The Other Side of Orson Welles
In January 2018, a gaggle of Hollywood A-listers, including directors Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne and Rian Johnson, filed into a Santa Monica screening room to see a rough cut of a film which finished principal photography a mere 42 years earlier. Among them were one of its key cast members, 79-year-old Peter Bogdanovich, and actor Danny Huston, son of the film’s leading man, John Huston, a formidable director in his own right. It was a momentous occasion, one that most film lovers thought they would never live to see: the completion of Orson Welles’ last movie, The Other Side of the Wind.
It’s hard to quantify the sheer mystique that Welles carries for many in the movie world, as tantalising and enigmatic as the Harry Lime character he so memorably embodied in . Somehow larger than life, Welles stands as both emblematic celluloid maverick and long-suffering martyr for the seventh art. Aged 25, the young man who was New York theatre’s reigning wunderkind was given fulsome resources and complete control by RKO to write, direct and star in 1941’s , a saga of entrepreneurial ambition, hubris and self-destruction which for years was, was mangled by the studio while Welles was in Brazil at the behest of the US government, the ensuing decades proved a lengthy scramble to show that his creative fires remained undimmed, even as he was battling in reduced circumstances both in America and across Europe. That’s why, for some, Welles remains the very acme of the visionary filmmaker pitting his wits against the money-men and the system who just don’t understand true art. By the 1970s, outsiders would see the big man as an occasional bit-part actor, TV talk show stalwart and undignified advertising hawker for various brands of booze, but was conceived by Welles as a scathing retort to all the doubters who saw him as some sort of ongoing sad joke.
