Welles at the Movies

[sierra]

http://azevedosreviews.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/orson-welles-never-really-liked-movies/ the interview on this page provides some insight. I think what he says about Rosselini is especially interesting.

I'd also like to know what he thought of Billy Wilder. He wrote the movies he directed, something Welles respected in a director, and his style was similar to that of Lubitsch, who we know Welles liked. So if I had to guess I would say he probably liked Wilder's movies, but the only comment he made about Wilder that I know of is in My Lunches With Orson: he says that Sunset Boulevard was Gloria Swanson's picture, and Billy Wilder's. And he seemed to have liked the movie but didn't actually say whether he did or not.

He raved about de Sica's Shoeshine often but I don't think he ever talked about his other movies...since he called him his favorite filmmaker in the interview I linked above I would guess that he liked his other movies, but maybe he just liked Shoesine that much!

He loved Renoir but thought he made some very bad films, like The River. And he loved John Ford but hated The Searchers. He didn't like Powell and Pressburger. Loved Eric Von Stroheim.

I read in Despite the System that he didn't like Italian neorealism because it had no style, he preferred the artifice of Eisenstein. I'm not sure what the basis of that was. Anyone know?

Also, does anyone else see Buck in Stagecoach as probably being the inspiration for the night man in Touch of Evil?

[tonyw]

Re Buck. Not really. Perhaps the way Orson physically grew a few decades later? Interesting premise.

I'm glad to hear he liked Von Stroheim since I'm currently reading Arthur Lenning's 2000 biography

[Gus Moreno]

Buck in Stagecoach is not as loony as the nightman in Touch of Evil.

[Jeff Wilson]

I've been reading the transcripts of the tapes Bogdanovich and Welles made in preparation for This is Orson Welles from the Welles-Kodar papers at U of Michigan, and I got a chuckle out of this bit about Eisenstein, quite different from what eventually appeared in the book:

PB: What is Eisenstein to you?

OW: Not so much.

PB: And you to Eisenstein?

OW: We had long, long correspondence, you know.

PB: Did you really?

OW: Yes. Mainly by him. Mine was "I got your letter and you're a bum" was my answer.

PB: He liked your pictures?

OW: No. No. It didn't get to that. I wrote a bad review of the second part of Ivan the Terrible saying that he was a fraud, and he wrote, you know, 700,000 words about it, and I kept getting his letters, and --

PB: Explaining that he wasn't a fraud?

OW: Yes. No no, and all that, you know. No, he's not one of my heroes.

PB: No. Nor mine either.

OW: No. Oh, you should see the letters. I threw them all away. I wish I still had them. People say, "we want to publish those letters between you and Eisenstein." Mine only consisted of saying, "Stop writing me, you boring son-of-a-bitch."

[tonyw]

Jeff, Thanks for sharing this research with us. There is one point I'd like to make. Surely, Orson is referring to part one since part two was banned by Stalin and did not appear until 1958?

Eisenstein died in 1948 and after Churchill's notorious Fulton, MO, speech, would not have dared to write a letter to America remember the fate of the officer in ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVITCH) . Part Two is the film where all the repression unravels while part one could be seen as a "Great Leader" film though there are tensions in Cherkassov's performance even there.

[Jeff Wilson]

You are correct Tony, he was referring to part 1 of Ivan.

It is funny, going through the transcripts, how right Welles is when he tells Bogdanovich how asking him about a given director or film on different days will get totally different responses. In one conversation, he talks about how much he loathes How Green Was My Valley and Ford's Irish pictures, and in another, he talks about what a good film HGWMV was. It's very odd.

[tonyw]

Well, he does say in the Arena interview and elsewhere that his responses depended on how he felt on a certain day. This means he was constantly re-evaluating and changing responses in a manner akin to his editing table practises. He later decided not to be explicitly critical of certain directors since they were all colleagues and this took a more critical approach. However, if his conversations with Jaglom are accurate, comments did emerge. However, Richard Burton did deserve Welles's response when he came to his table since he definitely wasted his talent when he had the money to do the things Welles really wanted to do but did not. Welles made a virtue out of necessity when doing those various films to fund his own work while Burton made a vice out of necessity to finance his lavish life style.