Orson Welles’ last finished film was this extremely fun, typically puckish and brilliant sorta-documentary—director/film historian Peter Bogdonivich refers to it as an essay in the interview included with the movie—recently released as part of the invaluable Criterion Collection.
Basically, it’s a stitched together creation made of pieces of other, uncompleted films. Welles tragically had trouble gaining enough funds to complete projects, going back to a version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that would have been his third movie. While he was in South America starting the film, RKO hacked up his masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons, and consigned the removed footage to the furnace, so that Welles couldn’t try to do anything about it. The movie still failed at the box office.
(The second disc in the F For Fake DVD set features a 90 minute film on Welles’ unfinished works. I haven’t rented that disc yet.)
Welles had been working on a documentary about a real-life art forger and the author, Clifford Irving, who wrote a book exposing him. However, things then took a bizarre turn when Irving himself subsequently was guilty of forging a faked ‘autobiography’ of then nutty recluse Howard Hughes. This was a huge story for a while.
In the end, Welles decided to incorporate the shot footage into a longer work about charlatans, mountebanks and fakers, in which group he definitely includes himself. Welles narrates and appears throughout the film, often performing magic. (He was, among many talents, a successful stage magician.) This is the later Welles, hugely fat, striding around in his trademark black fedora and cape (!), puffing on a cigar the size of a piano leg and obviously having a blast. You can tell the man loved making films, and much of the pleasure the film affords the viewer is knowing that its making brought the often-disappointed Welles so much joy.
Highly recommended.
