Welles and Globalism

[Black Irish]

The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences
Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless. (Victor Davis Hanson)

The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that excess invites unexpected correction.

“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda. They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.

But "Fake News" now serves to remind the public of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth. The once liberal invention of the term “fake news” now mostly refers to media efforts to warp the Trump presidency using left-wing journalists who “know nothing”, and thus are easily manipulated by their progressive political puppeteers.

Nonfactual accounts of “hate crimes,” an increasingly percentage of which prove to be pure inventions.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION REALLY IS ILLEGALITY

Illegal immigration offers another Nemesis moment. Activists, Democratic politicians, and Mexico itself allege that the Trump administration is hounding the blameless, as if there were neither immigration law nor a concept of deportation for violations of it. But usually in every media report of a victimized illegal alien, one also finds buried incidental information showing that the detainee had previously been convicted. The Left apparently sees identity theft as a minor matter for illegal aliens, though a serious one for citizens.

THE RUSSIAN CAN OF WORMS

In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.

While the media and progressives were floating the Trump-Russian connection, it was also clear that there were all sorts of shady elements to the story that would not appear favorable to either Clinton or Obama.

It is now reported that the Obama administration during the campaign went to a FISA court to tap the communications of Trump-campaign officials and unofficial supporters. FISA applications are almost never rejected (and never leaked), but the court rebuffed this one in June 2016, ostensibly for insufficient cause. Obama-administration officials may have assumed that a grateful shoo-in successor Clinton Justice Department would not worry greatly about such interference. Obama administration may have tried again as the campaign heated up in October 2016, may have found a more sympathetic judge, and may on the second try have begun widely tapping Trump-campaign officials.

But then Nemesis again appeared. It turned out that almost everyone in Washington — especially Sessions’s Democratic accusers — had met with the Russians Russian officials were frequent guests at the Obama White House, to educate the macho former KGB officer about why American and Russia were in fact friends rather than enemies.

Trump pulled down the temple on everyone — by tweeting groundbreaking but unsupported accusations that a sitting president of the United States and his team were the catalysts for such unlawful tapping. Apparently, he reckoned that the liberal conversation would therefore turn defensive rather than accusatory. How were they trafficking in confidential intelligence information if not from skullduggery of some sort?

Smarter observers backtracked from the Russian-Trump collusion, given that the leaks were less likely to be credible than they were criminal. The accusers have become the accused. Each time Trump impulsively raises controversial issues in sloppy fashion the news cycle follows and confirms Trump is inexact and clumsy but often prescient; his opponents, usually deliberate and precise but disingenuous.

FISA-GATE

Obama officials have written contorted denials that by their very Byzantine wording suggest there is some truth to the thrust of Trump’s accusations. The public is learning that intelligence agencies and the Obama Justice Department deliberately monitored Trump’s campaign effort.

Maybe there is a divine goddess Nemesis, Or just maybe over the last eight years, the Obama administration so relied on media collusion that it felt it could do things politically and culturally that otherwise no sane administration would even dare.

[Black Irish]

FDR HAD A FAMOUS GHOSTWRITER: ORSON WELLES
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/f ... 180962658/

“The most important thing is for you to get well and be around for the last days of the campaign.”

as American soldiers and sailors advanced toward Germany and Japan, Republican opponent Thomas Dewey’s questions about the president’s age and energy began to resonate with the public.

Roosevelt was campaigning hard, trying to counter the concerns about his health, but he needed surrogates. None— including the many Hollywood stars who gave an occasional speech for Roosevelt in 1944—were as passionate and dedicated as Welles.

Welles attacked Republicans as plutocratic elitists with the same withering contempt he’d aimed at newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst

Welles’ left-wing politics made him sympathetic to Roosevelt’s New Deal. even after Roosevelt disappointed progressives by replacing radical-leaning Vice-President Henry Wallace with Missouri moderate Harry Truman on the 1944 ticket, Welles remained loyal. Welles attacked Republicans as “the partisans of privilege, the champions of monopoly, the old opponents of liberty, the determined adversaries of the small business and the small farm.” He even called out Hearst, his archenemy, whose newspapers supported Dewey.

Welles often met with Roosevelt at the White House and on the president’s campaign train. According to biographers, the actor also sent the president ideas for his speeches—suggestions the president included in his addresses. Decades later, Welles even claimed to have helped Roosevelt come up with one of the most memorable lines of the 1944 election: the punch line of a speech concerning a political fracas over the president’s dog.

In August 1944, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reported that Roosevelt had called Hayworth to let her know that Welles would be away from home, engaged in special work for him. According to Frank Brady’s biography Citizen Welles, the president called Hayworth when Welles balked at his request. “But Mr. President, Rita will never believe me if I can’t tell her where I am,” Welles said, according to Brady’s book.

The FBI dispatched an agent to interview Hopper. She “stated she did not know exactly what the President was having Welles do,” reads the agent’s report, “but she did know that he was on some kind of mission for the President.”

Welles biographers disagree on what the mission might have been. Brady, recounting a story Welles told him about shooting footage of Albert Einstein talking about the theory of relativity, suggests Welles may have been working on a never-released documentary project about the atomic bomb.

Republicans were running an entirely negative campaign. “By free enterprise they want exclusive right to freedom,” he argued. “They are stupid enough to think that a few can enjoy prosperity at the expense of the rest.” He would later tell people that, encouraged by Roosevelt, he’d contemplated running against U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy in his native Wisconsin in 1946.

Some biographers characterize Welles’ senatorial daydreams of 1944 as a sign of vanity, “He was devout about great times needing great men,” wrote David Thomson in Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. “So he missed that drab, sly, common touch that gets elected.”

After the election, Roosevelt sent Welles another telegram, thanking him for his help with the campaign. “It was a great show,” Roosevelt cabled, “in which you played a great part.”

[Black Irish]

TW: I downloaded Confidential Report in 1080p. It looks fantastic, and has plenty of film grain. So that cut is on bluray now? 

MT: Not that I know of. Maybe a foreign Bluray, but I would think we would have heard of it. Are you sure it's 1080p? Where did you download it from?

TW:
I got it from a Russian torrent site and used a proxy to hide my IP as I downloaded it. I'm not sure that particular cut is public domain, so I wanted to hide my piracy.

Anyway, there are a couple Blu-Ray releases of CR: an Italian one and a subsequent French release which people say is better. I must have found the former, though it looks great to me.

Obviously, having Criterion upgrade their Comprehensive box to HD is what we all would want.

If you're up to speed and comfortable with torrents and proxies, I found the thing here:

Мистер Аркадин: Тайное досье / Mr. Arkadin: Confidential Report (Орсон Уэллс / Orson Welles) [1955, Франция, Испания, Швейцария, детектив, драма, триллер, фильм-нуар, BDRip 1080p] DVO + Sub Eng + Original Eng :: RuTracker.org

Мистер Аркадин: Тайное досье / Mr. Arkadin: Confidential ...
rutracker.org
Мистер Аркадин: Тайное досье / Mr. Arkadin: Confidential Report (Орсон Уэллс / Orson Welles) [1955, Франция, Испания ...

MT: Thanks Terry. My knowledge of torrents is limited, so I'll probably leave it alone, but it's good to know it's out there. I may do a post on the French and Italian Blurays.

TW: Sure, that's worth a mention if it's never been posted. I assume they'd be Region 2, but you'd have to do some web searching to know for sure.

**********

The Criterion Collection has been putting together some fabulous Bluray packages of Welles films lately, including their CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and IMMORTAL STORY sets last year, as well as the upcoming OTHELLO set later this year. Hopefully, Criterion will eventually get around to upgrading their fabulous COMPLETE MR. ARKADIN from 2003 to Bluray too. In the meantime, the European version of the film, known as CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, was released in two different Bluray editions back in 2015, the Welles centennial year. The first was an Italian release by Dolmen Home Video, available for import from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Arkadin-Blu-R ... B00IAZXNYC
and the second was a French release from Carlotta:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Mr-Arkadi ... ay/130478/

The French Carlotta is said by some to be the better of the two, although Amazon does not offer that one for import. The Italian edition is available through download from a Russian site, for those familiar with torrents and IP-hiding proxies, but those unfamiliar will probably want to leave it alone and wait for a possible Criterion release.