(Editor’s note: Radiance / MVD Group Entertainment will release Malpertuis as a limited edition region-free Blu-ray disc on October 14. The Blu-ray is now available for preorder from mvdshop.com/products/malpertuis-blu-ray.
By MICHAEL HINERMAN
Orson Welles fans should welcome the upcoming Blu-ray release of Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis (1971). Nearly impossible to see until Barrel Entertainment’s ground-breaking 2007 DVD edition, Malpertuis remains a fascinating and unfairly neglected entry in the Welles acting canon.
Aside from the 4K upgrade, the Blu-ray benefits from a plethora of extras, the most significant of which for Welles fans is the revelatory featurette Orson Welles Uncut, which documents Welles’s approach to his acting gigs in ways hitherto unseen. Watching Orson Welles Uncut is a comically surreal experience, given that it is a vicious, unrelenting attack on Welles, where unintentional humor is supplied by the fact that the Welles we see in the outtakes bears no resemblance whatever to the monster we hear described by the people being interviewed.
Director Harry Kümel, remembered primarily for the visually striking vampire movie Daughters of Darkness, and radiating waves of petty resentment, reports that Welles was drunk throughout the four-day shoot, and couldn’t remember his lines. The Welles we see in the outtakes is word-perfect and apparently sober.
Kümel states that Welles antagonized the entire cast, who hated him, and who were so relieved when Welles finished his role and left the project that they had a party! We then cut to actress Susan Hampshire, who says that she loved working with Welles.
Next up is a condescending, pretentious monologue from co-star Mathieu Carriere, hired in 1971 for his pretty boy looks, and now a Gauloises-shriveled wreck, comparing Welles to some sort of strange animal that you can’t direct, but only follow with the camera lens, an odd comparison to make given that Welles plays his entire part bedridden. Carrier describes the 56-year-old Welles as “already dying even then” (in 1971! Someone should have told Oja!), and that Kümel, in letting Welles direct himself, was doing Welles a favor (“that was Harry’s gift to Welles”).
Kümel bizarrely insists that Welles’s biggest problem was that he had let the movies move past him, that Welles was not conversant with the great advances in film technique made since, well, Citizen Kane. Kümel’s evidence for this? Welles preferred to post-synch his dialogue rather than record direct sound, a common practice in both Hollywood and Europe, and one which Welles had been using to tremendous creative effect since Ambersons. This less-than-astute observation was formed at the time Welles was shooting the technically radical The Other Side of the Wind, with his groundbreaking essay-film F for Fake ahead of him.
The best story of all is that, having apparently been such an obstructive presence throughout the shoot (Welles liked to have long lunches! And drink champagne! Quelle horreur!), Welles offered Kümel a free day of shooting. He then proceeded to fly through 18 set-ups, before departing at noon. Kümel, who comes across as a self-important, humorless prig, quite fails to see the very obvious Wellesian irony in this.
Throughout all this egregious defamation we see footage of Welles behaving completely professionally, offering his director multiple interpretations of a scene, or of a line of dialogue; getting irritated when his performance is not sufficiently inspired; solicitously asking his director if this or that was “OK”, or if he needs another take. Above all, unlike Kümel, he appears to be having fun. Couldn’t Kümel have come up with a least one take of Welles berating a fellow actor, or blowing his lines, or nipping from a flask, or throwing some sort of a tantrum? But no, he doesn’t, not one.
It’s as if the filmmakers had absorbed all the “Welles as tyrannical ham” stories that various second-raters had been dining out on over the years (and making money off of in memoirs and interviews – I’m looking at you, Austin Pendleton), decided that would sell, discovered that they had nothing with which to back up their original premise, and proceeded anyway. It’s like a Monty Python sketch where the humor is unintentional.
After watching this documentary, I am reminded of Welles’s explanation of his later acting career: “they hire me when they have a bad movie and want to give it a little class”. Malpertuis is not a bad movie; it is, in fact, a rather good one, but it is a frustrating experience; full of very real virtues, but many avoidable faults; worth seeing, for sure, for its extraordinary set design and ravishing cinematography by the great Gerry Fisher; for its phantasmagorical premise; for Welles, magnetic and domineering in his “Mr. Clay” mold; and for Susan Hampshire’s mesmerizingly otherworldly performance(s).
Mathieu Carriere, unfortunately, is dull, amateurish, wooden and unconvincing in the lead; his attempt to appear enigmatic comes across as merely confused. There are also some poor supporting performances.
Where Malpertuis really stumbles is in Kümel’s inability to bring any kind of visionary light to the story; he seems content to illustrate, rather than illuminate, his source, in this case the 1943 novel of the same name by esteemed Belgian fantasy writer Jean Ray. A genuinely great artist, like Welles or Kümel’s mentor Joseph Von Sternberg, brings an expansive inner vision to his material to which everything else, the source, the script, the settings, the photography, the performances, the editing, etc., is completely subordinate. The source, be it Shakespeare, or Kafka, or an esteemed Belgian fantasy novelist, is never an end-in-itself, but instead serves as a springboard to conjure a world, with its own peculiar rules and logic, which we are then invited to enter and explore.
Malpertuis, in its original form a dreamy fable of myth and modernity, practically demands such an approach, but Kümel brings nothing beyond a certain visual panache, and never succeeds in conjuring a world; he is very obviously flailing around, and Malpertuis suffers for it. The film’s rhythm is off; baffling shifts in tone and clunky editing patterns are extremely alienating, and a good half hour could be chopped out of the running time without any great loss, especially during the awful tavern scene. Malpertuis does not seduce, there is no poetry in it, and without that seduction and poetry and sense of longing for another, earlier, more colorful, more vivid, more interesting, more passionate, perhaps more dangerous, world than the one we inhabit, Malpertuis has no raison d’etre. The climax, which should be a shattering emotional experience, becomes, in Kümel’s cloddish, calloused hands, a trivial, incoherent mess.
It’s worth pondering what Welles could have done with Ray’s novel. I have no idea if Welles read it, or any of Ray’s work, but given his well-known interest in Greek myth, and his reported enthusiasm for the project (at least in the beginning), this would not surprise me. Perhaps Kümel’s unfathomable hostility towards Welles, during filming and forever after, lay in a subconscious realization that Welles, and not he, was really the man for the job.
MVD Shop is currently offering the Malpertuis Blu-ray online for $31.47 – thirty percent off the list price. Despite my sharp criticisms in this review, it is a worthy addition to any Wellesian’s collection.