The Immortal Story on DVD & Blu-Ray

[Roger Ryan]

Having seen the film numerous times, including twice on a cinema screen (albeit projected from a digibeta videotape), I thought I had settled on my opinion that The Immortal Story was an intriguing but minor work with an uncomfortably exaggerated stylistic approach to its cinematography and mise en scène. This new edition from the Criterion Collection has allowed me to see the film with new eyes. The clarity of both image and sound on the Blu-ray finally pulled me into the film's fable-like world and all aspects of the film seemed stronger as a result. This may be Welles' most beautiful-looking film and, I now realize, the bad cropping of the image I had seen in the past gave the impression that Welles was being careless with his compositions. At an appropriately-framed 1.66:1 aspect ratio, each shot seems just right. While I could still quibble about the harshness of some of the lighting, the color effects now look wonderful.

With greater clarity in the dialogue, I discovered a new warmth and care in the performances. True, Welles mummifies the role of Mr. Clay in a way that seems to diminish the impact of the character, but the three other lead actors are dedicated to strong interpretations that work together beautifully. Having watched both the English-language version and the French-language version in one sitting (I was surprised that the actors actually appear to be speaking the respective languages in each version even though all of the dialogue is dubbed in both edits), I went back and watched the English-language version again, such is my new-found affection for the film.

One more note: I'm not certain if this was in the original Dinesen story, but I just realized how clever/fortunate the line of dialogue is that explains how the former Clay associate Louie Ducrow had everything of value destroyed in his manor. This allows all those interior shots of the manor to be sparsely-dressed, excusing an obvious budgetary issue by making the lack of furnishings and artwork a plot point!

[Jeff Wilson]

One more note: I'm not certain if this was in the original Dinesen story, but I just realized how clever/fortunate the line of dialogue is that explains how the former Clay associate Louie Ducrow had everything of value destroyed in his manor. This allows all those interior shots of the manor to be sparsely-dressed, excusing an obvious budgetary issue by making the lack of furnishings and artwork a plot point!

That bit about destroying all the art and leaving only mirrors is straight from the original story, albeit the narration rather than spoken by a character.

[Wellesnet]

From the Criterion forum, a demonstration of the fade-to-yellow problem that plagues many old color films. The new Criterion Bluray has corrected this.


Knives: I am in complete surprise of The Immortal Story which seems more out of Raul Ruiz's world than anything I've ever seen from Welles. Even his brilliant go at Kafka doesn't have this film's marvelous humour at the stories one constructs to keep the horrors of reality at bay. There are all of these little touches spread throughout which are simply jaw dropping given how shoe string I understand the production to have been. Half way through when they drag that poor blonde man to have a meal is a great example. We have this highly artificial world with the red stage curtains, the mechanical help that seems to not have been programmed to speak, all the way down to Welles' own gaudy makeup like in an opera performance. So they plop in this man acting as if from the real world that Welles imposes his reality on. Is this Welles freedom or the young man's destruction. But of course it is neither as Welles has just trapped himself in another artificial reality with no satisfaction. If it weren't so funny it would probably be unbearably sad.

Excuse the groping speculation everyone, but this film seems to not only invite it, but demand it. To me there seems to be some obscure connection between the seashell (a symbol of fertility and birth in many cultures), and the gold piece, which the sailor says is like the Moon, controller of the Ocean tides which deposit the shells on land. Even the hoped-for baby possibly fits in here, because of the curious coincidence of the lunar cycle being the same length as the average menstrual cycle. Those quiet and poetic mysteries are one of the things that make this film unique in the Wellesian oeuvre.

[Le Chiffre]

Some observations on the new Immortal Story Bluray:

1. Criterion’s version is only 58 minutes long, pretty much a copy of the French version. The version Turner Classic Movies shows is about 62 minutes, four minutes longer. The 58 minute version on bluray omits several lines of dialogue, including one of my favorite lines in the film: "For Mr. Clay had come to have faith in his own omnipotence", with a shot of Clay standing in a barred-up window.


2. The 1.66 aspect ratio, used for both English and French versions on this disc, is very nice and works quite well, but I would have preferred to have seen the French version presented at full frame, since that was likely how it was originally broadcast on French television back in 1968. I have no problem with the English version being shown here at 1.66, but I would have preferred to see it at 62 minutes, like the TCM version, since that is reportedly how it was originally shown at U.S. theatres.

3. The Criterion Blu-ray looks fabulous, though, with rich shadows and much facial detail I’ve never seen before. The visual compositions all have a sumptuous color palette, with a depth and clarity that no other version that I’ve seen even begins to approach. The Blu-ray is well worth purchasing just because of that.

4. The proposed Welles western that Norman Eshley talks about in his interview - the story of two ruined southerners who set out on a killing spree after the Civil War - sounds like it might be “Soldier, Soldier”, the script of which is located in the University of Michigan’s Welles archive. Hopefully someone can verify this sometime.

5. The commentary by Australian professor Adrian Martin is well done, and I especially like his observation of Mr. Clay having a vampiric quality. With the clarity of this Bluray edition, you can see that some of Welles’s glowering facial expressions as Mr. Clay seem almost vampire-like, and his makeup recalls the vampirish creature that Welles played in the early “Hearts of Age”. Even Clay’s moustache looks a bit like a pair of fangs. Plus, the fact that Clay is only seen in the evening or at night, and dies at the end when the sun comes up in the morning, looking drained and decayed, is interesting. There are many different variations on how to kill a vampire, and the one in Murnau's NOSFARATU ( the version Dineson probably would have been most familiar with as an Eastern European) says it must happen when a girl spends the night with the vampire and then the morning sun's rays kill him. That's sort of what happens in TIS.

[Le Chiffre]

6. In the French language version, the subtitles indicate that Virginie considers Levinsky to be like "the Wandering Jew" after he tells her of the pogrom that killed his family and forced him out of Poland ("at first I thought you were just someone in Mr. Clay's employ. But now I see you're the Wandering Jew')
Wiki on The Wandering Jew Legend:

"The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century.
The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character...

7. Francois Thomas observes in his interview that, at the time, THE IMMORTAL STORY was considered to be more of a Jeanne Moreau film then an Orson Welles film. The fact that it was being directed by a filmmaker of Welles's stature was seen as just a nice bonus. According to Thomas, the first broadcast was delayed several times for various reasons.

[Terry]

Having watched the Criterion a few times, it seems to me that Immortal Story is Welles' best film after Ambersons (which itself is a greater achievement than Kane, though I think even Welles' lost cut suffered a structural problem with the missing third act that Joe Cotten wrote him about; the re-edit certainly didn't redress that issue.) I doubt anyone anywhere shares the opinion that Story is a great work, it being Welles' most unsung and neglected piece (though if it were to become the dark horse which eclipses his other masterpieces, that would be fine by me.) It's such a careful, graceful, subtle, evocative, understated, assured, balanced and confident work, that his other films come across like a drunken bull rampaging through a China shop, with the occasional pause for the beast to admire itself in a mirror. I couldn't even watch F for Fake recently, a film I've loved for years, as it seemed so cheap, slapdash, incoherent, befuddled, yappy and babbling.

So overlooked is Immortal Story, that Mike's is the only post on the Internets to even notice that the Criterion is a shorter cut than the TCM version. I haven't seen the longer cut in many years and don't remember any of the four missing minutes, though the Criterion cut is perfectly shaped and paced as it is. I do have a vague impression of the shot of Mr. Clay in the window. What else is missing? And who's responsible for these two different English-language cuts? Welles?

Clay's obvious makeup could have been done for TV, where one wouldn't notice it in the standard definition of the day. It looks like the makeup from Orson's Bag and many of his stage productions, all the way back to stuff from Todd. I haven't decided yet if Welles thought his stage makeup looked good on film, when of course it doesn't and couldn't hold up under the scrutiny of a 35mm closeup. I'll continue mulling that.

[Le Chiffre]

That's a good idea, Terry. Let me see if I can get the TCM version uploaded.

Welles doesn't seem to have cared much about how phony his makeup looked in films, but then he probably never anticipated something like Bluray, where you can see the seems in a film like never before. I remember critic Dave Kehr remarked on how "outrageously false" his beard in ARKADIN was. The Criterion CHIMES brings out what to me seems the almost WC Fields-like quality of Falstaff's nose, and there are several shots where you can almost see the putty holding it on. In Othello, Welles's skin tone seems to change several times throughout the film, and in his commentary for the Kino STRANGER, Bret Wood remarks how you can at times see the wax holding Welles's moustache on. I guess all this just goes with the Bluray territory.

I'm more distracted by bad synch in Welles's later films, especially since that is something that can be corrected to a large extent with today's technology. The phony looking makeup is just something we have to accept, and I like to take it as part of the deliberately tongue-in-cheek artifice of Welles's film world.

I wrote above:
4. The proposed Welles western that Norman Eshley talks about in his interview - the story of two ruined southerners who set out on a killing spree after the Civil War - sounds like it might be “Soldier, Soldier”, the script of which is located in the University of Michigan’s Welles archive. Hopefully someone can verify this sometime.

Let me correct myself here. We recently learned from Mathew Asprey Gear, author of AT THE END OF THE STREET IN SHADOW, that SOLDIER, SOLDIER is not a western, but an alternate version of Welles's pirate adventure SANTO SPIRITO. Mathew found this out after inspecting the newly discovered Welles archive in Turin, Italy. I was also mistaken in saying that SOLDIER was part of the Michigan archive. As far as I know, it is not.

[Wellesnet]

Interesting look at a scene that compares the long and short versions of the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVuhD1_DQ04

[atcolomb]

Website Blu-ray.com has a "late" review of the Criterion release. The reviewer calls the film "odd but kind of weirdly captivating piece".

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Immo ... 43/#Review

[Wellesnet]

Jonathon Rosenbaum's essay for the Criterion Bluray-
The Immortal Story: Divas and Dandies
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts ... nd-dandies

[Le Chiffre]

A good Blu-ray review from DVD TALK and it does talk about the framing of the image.

http://trailersfromhell.com/the-immorta ... 70ENY-cHIW

One of the visual essays shows the widescreen frame line being used precisely in the very first shot. A mockup with sticks convinces us we’re looking at a ship in the Macao harbor, with a wall standing in for a stone wharf. If more image were visible below, the illusion of a harbor would be lost. In my experience that means that The Immortal Story was filmed with a hard matte.

Thanks atcolomb, for that interesting article. Welles filming THE IMMORTAL STORY in a hard-matted 1.66 is a logical possibility, although a letterboxed broadcast in 1968 is something I've never heard of before.

[Roger Ryan]

A good Blu-ray review from DVD TALK and it does talk about the framing of the image.

http://trailersfromhell.com/the-immorta ... 70ENY-cHIW

One of the visual essays shows the widescreen frame line being used precisely in the very first shot. A mockup with sticks convinces us we’re looking at a ship in the Macao harbor, with a wall standing in for a stone wharf. If more image were visible below, the illusion of a harbor would be lost. In my experience that means that The Immortal Story was filmed with a hard matte.

Thanks atcolomb, for that interesting article. Welles filming THE IMMORTAL STORY in a hard-matted 1.66 is a logical possibility, although a letterboxed broadcast in 1968 is something I've never heard of before.

Apart from a stray shot here and there where a head appears cropped a little more than one would expect, there's nothing in the film to suggest the film wasn't deliberately composed for 1.66:1. In fact, as suggested in the review, there would be many shots that would spoil the effect of the composition or make them appear ungainly with additional information at the top or bottom of the frame.

Since we've been discussing the version broadcast on TCM in the past that was four minutes longer, I thought I'd include my observations from a Facebook post I made today:

The added four minutes certainly helps with some of the pacing issues, especially with the early segments involving narration. I always thought that Welles was cutting the voice-over segments a little too tightly along with the length of certain transition shots, but now I see it was really an attempt to shorten the running time (presumably for television) and not because Welles thought the tighter cutting was an improvement (although maybe he felt that it was). Apart from the greater breathing room (quite a few reaction shots with no dialog), the added four minutes includes the narration line regarding "Mr. Clay believing in his omnipotence", a slightly longer set-up before Levinsky begins reading from Isaiah, some additional narration/shots as Levinsky returns to his apartment, and an extended exchange between Mr. Clay and the sailor while the sailor examines his sea shells. There might be a few other additions of dialog, but I didn't catch them. Overall, none of the content was really compromised by cutting these four minutes, but I prefer the more leisurely pacing which suits the style of this film.

[Le Chiffre]

I agree with you, Roger. The extra four minutes are not make-or-break, but seem to me to enhance the film's stoic qualities. That line you mentioned, which is actually "Mr. Clay had come to have faith in his own omnipotence", seems essential to me, making Mr. Clay's godlike pretensions more clear and resonant. Welles once described Mr. Clay as "a kind of director", and the "director as God" idea seems to anticipate The Other Side of the Wind, with both Hannaford and Clay manipulating "two strong and lusty jumping jacks" as part of a creation scheme.

Regarding the correct aspect ratio, yes, TIS looks fine for the most part in 1.66, but since visual composition was one of the glories of Wellesian cinema, it would be worth getting to the bottom of how how this film was shot - specifically whether a full frame version exists - and how the film was intended by Welles to be shown. This would also include pretty much all of Welles's later films, from TOUCH OF EVIL on. The Criterion set of TIS features a good interview with the film's DP Willie Kurant, but I don't think that A/R question was asked. Too bad. The case you made for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT being hard matted at 1.66 a few years ago was convincing I thought. I'd like to find some way to confirm whether that became Welles's operating standard for his later films (excepting FILMING OTHELLO).

BTW, for anyone wondering about the source for the version shown on TCM, it was probably an Australian Region 4 DVD from 2012, released by the "Madman" company. I've never seen that DVD myself, but it's been said that it has the 62-minute version. It was one of three Welles DVDs released by Madman that year.

[atcolomb]

I think i still have my TCM recording on a disc. I have a Panasonic dvd recorder and the back of my DirecTV receiver has a S-Video connection so i can get a good standard definition copy of anything i like to keep on a blank disc.

[Le Chiffre]

edmoney wrote:
Can anyone summarize what was cut in those 4 minutes and the reason for the cuts?

Wich2 wrote:
Ed, I would think those cuts might have been for the French TV broadcast? Does anyone know if they are sticklers for the one-hour block, as American TV is?

I originally figured as well that that 1-hour timeslot was the reason for cutting the four minutes, but I just re-watched the Francois Thomas interview on the Criterion set, and I didn't pay close enough attention the first time, because it seems that I was way off in assuming the French and English versions on the Criterion set were the same, aside from the language. According to Mr. Thomas, the French version runs only 50 minutes, eight minutes shorter than Criterion's English version, and twelve minutes shorter than the English version on TCM and the Madman DVD. Furthermore, the French version features about twelve minutes of shots that are different from the English version. So the French version alone makes the Criterion set worth getting.