The Hollywood Reporter gave a favorable nod to director Chuck Workman’s documentary, but noted the difficulty in summing up Welles’ life in 94 minutes when there is enough material for a mini-series. THR stated that “Workman’s strengths as a miner of archives really pay off here, as he offers up exceedingly rare documentary footage of his subject drawn from diverse international sources, peeks at unfinished works and camera tests Welles himself shot.”
Interview subjects include authors Simon Callow, James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride; filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Henry Jaglom, Michael Dawson, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Marshall; colleagues Oja Kodar, Norman Lloyd and Ruth Ford; mentor Roger Hill’s daughter Jane Hill Sykes; and Welles’ surviving daughters Christopher Welles Feder and Beatrice Welles-Smith.
Workman also makes use of vintage interviews with John Houseman, William Alland, Robert Wise, Richard Wilson, Michael MacLiammoir, Suzanne Cloutier, and Anthony Perkins.
“The Welles saga has been told innumerable times, including in a host of hefty biographies, and it can’t be said that there is much here in the way of new information or insights. One thing Workman does provide, however, is a strong visual sense of the world in which his subject lived and worked. No other Welles chronicler has gone to Woodstock, Illinois, to film the very theater in which Orson, in his early teens, put on and acted in his first Shakespeare productions, or has so vividly captured his subject’s 1950s European sojourn (we hear Welles speaking barely passable Italian), which qualified him as the pioneer post-war independent American filmmaker.”
The entire review can be found here.
Magician will be featured at the Mill Valley Film Festival in San Rafael, California on October 10. It will be shown alongside a tribute to Workman, who will receive the MVFF Award from the California Film Institute.
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