"Someone to Love" OW's last performance, on DVD

[Terry]

Maybe Mteal can edit it for us. If we keep the Welles footage and dump the rest, well, that would suit my personal tastes. Never saw Sitting Ducks, but A Safe Place lost me after 30 minutes or so.

[Jeff Wilson]

I've watched a review copy of the DVD of SOMEONE TO LOVE, which comes out next week. I found the movie to be largely insufferable baby boomer navel-gazing, with bits of Welles interspersed throughout until his final appearance at the end. Of mild interest to Welles fans will be the commentary track with Jaglom and Andrea Marcovicci, which features a few stories about Welles amidst some casual chatting about the movie.

[Terry]

I like the operafication Glass did of La Belle et la Bete. I thought it was tremendous, and don't see anything sad about that. I wouldn't even have seen the film otherwise (or Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Testament of Orpheus, and Les Parents Terribles.) I like the original soundtrack as well, but without the Glass score, I may not have discovered Cocteau's films at all. Maybe Britney Spears could score Mr Arkadin and introduce a new legion of fans to Welles.

Hell, if Glass operafied Kane, I'd give it a try. I can only imagine.

I wouldn't want to see Macbeth without dialogue except as a dvd extra. That seems an insult to Welles, considering it was his own original dialogue track that was used for the restoration. Just as sad for someone to see Macbeth the first time without Welles' own dialogue track. I appreciate the intent of concentrating on the music, but that's not my favourite Welles movie score (or film.) Much more interesting to see Benny Herrmann's score without dialogue. For me anyway. Though I've seen the release and restored versions of Macbeth enough times to have gone to see how Ibert's barabaric score works on its own (just too bad the closest showing was a few thousand miles away.)

I also didn't care much for Glass' Dracula score either, though I'm not opposed to the idea of new scores for old films (especially early talkies which barely had music until Max Steiner came along.)

What would be much nicer is if Lady from Shanghai had a dialogue-only track. I'd like to see that without the music. Then someone could do a new music and sound effects track for it (albeit not Philip Glass - better to use whatever old public domain stuff Welles might have used for his original temp score.)

Uh, I didn't even enjoy the Orson bits in Someone To Love that much. That's just me, but I didn't. I did like the first 30 minutes of A Safe Place.

[Glenn Anders]

Henry Jaglom has a new film coming out in February, HOLLYWOOD DREAMS. It was just showcased at the AFI.

Philip Glass has a real affinity for film music. [Has anyone noticed, appropo of nothing, that he looks quite a lot like Bernard Herrmann?] I liked Glass's score for THE ILLUSIONIST, haunting stuff, and he is getting good notices for NOTES ON A SCANDAL.

What moved me a good deal about SOMEONE TO LOVE was Jaglom's having Welles wrap the film in a way similar to how he introduced the trailer (preview, as we used to say) for CITIZEN KANE. Welles somehow created a breath-catching symetry there.

Glenn

[Terry]

Herrmann was a minimalist as well. I like minimalism.

Watching tv with the lights out is bad for your eyes, Glenn! (Not that I ever listened to what my Mother said.)

[Glenn Anders]

Hadji: I didn't think you were one of the nit-pickers here.

Yes, I know. I keep a small lamp on in the hallway, which gives my old eyes some relief.

But you are right to give that warning.

Glenn

[Terry]

I always watch tv in the dark. Which may be why I currently need a stronger prescription for my glasses.

[Glenn Anders]

You ARE one of us!

Todd Baesen, you know, is the Founder of the Blind Film Critics Society.

I shall submit your name. Only one other member here (besides myself) has ever been admitted.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

Someone to Love – regrettably Orson Welles' last film, released in 1987 – is brutally panned on the Only the Cinema blogsite @ http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2009 ... -love.html
The reviewer, Ed Howard, compares director Henry Jaglom unfavorably to film auteurs Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer and to cartoonist/writer Jules Feiffer, who (like Jaglom) all dwell on themes of loneliness and "the antagonisms and insecurities and self-erected barriers that plague the relationships between men and women in the modern age." Howard writes that Jaglom's "filmmaking itself is amateurish and uneven, his cutting inept, displaying all the distracting attributes of a theater director working in film: especially, the awkward reaction shots in which people, supposedly watching something happening nearby, seem to be in an entirely different room or maybe a different building." A fellow named Joshua notes in a comment that he remembers being "incredibly annoyed by how clear it was that Orson Welles was not in the same room as any of the other cast members (Sally Kellerman, Andrea Marcovicci et al), aside from Jaglom", when shooting his scenes as the wisdom-spouting patriarch. I don't remember noticing this when I forced myself to sit through Jaglom's vapid feminist romance 22 years ago.
Strangely enough, at one point in the film, Welles actually says to Jaglom: "Why have you imposed this peculiar misery on your friends in a noble institution like the theater?" It's as if he knew his last flick was going to be a colossal bomb.
I find it utterly horrifying that the genius who reached the directors' pantheon with Citizen Kane, Falstaff, Touch of Evil and The Fountain of Youth, etc. made his swan song in this boring, self-indulgent mess. Definitely Orson's worst film as an actor, right down there with Zen Business, Tesla and The Witching.
Boris Karloff was lucky to have Peter Bogdanovich give him a good send-off with Targets. Sadly, Welles wasn't quite so fortunate in his work with Jaglom.

[Glenn Anders]

Harvey: I think if we gave Henry Jaglom truth serum (just asked him, simpler yet), he would tell us that most of his later films are attempts at, and hybrids of, the "essay film" -- which Welles limned so beautifully in F FOR FAKE. In fact, it should be no secret here that Jaglom has been taking Welles' advice to make small films, utilizing friends as a kind of poor man's Mercury Players, creating steadily, his whole career -- following as Welles did, a kind of autobiographical drift hidden in the shadows of their back stories. In many of Jaglom's films, there is either an overt or an implied reference to his mentor, Welles, his style or his work.

The awkwardness of the early essay pictures was, at least early on, part of their charm. The films of his I like most are the the early ones (before the essays): A SAFE PLACE, TRACKS, SITTING DUCKS, ALWAYS, and a later one, LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS. He is constantly paying homage to lost loves and lost teachers, the few uncompromising artists of Hollywood left after "the golden age."

SOMEONE TO LOVE combined Jaglom's lost love theme and his lost teacher theme, in that he may well have re-cut the picture as a farewell to Welles, rather than produce another lament over the failure of his marriage to Patricia Townsend.

The symbol of an old movie palace, about to torn town, works for me in regard to Welles, as does Welles' final magnificent advice a -- CUT!

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I think "essay picture" is really being kind on "Someone to Love." Its really such an odd film that feels more akin to reality TV, or some kind of "unplanned" TV show, like one led by comedians Merrick and Rosso in Australia, that was always more awkward than liberating in tone.

To put it simply, Henry Jaglom stars and directs himself, as a 1970's filmmaker whose films have dated very badly in 2009, and who, like henry Jaglom himself, happens to be good friends with the great Orson Welles. He and Orson shoot the proverbial poop for five inutes in Orson's hotel room, about Henr'ys high-falutin ideas about this "film" he is trying to "make."

Like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" before it, "Someone to Love" seems to have been conceived as a couple of scenes (here nothing more than assisted monologues) with a dying legendt, the visibly unwell Welles, then expanded well beyond the point of good sense by inviting several of Jaglom's other friends, who share their feelings of loneliness and "Hollywood old age". The troupe then gather in a closing theatre and pontificate repeatedly for an hour, or as long as your attention lasts.

I feel like Jaglom had good intentions; and "analysing" the loneliness of himself and his friends did indeed feel like a great philanthrohic and philosophical enterprise, for as long as I was inside the film, but not also without a feeling that it was being presented in a silly and boneheaded way, the self-referential improvised dialogues coming off as very 70's and just not enough crumbs to justify a whole slice of bread. Maybe a one-hour made-for-TV slice of bread, or perhaps a brief toast soldier between more substantial meals.

Ben Cheshire (Sir Bygber)

[Glenn Anders]

Your assessment works for me, Sir Bygber Brown.

I think that LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS, one of Jaglom's less well known pictures, makes as a whole a more successful homage to to the spirit of Orson Welles. Even if Welles takes the form of Viveca Lindfors, who died shortly after the film was completed.

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

And who was Welles's Cordelia in the 1956 New York production of King Lear. I agree that Someone To Love has about an hour's worth of good stuff in it, including Welles. The bickering between Jaglom and his brother is pretty funny, and it's good to see Oja in there too.

[Wellesnet]

2014 TCM intro with Ben Mankewicz and Henry Jaglom:


Afterword: