Reactions to 'The Other Side of the Wind'

[Wellesnet]

Darkness Induced Audience Apathy:
"This is one really dark, bleak movie about the endless frustration of the movie business without any glamour or pleas for TrueArt anywhere. It's also about growing old and about Hollywood never being worth all that much at any point of time, and the fact that even liking movies is probably not all that good a pastime. A case can be made for it being Welles' bleakest film ever.

Despite being a satirical movie about cinephilia and uncritical adulation of older films, a lot of the jokes and references depend on a good knowledge of arcane film history. A good example is the scene where Hannaford is blowing the candles, and one of them makes a joke about a car crash of [[Creator/Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Murnau]] and [[Creator/James Dean Dean]], which refers to the fact that both Murnau and Dean died in a car crash before the premier of their final films and they both died fairly young, adding in a dose of Dramatic Irony given that Hannaford's death under similar circumstances is given away in the opening narration. The scene is also lit in a very expressionistic style that evokes Murnau's German Expressionism.

When the film was in production throughout the 1970s, the decadent nature of Hollywood was still just the subject of myth among much of the general public, with the film industry still maintaining a glamorous facade that allowed it to seem like this land of milk and honey for aspiring talent. In light of the Me Too movement that started just a year before the film's eventual release, however, it comes off as one of the first (albeit heavily belated) truly honest looks into what Hollywood is actually like, being a decadent, parasitic entity that leeches off of young stars for personal gain and gradually causes its biggest names to rot away both physically and mentally.

The general critical view is average. Many argue that it's a movie that plays well given the nature of its incomplete nature and post-production views, but they also feel that it's not a masterpiece and the film still remains underdeveloped owing to the fact that Welles never finished it himself. Others are staying on the fence on account of the fact that Welles' films really do have weak receptions only to later be heralded as a great film.

Most of Welles' career avert this owing to his progressive values and before-it-was-cool leftist stances, but ''The Other Side of the Wind'' while being a fairly critical and subversive film of Hollywood, and being as it is, Welles' most with-it film with its nudity and sex, brushes against contemporary issues such as the fact that Croatian actress Oja Kodar plays a Native American actress who is topless in the film-within-the-film and is a fairly underdeveloped character. The film critic Juliette Riche is intended as a spoof of Creator/PaulineKael, but some of her criticisms about Hannaford's macho affectations, as well as exploiting his cast and crew, come off as being far more valid and accurate than Welles may have intended given the Me Too era.

PacingProblems:
Inevitable given the nature of how it finally came together, but the film's first 25 minutes or so is deadly slow and introduces a bunch of characters only few of them continue till the end, and it isn't until the party sequence begins that the movie really picks up.

[Wellesnet]

Has "The Other Side of the Wind" played a part in a revitalized interest in the Easy Rider era?

Sight and Sound magazine is beginning a series exploring the history of New Hollywood:
https://shop.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound ... ywood.html

[Wellesnet]

http://www.filmmonthly.com/film/the-oth ... f-the-wind

Am I to treat this as a product of the 1970s, the 2010s, or the 40 years it took to come to life? I’d veer towards the latter, but it actually doesn’t matter too much. The Other Side of the Wind is surprisingly timeless, as are its successes and shortcomings. It isn’t like dated morals are a pervasive issue, either: This is a satire, and it’s quite an effective one. Orson Welles’ final film is a staccato, bitter piss-take on modernity, standing highest when it falls into itself à la Godard and Vertov. It’s the reliance on more baseline narratives that detract the most, though, softening the film’s edges.

Welles’s editing (which was finalized by Bob Murawski) isn’t just hard. It’s austere, and it stomps viewers into a submission exemplifying the director’s most arresting tendencies. Welles never had an issue with being seen as “pretentious” and Wind doesn’t differ too much from his punk rock sensibilities for most of its first hour. It’s the second hour that loses its magic as it knits its threads—both technically and thematically—into a more controllable film. So just who’s to blame? Those that brought an unrealized mind to reality? Maybe Welles himself? Yet these questions (and frustrations) add a bit to the mystique. After all, this is an unfinished film, and it’s something to behold.

*******

Cinema Crazed
Phil Hall

Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” was, for many years, the second most infamous unfinished film of all time. (A certain Jerry Lewis film earned the top spot within incomplete cinema.) As everyone knows by now, the film was posthumously stitched together 42 years after principal photography was finished and is now being made available via Netflix. To be blunt, it would have been better if Welles’ unedited work was left in oblivion.

“The Other Side of the Wind” cannot be taken seriously as an Orson Welles film. In reality, it was an Orson Welles home movie, with the master filmmaker recruiting many of his longtime pals for parts in a warped roman à clef self-pity tale about a party for a down-and-out director (John Huston playing Welles) who is trying and failing to raise funds for his latest project, an Antonioni-style art film designed to connect with a youth culture that has shunned the old master’s canon.

Much of the footage takes place during a party where the director’s work is being screened, and guests include characters who are thinly disguised to resemble Welles’ friends and frenemies including Marlene Dietrich (Lilli Palmer), Pauline Kael (Susan Strasberg), John Houseman (Tonio Selwart) and Peter Bogdanovich (played by Bogdanovich – Rich Little, who was initially cast and departed the production before its completion, can be spotted in a few scenes). Other old-time Hollywood types including Edmond O’Brien, Mercedes McCambridge, George Jessel, Benny Rubin and midget icon Angelo Rossitto turn up, along with early 1970s Hollywood players including Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazurksky and Henry Jaglom. Welles’ real-life and reel-life collaborator Oja Kodar co-wrote the screenplay and appears in the film-within-the-film segments as an American Indian who spends a surplus amount of time wandering around naked without betraying any clue that she is capable of acting.

Welles shot “The Other Side of the Wind” in a mix of 35mm, 16mm and 8mm formats, with switching between color and black-and-white. The result is a visual hodgepodge, which is not helped by a strangely incompetent score by Michel Legrand that rarely matches the mood of the visuals. (In fairness, no score was recorded during Welles’ life and Legrand tried to guess what Welles might have approved based on sketchy notes.) The stop-and-start nature of the six-year production history is fairly obvious, especially when it becomes clear that certain actors are isolated in segments where they do not share the frame with their castmates. (Lilli Palmer, in particular, seems to be in her own movie.)

In an attempt to fit in with the shifting cultural liberties of the early 1970s, Welles stuffed “The Other Side of the Wind” with mild obscenities, sexually charged sequences for the film-within-a-film footage and a half-considered homosexual subplot, but these come across as clumsy rather than cutting-edge. Overstuffed hammy performances by actors who have no connection to the central story – most notably Cameron Mitchell doing a bogus Texas accent as a disgruntled make-up artist and Norman Foster as a candy-addicted ex-alcoholic crony of Huston – create irritating distractions, and some vague talk about film theory and the Hollywood studio system are thrown in to appease the cinephile snobs.

Ultimately, “The Other Side of the Wind” is not so much an artistic achievement as it is the cinematic equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall – sadly, nothing really sticks, leaving the viewer with a wasted pasta of a movie.

[Wellesnet]

Film Critic JONATHAN ROSENBAUM discusses Welles, The Other Side of the Wind, plus His Book CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS: Interviews And Dialogues!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48F1mcs8Uqg

[RayKelly]

Netflix released extensive viewership data for the first time. The viewership numbers for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND were not reported, but the audience for THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD was disappointing.
https://www.wellesnet.com/netflix-viewership/

[Terry]

Whoever the population of Google Users are, only 41% of them liked The Other Side of the Wind, the only Welles film they outright rejected. It just can't compete with the likability of Man in the Shadow!

The Man in the Shadow 96
Tomorrow Is Forever 91
Trent's Last Case 90
Jane Eyre 88
The Stranger 87
Three Cases of Murder 86
Touch of Evil 86
Macbeth 84
The Lady from Shanghai 83
The Third Man 83
Othello 83
The Trial 83
F for Fake 83
Black Magic 82
Mr. Arkadin 82
Citizen Kane 81
The Magnificent Ambersons 81
Journey into Fear 80
The Prince of Foxes 80
Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight) 79
The Immortal Story 74
Don Quixote 73
Too Much Johnson 68
The Black Rose 66
The Other Side of the Wind 41

[Roger Ryan]

I suspect Welles would have been heartbroken that Chimes at Midnight ranked so low on this Google user list, but may have been delighted to see both The Trial and F For Fake rated higher than Citizen Kane... and might have been amused to see Mr. Arkadin rated higher as well!

[tonyw]

Such lists are really arbitrary, and I doubt whether they include anybody who is really specialist in the areas concerned and have sufficient background and knowledge to make appropriate evaluations.

[Wellesnet]

Mathew Asprey Gear discusses "The Other Side of the Wind" in this recent Zoomcast: