Lively, entertaining reviews of, and essays on, old and newer films and everything relating to them, written by professional author William Schoell.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

John Huston as Jake Hannaford
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (Released 2018). Filmed from 1970 - 1976. Director: Orson Welles.

"He's so crooked he has rubber pockets so he can steal soup!"

"I'm bored with the whole story."

Director Jake Hannaford (John Huston) is celebrating his 70th birthday with a large assemblage of friends, enemies, and sycophants, while bemoaning the fact that he apparently can't complete his latest movie because his leading man, John Dale (Robert Random), has run off, not to mention the usual financial difficulties. Attending his party are such people as director-acolyte Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich); critic Julie Rich (Susan Strasberg), who asks too many questions; associate Billy Boyle (Norman Foster); cynical actress Zarah Valeski (Lilli Palmer); and other characters played by Edmund O'Brien, Cameron Mitchell, Mercedes McCambridge, Paul Stewart, Gregory Sierra, Dan Tobin, John Carroll, and others. Interspersed with scenes from the party are sections of the uncompleted film-within-a film being made by Hannaford. 

Peter Bogdanovich
As revealed in the excellent book Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of 'The Other Side of the Wind' by Josh Karp, Welles took years to shoot this film outside the studio system and never did complete it. After years of legal entanglements it was eventually finished by others supposedly working from Welles' notes, and then released by Netflix. Some of the material seems to have been watered down from the original intentions for one reason or another, as you only know certain things are going on because you've read about the movie in Karp's book or elsewhere. 

Robert Random and Oja Kodar
The big problem with The Other Side of the Wind is that it has no plot, no decent script, only a premise that is never developed. The party scenes are shot with hand-held cameras that give the movie a very cheap cinema verite feel but also distance the viewer from what's going on on screen. The clips from Hannaford's movie are shot in color and widescreen and these sequences are a bit more striking -- a would-be sex scene in a car between the character played by Dale and the character played by Welles' real-life mistress (and co-screenwriter) Oja Kodar, for instance, and a sequence where Kodar walks about nude in the desert -- with a very hokey phallic symbol in evidence. (Kodar does have a nice body but that's about all you can say about her acting and writing abilities.) One doesn't know who contributed the film's rare moments of quality dialogue, but we can guess. 

Hannaford celebrates his birthday with a cake
We've been told by Welles' chroniclers that in this film Hannaford is a macho closet case who seduces his leading ladies (or the wives of his leading men) when he really wants to bed the leading men, and that he is obsessed with his current (or vanished) star John Dale. The evidence for this consists only of Hannaford keeping many life-size dummies of Dale around his residence, and some remarks made by Strasberg near the end of the film that don't cut quite close enough to make all of this a certainty. ("Have a go at the dummy, Jake," McCambridge says when someone starts shooting at them, "they bleed even more easily than people.") If Welles had finished his film, everything might have been made more explicit or at least more comprehensible, but I'm not sure that it would have made an especially good movie in any case, and the sexually-conflicted Welles, who had some old-fashioned ideas about homosexuality, probably wasn't the best person for this project in the first place. One of the longest scenes has to do with Jake going on about "faggots" to an English professor (Dan Tobin, who is excellent) who once had Dale in his class.

Lilli Palmer
John Huston might seem like perfect casting for Jake Hannaford but he only hits the mark in a couple of scenes, and is not that effective throughout most of the movie. Bogdanovich, although a trifle amateurish at times, suggests that he might have had a major career as an actor had he chosen that route instead of directing (of course he did amass 57 acting credits!!). Strasberg is a cast stand-out, and there are nice vignettes from Palmer, O'Brian, Sierra, Stewart, McCambridge, Mitchell, and others. The Other Side of the Wind truly shows desperation when Welles calls in a bunch of midgets to cause mischief, and although, as mentioned, there is some good dialogue lost in the mess, the movie is more often than not simply pretentious. The film is so briskly edited that you aren't bored, at least until it becomes painfully apparent that there isn't any real storyline. Michel Legrand's nice score does its best to smooth over the rough edges but it's a losing battle. 

Verdict: What a shame! An Orson Welles Home Movie. **. 

6 comments:

Ed Walters said...

The scene in the car was exciting and colorful but otherwise it wasn’t that memorable in my opinion. Maybe I should give it another look.

William said...

I agree that that was one of the better scenes in the movie, kind of wild with the driver going after the guy or the woman -- it wasn't clear which one he was after actually -- but the rest was not something I would want to sit through again, LOL!

Thanks for your comment, Ed!

irish said...

Disagree with your review. A great movie.

William said...

Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil were all great movies -- did you REALLY think Other Side of the Wind was in that league?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, however. Thanks for your comment.

angelman66 said...

Hi Bill - must agree with you 100% on this; it's a tragic mess in my opinion for all the reasons you state. What a waste of an amazing cast...I have NO idea what Welles's vision was supposed to be here...
-C

William said...

I don't think he knew, either, Chris, although his apologists and super Welles fans see this as a great movie and if you don't like it you just don't "get it." Welles had a basic idea -- older macho director wants to make a trendy movie that will prove he's still relevant in Hollywood terms, but can't deal with his sexuality (another cliche, in fact, the guy who is TOO macho to cover up insecurity about his homosexual feelings), and so on -- but where the hell is the decent screenplay that would really bring all these disparate characters to life? Some of the actors are great but they can only do so much with sub-standard material. Yes, satirical points about Hollywood and the filmmaking process are made, and yes, the movie-within-a-movie is Hannaford's vision, not Welles, but you still need a strong story and "Wind" just hasn't got one. Some people gave up their own dreams, destroyed their own marriages, to keep working with Welles on this picture, and it's literally a crying shame that the ultimate result is so utterly mediocre. Even if Welles had lived there's little he could have done to save this.