Madison Celebrates Welles throughout 2015

[Wellesnet]

http://host.madison.com/ct/entertainmen ... 608d7.html

Orson Welles is the Kenosha-born filmmaker, and Cinematheque will be celebrating his 100th birthday with a yearlong series that will spill over into April’s Wisconsin Film Festival. It begins with the granddaddy of them all, “Citizen Kane,” on Saturday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque screening room at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave.

Cinematheque director Jim Healy has loaded the spring series with some of Welles’ best-known films, including “The Magnificent Ambersons” (Jan. 31) and “Touch of Evil” (Feb. 28). But Healy said the series, which will run throughout 2015, will include plenty of Welles’ lesser-known works.

“His filmography is all over the place,” he said. “Incomplete works, multiple versions of completed works, odd digressionary forays into short formats and radio and television and commercials. That’s what makes him an ideal subject for such an extensive retrospective. There are always surprises around the corner.”

http://cinema.wisc.edu/series/2015/spri ... elebration

[Wellesnet]

Madison Part 2, at the Wisconsin Film Festival, featuring a quartet of Welles films, including a very rare 35mm showing of the 1958 "Crack in the Mirror":

April 11th, 1:30 pm
Chimes at Midnight
Campanadas a medianoche
Spain, France, Switzerland | 1965 | 115 min | DCP
narrative | section: Restorations and Rediscoveries, Wisconsin’s Own, Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration, Capitol Cinema
Premiere Status: Special Presentation

directed by: Orson Welles
In one of his supreme achievements as the complete auteur, the great Orson Welles stars as the grand fool Falstaff in his own brilliant distillation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Richard II, with narration borrowed from Holinshed’s Chronicles. The story focuses on the relationship between young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), to whom the fat, cowardly, lying, and often drunk Falstaff serves as a surrogate father while King Henry (John Gielgud) pays little attention to his heir. Welles’s performance reflects a deep, personal, and poignant kinship with Falstaff, who, though often a clown, represents decency in a cruel and violent world. Welles the director balances the warm and comic episodes with one of the most memorable battle scenes ever depicted in motion pictures. The director’s patented use of dutch camera angles, deep focus cinematography and invigorating editing rhythms reach their apotheosis in this unforgettable masterpiece. Public screenings of Chimes at Midnight have been exceedingly rare over the last several decades due to controversy over the legal ownership of the movie. A restored DCP courtesy of Filmoteca Española and Mr. Bongo Worldwide Ltd. will be screened. Special thanks to Bruce Goldstein, Cristina Bernáldez, and David Buttle.

- Jim Healy

Sunday, April 12th 1:30 pm
Crack in the Mirror
USA | 1960 | 97 min | 35mm
narrative | section: Restorations and Rediscoveries, Wisconsin’s Own, Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration
Premiere Status: Special Presentation

directed by: Richard Fleischer

Filmed on sets in Europe, Crack in the Mirror is easily one of the most arresting Hollywood studio films that Orson Welles ever appeared in as an actor-for-hire. Welles plays both a murder victim and the murderer’s defense attorney in this offbeat courtroom drama that unfolds on separate planes of social class. His two co-stars, Bradford Dillman and French chanteuse Juliette Greco, also assay two roles each. The loutish Hagolin (Welles) is rubbed out by his young mistress, Eponine (Greco), after she fails to entice her younger lover, Robert (Dillman), to commit the crime. Meanwhile, wealthy attorney Lamorciere (Welles again), spurned on by jealousy, agrees to defend Robert when he learns that his own mistress, Florence (Greaco again), is fooling around with his former assistant, Claude (Dillman again), the promising lawyer who has decided to defend Eponine. The twisty, suspenseful screenplay was written by none other than long-time 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, using the pseudonym Mark Canfield. Conceived as a vehicle for his own mistress, Greco, Zanuck assigned one of his favorite directors, Richard Fleischer, himself a veteran of many a successful crime story (The Boston Strangler, 10 Rillington Place). In fact, Crack in the Mirror reunites Fleischer, Zanuck, Welles and Dillman from their 1959 true crime classic, Compulsion in which Welles played a thinly veiled version of attorney Clarence Darrow. Filmed in beautiful black and white CinemaScope, a superb 35mm print from the Fox archives will be screened.

- Jim Healy

Thursday April 9th, 6:30 pm, Friday April 10th, 11:45 am
Too Much Johnson
USA | 1938 | 80 min | 35mm
narrative | section: Restorations and Rediscoveries, Wisconsin’s Own, Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration, Opening Night Selection
Premiere Status: Special Presentation

directed by: Orson Welles
Unseen and lost for more than 70 years, Too Much Johnson represents a crucial chapter in the career of Orson Welles. As director of the Mercury Theatre Company, Welles’s innovative stage productions utilized provocative interpretations of classic plays to alter the way the work was read. This extended to his 1938 production of the 1894 comedy Too Much Johnson by William Gillette. The farcical story follows a womanizing lawyer who escapes from New York City to a plantation in Cuba ahead of a cuckolded husband. The lawyer has been using the name Alfred Johnson, and the new owner of the plantation is Joseph Johnson, who is betrothed to the daughter of another family traveling to Cuba. With the husband in hot pursuit, the lawyer must think quickly to stay ahead of his lies and escape with his life. Welles’s idea was to precede each of the three acts with a short slapstick film that filled gaps in the plot of the play. He filmed on location in and around New York City using Mercury players such as Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, John Houseman, Mary Wickes and his own wife, Virginia Nicholson. Though all of the footage for these prologues was shot, technical difficulties prevented the film from being shown as part of the stage production. What remains is a partially-edited sequence of events that gives a sense of what Welles had in mind. The production reveals a fascinating amalgam of early film techniques and more modern impressionist editing that would presage the genius to come. The nitrate film print was discovered in Italy in 2013 and preserved by George Eastman House as it was, providing a unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. Jared Case, a George Eastman House archivist, will provide a guided, narrated tour through the Too Much Johnson footage, accompanied on piano by David Drazin.

- Jim Healy

Thursday April 9th 6:30 pm, Wednesday April 15th, 1:30 pm
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
USA | 2014 | 94 min | DCP
documentary | section: New International Documentaries, Wisconsin’s Own, Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration, Opening Night Selection
Premiere Status: Wisconsin

directed by: Chuck Workman
One of the leading lights in the history of international cinema, Orson Welles has inspired multiple succeeding generations of film artists with an arresting use of sound and image, singular interpretations of literary classics, and a celebratory, but fundamentally tragic vision of the human condition. Welles was born May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and this informative, fast-paced, and entertaining new documentary takes viewers through Welles’s formative years in Woodstock, IL to his enormously prolific time in New York City creating innovative works for theater (like his "Voodoo" Macbeth) and radio (the legendary War of the Worlds broadcast). Welles arrived in Hollywood as a "boy wonder", but as far as his reputation with the studios goes, it was all downhill after Citizen Kane. Nonetheless, Welles crafted several film masterpieces as both a studio hand and as an independent artist and director Chuck Workman has assembled a tantalizing buffet of clips to illustrate Welles’ diverse and fascinating career in cinema. Magician also includes interviews with several Welles collaborators and scholars, including UW, Madison graduate and author Joseph McBride. ""This valuable documentary is the easiest, and in some cases only, way to appreciate the work of one of the medium’s most accomplished artists" (Film Journal).

- Jim Healy

[Le Chiffre]

Finally got my feet wet on the OW centennial by seeing two Welles movies at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison. First was the new DCP restoration of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT by the Filmotecha Catalunya, and the second was a 35mm print of CRACK IN THE MIRROR.

The DCP Chimes was a very good, solid restoration, but not great. The source material used for the French Studio Canal DVD strikes me as being of higher and more pristine quality. But this new Spanish restoration is easily the best I've seen Chimes look on the big screen.

The producers of the restoration have said they wanted to be true to the way the film looked and sounded when it was first released in the 1960’s. But one thing that is more noticeable about Chimes on the big screen, as it was back then, is how patchy it’s construction is, and most notoriously, how often the dialogue doesn't quite match lip movement. Wellesian purists seem aghast at the idea of giving someone like Michael Dawson the chance to line up the sync better and remix it for stereo, so I guess we’ll have to live with the film’s inherent flaws, which are never bad enough to seriously marr this great, powerful film anyway.

The image on the DCP was on the light side, which meant that black backgrounds lacked a certain depth and richness, but the sound and picture quality were good and clear for the most part. Scratches and other print wear were evident on occasion, but never bad enough to be distracting. A sizeable and respectful audience gave the film a round of applause at the end.

CRACK IN THE MIRROR, the 1960 follow up to COMPULSION, was a real pleasant surprise, and was shown in a beautiful, near pristine, 35mm widescreen print, that was worlds better than my old pan & scan bootleg video, which was the only way to see the film prior, since it’s never been released on VHS or DVD. After seeing it Sunday with a large and appreciative crowd, I can’t imagine why it’s been consigned to such oblivion. It’s not a great film by any stretch, and it’s not as good as COMPULSION, but it’s a highly entertaining courtroom drama that has some nice twists and turns, as well as the same solid direction from Richard Fliescher that marks the more celebrated earlier film. Also like the earlier film, Welles delivers a stirring courtroom speech at the end. Jim Healy, director of the Wisconsin Film Festival, gave a very good intro to the film, humorously detailing the rather acrimonious conditions under which the film was made.

This film also received a round of applause at the end, and Welles fests could do a lot worse than add this appealingly offbeat and too rarely seen film to their schedules, especially when it can be seen in a print like this.

[tonyw]

I saw CRACK IN THE MIRROR on first release and liked it then. I hope a good DVD copy of CHIMES appears soon sinc ethe beginning of my VHS tape is starting to jump but it stabilized preventing me from running my DVD copy with non-removable Japanese subtitles right of screen.

[Wellesnet]

Thanks to David (Shadowplay) Cairns for posting this on Facebook. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell on the Madison OW Fest:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/ ... omes-home/

[Wellesnet]

The fourth and last Welles celebration this year in Madison wraps up this weekend with Joseph McBride doing his popular "Wellesiana" show:
http://www.wellesnet.com/joseph-mcbride ... es-series/