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. **. 

THE OTHER SIDE OF NETFLIX' "MAKING A MURDERER"

THE OTHER SIDE OF NETFLIX' MAKING A MURDERER

I confess that I only watched the first episode of Netflix' Making a Murderer non-fiction series. I didn't think the documentary was that well done, and had no great interest in watching ten hours of this story: its premise was that Steven Avery, wrongfully convicted of a rape and imprisoned for 18 years, was also wrongfully convicted of the rape-murder of Teresa Halbach subsequent to his release, and that police planted evidence to convict him. I am well aware of how venal human nature can be, and I am certainly aware of corrupt cops, but I found it hard to believe that men who had long-time honorable careers would suddenly risk those careers, as well as jail time, just because Avery filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit -- after all, whatever money judgment he received would have come from the taxpayers, not out of the pockets of those law enforcement officials. It would also mean that the "real" killer would get away with a ghastly crime, and be left free to attack and murder more innocent women. I don't buy it. Yet, apparently the prosecutor in the original rape case knew of Avery's innocence and did nothing to stop his conviction ... Two recent books look at the Teresa Halbach murder and the Netflix documentary about Steven Avery.

AVERY: The Case Against Steven Avery and What Making a Murderer Gets Wrong. Ken Kratz with Peter Wilkinson. Foreword by Nancy Grace. Benbella; 2017.

Ken Krartz, the prosecutor on the case, intelligently explains how the documentary, which can hardly be accused of objectivity, distorted or withheld key facts so that Avery would seem innocent. Kratz, who was disgraced when he foolishly sexted a crime victim, received death threats not for that behavior, but because he supposedly prosecuted an innocent man. Many of these hateful messages, I believe, are generated by criminal types who hate the police and the justice system.

Avery makes a strong case that Steven Avery was guilty as sin, Kratz may make excuses for his reprehensible behavior -- the old sexual addiction ploy -- but that doesn't mean his case against Avery isn't solid. Avery built up a lot of hate over those 18 years in jail, and although he only succeeded in screwing up his own life even more, he took out his hatred on a perfectly innocent woman. With all the hoopla over the documentary, it's sad that the victim, Teresa Halbach, has been almost forgotten.

Verdict: The other side of the story. ***.

INDEFENSIBLE: The Missing Truth About Steven Avery, Tersa Halbach, and Making a Murderer. Michael Griesbach. Kensington; 2016.

Michael Griesbach is a prosecutor, but he did not work on the Steven Avery murder trial. He found it hard to believe that police officers he greatly respected would have framed Avery for murder, but he was troubled by much of what he saw in Making a Murderer -- until he dug deeper and discovered how the documentary withheld information and used editing tricks to support their theory that Avery was innocent. Grisbach is unsparing in his condemnation of the men who allowed Avery to be (in this case) wrongly convicted of the original rape charge, but he intelligently and astutely makes the case for Avery's murder of Teresa Halbach. Griesbach allows that there might have been mistakes made, such as in the interrogation of Avery's nephew, but point by point he exposes Making a Murderer's inaccuracies (to put it mildly) and the fact that the documentary leaves out much information that would point towards Avery's obvious guilt. Indefensible is an eye-opener.

Verdict: Possibly the final word on Steven Avery. ***1/2.