig. What their work lays bare is an eccentric, rather choppy, but highly watchable movie, and Orson Welles is quite alive in it. You can feel the intensity of his DNA in its sinister atmosphere of garish noir depravity.  So is it a good movie or a bad one? A fascinating jumble or a searingly told story? A work of art or a curio? Let’s say that it’s a little of all those things. The Other Side of the Wind has many characters (though a number of them just pop up to gawk into the camera and detonate a line or two). It has a loose but flowing party-into-the-dead-of-night structure, as well as a ripely cynical atmosphere of Hollywood insider dread. It also comes at you in scrappy bedazzling fragments and a variety of film stocks (35mm and 16mm, black-and-white and color), though the movie, which Welles shot in bits and pieces over a period from 1970 to 1976, isn’t a sketchy, one-man-band fever dream just because Welles died before he could complete it. Judging from the evidence, a sketchy, one-man-band fever dream is what “The Other Side of the Wind” would have been even if he’d finished it.”

The Guardian: (FOUR STARS) Edited for release 50 years after it was shot, this autobiographical satire is just as wild, dated and brilliant as you’d expect …  The resulting work is as every bit as brilliant and chaotic and exasperating as you would expect, garrulous and madly disputatious, with plenty of tragicomic lechery and crassly dated wisecracks about Native Americans and gays. It’s a fascinating image of Welles’s own fierce self-questioning yet self-affirming state of mind, and the state of American cinema itself as the Hollywood golden age was about to give way to the New Wave.

IndieWire: (THREE AND A HALF STARS) “Fans of the director’s late-period work (particularly his last completed effort, the rapid-fire diary film F for Fake) will find it thrilling to return to those unpredictable, garrulous recesses, no matter the bumpy ride. Welles continues to contemplate storytelling, Hollywood, and his own troubled career by transforming these obsessions into a marathon of creativity. Stitched together by star editor Bob Murawksi, The Other Side of the Wind  is a fascinating resurrection.”

Screen Daily: “Wellesians, both hardcore and casual, will certainly argue about Wind long after its Venice premiere and its release by Netflix in November. It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.”

The Playlist: (B+ grade) “Stylistically, what resonates with Welles final work is simply how remarkable his cinematic eye was even with the arduous production schedule. Welles has been quoted as saying the film within the film was intended to reflect Hannaford trying to fashion something hip and contemporary (Welles used Michelangelo Antonioni as Hannaford’s inspiration). That might be the case, but every shot in the film within the film is perfectly composed, gorgeously lit and hypnotically edited in a manner that simply cannot be ignored.  Every time Other Side Of The Wind cuts back to the film within the film, you wish there was truly a finished version that existed somewhere.  This portion of the picture is somehow of the time and, yet, not dated at all.”

Alberto Anile: “The first impression is that the work of fine-tuning was excellent and scrupulous. The many sequences already disclosed during the last 40 years have now bright colors, and black and white has all the nuances of the original negative. The comparison with what is reminiscent of the scenes already edited by Welles himself does not seem to show betrayals … What matters is that, as expected, as hoped, The Other Side of the Wind is one of Welles’s major works. A reflection on cinema, and its comparison with life. A duel between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Hollywood. A movie on the elusive ghost of sex. And on old age.”

CineVue: (FOUR STARS) “Huston is amazing in his role – the roaring lion who knows his day is up but won’t surrender. But Bogdanovich is a revelation – a cocky wunderkind with a motormouth and Hollywood impersonations who can instantly become a needy little boy using irony as a flimsy disguise as he addresses Hannaford as “daddy” … , this is fitting final ‘adios’ from one of cinema’s real legendary voices. And wait until the end of the titles to hear that voice once more say finally, “cut”.

Economist: “As soon as the film begins, it bombards the viewer with a barrage of black-and-white clips, a stroboscope of different faces and perspectives and snatches of conversation. It is as concerned with beat poetry and avant-garde art as it is with conventional narrative cinema. It is exhaustingly fragmentary and clatteringly noisy, but seems to be ahead of its time—and maybe our time, too. … Still, it is worth persevering. The film dazzles with its gusto and its formal daring, and intrigues with its postmodernism. Its subject is an ageing director struggling to finish a film and compete with Hollywood’s next generation—and that’s what Welles was too. The jittery editing recalls his F for Fake, which came out in 1973, and the structure could be compared to that of his debut masterpiece, Citizen Kane  (1941), which used numerous subjective viewpoints and a faux-documentary format to fashion a kaleidoscopic portrait of an influential male egotist.”

Financial Times: “Slipping in and out of handheld black-and-white docu-style footage, and with many loosely woven meta elements, its mixed-media style at times looks bracingly contemporary, at others like a postcard from a bygone age. Some of us probably enjoyed the film-within-the-film element — a dreamy and very 1970s affair starring a pretty Native American woman with an apparent aversion to wearing clothes and an even prettier young dude with Marc Bolan curls — far more than we were supposed to. Allegedly an Antonioni pastiche (overtones of Zabriskie Point), it looked very much like Welles saying to the Young Turks of New Hollywood: see, I can make that kind of stuff if I choose to — akin to Led Zeppelin recording a punk song.”

Venice Film Festival

“We waited for it for decades, and it was worth it,” Alessandro Aniballi, a founder of the respected Italian film website Quinlan.it, told Wellesnet after attending two press screenings held Thursday night. “Finally, we could see Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, the most legendary unfinished Welles film along with Don Quixote. And perhaps it was not so much unfinished, we must say, after seeing it twice already.”

Aniballi noted the film was received “a bit coldly compared to huge expectations” at both press showings, possibly “because it is a complex film, stratified, sometimes very fast, sometimes extremely dilated — but it is a totally Wellesian film.”

“The film is mounted in exactly the same way that Welles was mounting in those years and has the style of his work in the 1970s. This is why it is possible to think that Bogdanovich, who makes a brilliant introduction at the beginning of the film, has done more a work of supervision and assembly, than of real reconstruction. And so, we find today with joy that probably The Other Side of the Wind was not so much unfinished, as they have been told for years,” Aniballi said.

“In the same way as another maudit film of those years, We Can’t Go Home Again by Nicolas Ray, Welles stages the end of the old Hollywood, incarnated by Jake Hannaford (John Huston) and his “rat pack,” in comparison with the New Hollywood, embodied by Bogdanovich himself. The old men are macho, drunkards, violent and make a commune among themselves; young people are not very virile, arrogant, obtusely cinephiles and ultimately individualistic and selfish. But this is just one of the keys to reading the film, which includes its most sublime moments in the sequences of the film that Hannaford is shooting, which is a parody / tribute / rewriting of Zabriskie Point. It is extremely erotic, with Oja Kodar to its maximum. Among the other possible keys are the references to the eye — the eye of the camera, even the hundreds of eyes of the hundreds of cameras during Hannaford’s 70^th birthday party. And the multiplication of points of view that look at Hannaford is nothing but a brilliant rewriting of the multiple witnesses who try to tell the life of Charles Foster Kane. The alleged homosexuality of the macho director Hannford is nothing but a new Rosebud, that is to say an excuse to track and read the film. The point is rather the end of the classic Hollywood cinema, sunk and replaced by the “too much seeing” of thousands of images recording media. And so there is nothing left but an image that runs on an open screen, in an empty drive-in, in a desolate dawn,” Aniballi said.

At the Venice press conference, Rymsza said he had hoped to be joined by Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice; and the film’s co-star and co-writer, Oja Kodar; but the two could not attend due to health reasons. John Huston’s son, Danny, wanted to attend, but was traveling. In their place, Rymsza read statements from the three.

In her statement, Kodar specified health and family matters that kept her from attending the festival. Her letter to Rymsza read, in part:

From everything I heard up to now, you, Frank and Peter did a great job and I thank you all.

I hope to attend one of the premieres, if not in New York, then in Europe.

Good luck.

Beatrice Welles’ statement read:

The fact that The Other Side of the Wind  is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, means the public will be able to finally see it, for me his daughter, this is not only extraordinary but very emotional.

The people behind this undertaking are the true unsung heroes, I personally thank all of them, be it for a couple of years or literally decades that so many have given to this.  You all deserve an enormous standing ovation, I am amongst the standing ovation.  To all of you, my sincerest ‘Thank you.’

Who really knows what my father would have done with his last picture in the editing room? It will remain a mystery. He lived and breathed in the editing room. That’s where he came alive.

Under the guidance of someone who knew him well, Peter Bogdanovich managed to get a very difficult job done. Bob Murawski, an excellent editor in his own right, was given an incredibly difficult task to edit Orson Welles’ last picture. I can only say “Bravo, well done, what an undertaking”

Wind is not perhaps what you would expect from an Orson Welles movie, regardless of him not being alive to finish it himself. For someone who was so close to him and therefore his work; It’s very different from his other films.

Is this Orson Welles’ good-bye?  Impossible! He left behind far too much. I hope with all my heart that this picture will be able to re-open people’s  eyes and souls to his massive talent and to the ones who have never heard of him, apart from attached to Citizen Kane, will be fascinated by this picture and want to know more about this amazing man.

I wish I could be there with you.

The statement from Danny Huston  read:

From the Huston family I thank you for raising this Phoenix from the ashes in grand Orson Welles style.

I know that if there is such a thing as another dimension, they ― John and Orson ― will also be present in spirit (maybe on the other side of the wind…?) toasting a glass to you all that worked and completed the film for them and us, the audience.

To Frank Marshall, Peter Bogdanovich, Netflix, to all that have worked so tirelessly. To the stunningly beautiful Oja! And the Venice Film Festival for pointing a beam of light on the screen to expose and project this wonderful irreverential maverick work. I only wish I could be there to witness it. I regret it.

As they say Fillip, “Break a leg.”  You have worked wonders. It may be a good night to light a cigar on a boat ride down the grand canal? You deserve it.

At the premiere screening, The Other Side of the Wind was met by warm applause from the crowd, according to those in attendance.

Prior the official premiere,  Murawski was honored with the first-ever Campari Passion for Film Award at the 75th annual Venice Film Festival. The Passion for Film Award pays tribute to directors of photography, editors, composers, production designers, and costume designers whose efforts are often decisive to the quality of a movie, but seldom acknowledged at major film festivals.

Speaking with The Festival Insider podcast, Murawski said that Welles personally cut about 30 percent of the film. “So, that was a really good guide for us on how the rest of the movie should be cut and the attitude of the story. Ultimately, you have to let the material speak to you.”

Telluride Film Festival

In the Telluride program guide, veteran critic Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote of the recently finished film: “Welles didn’t live to complete it, but the happy surprise is that not only has the film been finished, but it can now be appreciated for what it is: a thematic bookend to Citizen Kane  as well as the stylistic inverse of it. Sardonic, skeptical and vibrant, in the same vein as F For Fake, the film is both a bold challenge and a cinematic elixir.”

On hand to represent the film at Telluride were its producer Frank Marshall, executive producer / co-star Peter Bogdanovich and consultant/ cast member Joseph McBride, who each shared humorous anecdotes with those in attendance at the 650-seat theater before the start of the movie. Later, the trio took part in a 25-minute panel discussion moderated by McCarthy.

Other surviving crew or VISTOW (Volunteers In Service To Orson Welles) members in attendance  included  Peter Jason,  Lou Race and Larry Jackson. Marshall took time to note the presence of Ruth Hasty, who supervised post-production on the film.

The Telluride crowd was described as rapt, and very attentive to the film, which received ” vigorous applause” at its conclusion. (McCarthy commented on the crowd reaction for The Hollywood Reporter, noting “it could be gleaned from a random sampling of viewers of different ages and degrees of devotion … general admiration and/or enthusiasm … To be sure, there was dissent, with some finding it somewhat boring … But among serious cinephiles, the film looks to have been accepted as a legitimate representation of Welles’ intentions.”)

“It looked fantastic on the big screen with great color and sound and terrific music,” McBride told Wellesnet after the showing. “The film seems surprisingly contemporary with the issues of sexual politics and harassment. Hannaford is the poster boy of the MeToo movement because he is an example of everything wrong with the male gender.”

McBride said he had a chance to chat with Sarandos and thanked him for greenlighting the completion of The Other Side of the Wind, while the negative was still locked away in Paris. Sarandos said he took a leap of faith because he always found Welles’s work “inspiring.”

Producers are reportedly pleased with the positive notices the film has received so far, though McBride said he felt a few critics did not get the movie, before quickly adding that has been the case with many of Welles’ finest works, including Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil.

Asked how Welles would have reacted to the premieres and upcoming streaming on-demand to 190 countries on November 2, McBride said, “I think Welles would have been thrilled by the whole Netflix setup and getting his movie out to 130 million subscribers.”

McBride, who was present on the first day of filming in August 1970, also  worked on an unsuccessful effort to complete the film for Showtime in 1999. He said the weekend premiere was emotional for all of those connected with the project.

“It is surreal to see this film, which has consumed so much of our lives,” said McBride, adding that Marshall jokingly wondered aloud what would they do now with the remainder of their lives.

Bogdanovich, who has striven to see the film finished since Welles’ death in 1985, wistfully said of the completed movie, “It’s so sad. It’s the end of everything.”

When Marshall  was asked by film critic Leonard Maltin how he felt now that the film has had its
premiere, he almost broke down as he spoke, according to an onlooker.

“Emotional. It’s been a long project,” Marshall said. “I’m thrilled.  I started my career with Peter. Here we are today — we’re finished. It’s kind of a cathartic moment. But it’s been a hell of a ride.”

* * *(Special thanks to Alessandro Aniballi, Alberto Anile, Małgorzata Kozubek, Massimiliano Studer, Joseph McBride and numerous others who texted, tweeted, emailed or telephoned in reports, observations, statements, videos or photos from Venice and Telluride.)

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