By RAY KELLY
Sunday night’s sold-out screening of The Deep workprint capped four evenings of unfinished Orson Welles movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The series kicked off on Nov. 19 with the U.S. premiere of the restored The Merchant of Venice before a capacity crowd.
Stefan Dröessler, director of the Munich Film Museum, hosted The Unknown Orson Welles as part of the 13th annual MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. It was rare treat for U.S. fans as Dröessler has told Wellesnet there are no immediate plans to release the footage on home video.
I attended the showing of The Deep. With the help of Wellesnetters and bloggers, here are some general impressions of the past four nights.
Sunday, November 22 – Scenes from The Deep workprints with voiceover by Dröessler.
With the negative lost, the Munich Film Museum has assembled footage from a surviving black and white and a faded color workprints in narrative order with Dröessler offering brief live commentary that fills in the blanks of missing scenes.
Dröessler prefaced the MoMA screening by reminding the audience that this was an assembly of scenes shot by Welles in the late 1960s. As a result, many scenes play longer than they would in a finished film and some patches of dialogue are repeated. The condition of the composite workprint was not nearly as distracting as the absence of sound, particularly lines delivered by Welles.
Based on Charles Williams’ novel Dead Calm, Welles’ movie was designed to prove he could be a bankable director by producing an entertaining yarn. Michael Bryant is cast as the iron-jawed husband of Oja Kodar’s beautiful Rae Ingram. Laurence Harvey is the unhinged Hughie Warriner and Welles and Jeanne Moreau’s provide comic relief.
In its current state, it is difficult to determine how The Deep would have ranked alongside Welles’ earlier thrillers, The Stranger or The Lady From Shanghai. (Dröessler hopes to eventually color correct the footage and tighten the running time from its present 115 minutes).
The dialogue is sharp and the story is clearly compelling. (Phillip Noyce’s successful Dead Calm is based on the same source material).
Editor Mauro Bonanni’s theory that Welles’ abandoned The Deep because of Kodar’s lackluster performance finds support in what was shown at MoMA on Sunday. While Kodar’s delivery might have improved with dubbing, her character shows little expression when dealing with a psychopath as her husband is stranded on a sinking ship. As in F For Fake and The Other Side of the Wind, Welles focuses on his young lover’s physical charms.
Saturday, November 21 – Journey into Fear, a reconstruction of the longer preview version.
Joe Bendel (j.b. spins): The intrepid Munich Filmmuseum tracked down the various cuts as well as the shooting script to reconstruct a more coherent and surprising funny super-cut of (Norman) Foster’s Journey Into Fear… Journey has always been an entertaining yarn, but the more complete version makes considerably more sense. Even though the Filmmuseum restoration team was again forced to resort to intertitles in places, the reconstructed preview cut gives us a fuller sense of the wit and irony of the script co-written by Welles and star Joseph Cotton. It is rather delightfully mordant… What RKO did to their Welles catalog makes you want to pull your hair out. A longer, smoother cut could have become an iconic film, much like Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man. Even with intertitles, the Filmmuseum version is the best way to see it, so hopefully it will be more widely screened in the future.
Friday, November 20 – Scenes from The Other Side of the Wind and The Dreamers with trailers for The Deep and F for Fake.
Joe Bendel (j.b. spins): Among the program of maddeningly incomplete Wellesiana, The Dreamers best stands alone as a discrete film in its present state. That said, Welles’ original trailer for F for Fake further advances the docu-hybrid’s meta jokes, while the extended teaser for The Deep ought to make Welles fans drool for the work-print screening on Sunday. Unfortunately, the work-print screening of The Other Side of the Wind scenes edited by Welles are distractingly rough and the events they depict—a film shoot jeopardized by the abrupt departure of its star—are spookily prescient of the fate that would befall the still unfinished film. While still somewhat fragmentary, The Dreamers manages to end on a note that roughly approximates closure. It is a deceptively simple, almost confessional film, focusing first on Welles playing a 19th Century trader obsessed with the immortal Italian diva Pellegrina Leoni, whom Kodar then portrays in more recent times. In their interpretation, she becomes sort of a Flying Dutchman Norma Desmond. Although Welles and Kodar pitched the film to number of big name stars, he clearly takes pleasure from Kodar’s close-ups.
Thursday, November 19 – The Merchant of Venice, King Lear pitch reel (1985) and film clips documenting Welles’s theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare.
JBrooks (Message Board): I thought the restoration was wonderful. The image is a revelation. It’s not perfect but it’s a vast improvement over the workprint footage in One Man Band. There are some color timing issues here and there and some grainier bits, but for the most part, it looks wonderful. It is colorful and sharp and often looks perfect – like a newly struck print of a well preserved film from the 1960s.As for the soundtrack, Droessler has replaced the missing dialogue with dialogue from Welles’ 1938 Mercury Theater Record of the play… It’s not a perfect solution obviously, but I think it works and is probably preferable to trying to overdub the footage with new actors. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised at how close the line readings from 1938 fit the filmed scenes… The film itself is difficult to judge because it’s incomplete. It’s a very truncated version of the play, and on top of that, the end of the film itself is missing. Welles apparently intended the film to end with Shylock’s “I am a Jew speech.” Apparently that scene was never shot – so Droessler plays the 1938 recording of the speech over a black screen.
Drucker (Criterion forum): It was more of a lecture than anything else, but the restored Merchant of Venice is certainly the best looking color film I’ve seen from Welles. Stylistically, it was very similar to Immortal Story, but I actually found it better and more powerful overall.
John Touhy (Facebook): Welles’ performance as Shylock was quite moving. Stefan Dröessler’s presentation and the clips he shared powerfully conveyed the struggles that Orson Welles went through to make his films, as well as the man’s sensitivity and intelligence. I left MoMA admiring Welles more than ever.
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