By RAY KELLY
A previously lost Orson Welles film, Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah, produced for the fledgling home video market has been uncovered.
The Estate of Orson Welles purchased at auction copies of two of the six Cartrivision shorts Welles wrote, directed, produced and starred in for Avco Broadcasting Corp. with an eye on commercial release. Avco’s Cartrivision, which predated Sony Betamax and VHS videotapes, was sold through retail giant Sears, Roebuck & Co. in 1972.
The acquired titles of Welles’ dramatic recitations were Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah (Avco 10245S-JJ) and American Heritage Vol. 2: Clarence Darrow (Avco 10244S-JJ). Unfortunately, the Clarence Darrow tape had been bulk erased sometime over the past 50 years. (There have been unconfirmed reports some prerecorded tapes were bulk erased during Cartrivision’s liquidation over copyright concerns.)
However, the videotape of Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah was remarkably intact.
The square cartridge’s half-inch magnetic tape was recently digitized in Los Angeles. The Cartrivision tape shedded white powder during the initial effort and deteriorated further during a second pass.
Wellesnet was afforded the opportunity to watch Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah, which contains separate performances by Welles on the Greek philosopher and the biblical patriarch. The total running time is more than 18 minutes with eight minutes devoted to Socrates and the remainder to Noah. As expected, it is a fairly simple production that relies heavily on the power of Welles’ voice.
Filmed in late summer 1970, the program was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and begins with the credit Orson Welles Presents Two Wise Men: Socrates & Noah — dropping the Old from the title found on the green and blue Cartrivision packaging.
“I’d like to repeat a few words spoken more than 2,000 years ago by a man pleading for his life,” Welles intones after a few puffs of a cigar at the start of the videotape. “They found him guilty, but he was one of the best human beings to ever draw a breath on this planet. He never wrote a single word, but the things he said after all this time they are still remembered word by word and still have lots to do with what keeps civilization more or less open for business. His name was Socrates.”
Welles recounts the trial of Socrates in 399 B.C. from a tastefully furnished living room, sometimes seated, but often standing. His stirring recitation touches on obedience to the law, the pursuit of money over truth and the generation gap.
“Even way back then in Athens, a few centuries before the birth of Christ, they had problems with the younger generation — but not Socrates,” Welles recalled. “He was very heavy with the kids and this — not surprisingly — got him into trouble with the Establishment. The way he was rapping with them was supposed to be giving youth some dangerous ideas.”
The trial of Socrates performance that follows the introduction rivals some of the finest moments of Welles’ illustrious radio work of the late 1930s and ’40s.
“If you in this court should say to me, “Socrates, this time we will let you off, but on one condition that you are not to inquire or speculate any longer and if we catch you doing it again, you shall die,’ I would have to reply, ‘I shall obey god, rather than you.’ As a soldier in the wars, I went where I was ordered like any other man facing death. So, what if now if I imagine god orders me to fulfill the philosopher’s mission of searching for truth I were to desert my duty because I was afraid of death — that would be very strange. To fear death is to pretend to know what cannot be known.”
The accompanying Noah segment was shot outdoors with Southern California homes in the background.
Welles starts by recounting his lifelong interest in Noah, noting his recitation draws from his own unproduced work, Two by Two.
“About the first Christmas I can remember, I was given one of those toy Noah’s ark with all the little wooden animals Since them I’ve always been fascinated by Noah’s story and when I grew up I wrote a play on the subject, and a film script and a novel.”
This home video performance, Welles notes, serves as a goodbye of sorts to the unpublished, never filmed Two by Two.
Wearing glasses, holding a Bible and adopting a Yiddish dialect, Welles recounts the biblical story of the Flood.
“The character speaking is a simple man — no prophet — and you may observe that he is the same faith as the original authors of Genesis, no offense is intended, but this is after all a Jewish story,” Welles remarks at the start.
His reading of the Flood, complete with glasses and red jacketed Bible, is nearly identical in content and length to the performance he had given several weeks earlier on The Dick Cavett Show, which aired on July 27, 1970.
At the conclusion of the 18 and a half-minute videotape, the simple end credit reads: Produced & Directed by Orson Welles for Avco Broadcasting.
The Welles estate is hoping to make the short film available to a wide audience. The work is being carried out by David Reeder of Reeder Brand Management, which handles licensing for the estate.
In addition to Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah and American Heritage Vol. 2: Clarence Darrow, Welles produced four other Cartrivision titles: Ring Lardner’s The Golden Honeymoon, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, the works of G.K. Chesterton and writings of P.G. Wodehouse. The Golden Honeymoon was recovered nearly two decades ago and premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2005.
The six Cartrivision tapes have sometimes been referred to as An Evening with Orson Welles, though that name does not appear on the packaging or film credits. Each Welles-directed Cartrivision title is believed to have run 30 minutes or less.
Filming on these shorts commenced on August 31, 1970, according to the memoir of Welles’ longtime cinematographer, the late Gary Graver. The August 31 date puts the Cartrivision shoot just eight days after Welles began filming The Other Side of the Wind.
The Cartrivision shorts were filmed at Welles’ rented Beverly Hills home on Lawlen Way, which was also where early footage for The Other Side of the Wind was shot and the narration for Rikki-Tikki-Tavi recorded.
“Shooting the shorts for Sears was a simple job,” Graver wrote in Making Movies with Orson Welles. “We finished them and sent them off. But we never received any feedback and we never heard anything about them again. Now, in hindsight, I wish I’d saved copies of those, since they seem to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth! Only one of those shorts, Ring Lardner’s The Golden Honeymoon, is known to exist today. I would love to see those again.”
Avco subsidiary Cartridge Television Inc. unveiled its Cartrivision television consoles with built-in recorders at a trade show in June 1970. The first of these handsome high-end units — priced at $1,600 — were sold by Sears two years later.
The retailer also marketed an “instant replay” camera for shooting black and white home videos. The initial roll out was followed by standalone player-recorders at $700.
Cartrivision offered blank tapes for home recording, about 100 feature films for purchase in 1972 and another 200 titles strictly for consumer rental. A special device in the possession of the rental department was needed to rewind those tapes to limit repeated customer viewings.
Avco billed Cartrivision as an “electronic miracle that turns your home into a personal television theater with a world of programming at your fingertips.”
But dismal retail sales prompted Avco to pull the plug on its Cartrivision line.
In July 1973, Cartridge Television filed for bankruptcy, having used up nearly all its money to introduce its product, according to the New York Times. An Ohio liquidator subsequently sold off the surplus recorders.
Later, it was claimed that Cartrivision videotapes disintegrated if stored in high humidity.
“Lost Orson Welles ‘Socrates & Noah’ film surfaces” — © Wellesnet | The Orson Welles Web Resource, 2022
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