Netflix have taken on the task of finishing and releasing (and sorting out the extensive legal problems of releasing) Orson Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind. Now Wellesnet is reporting that Netflix will be releasing a companion documentary on the making of the film, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.
If the only film of Welles’ you’ve seen is Citizen Kane, you’re missing out. I find it hard not to gush when I’m talking about his work: I love every film he made.
The London Independent has published a transcript of Martin Scorsese talking about The Third Man. Well worth reading. Everybody who’s seen it knows the great reveal, but Scorsese’s insightful as ever:
It became a moment internationally, a shared experience for a vast audience seeing that film. It’s not just a dramatic revelation—there’s something about Orson Welles’ smile at that point that shifts everything to another level, and it sustains no matter how many times you see it. Welles comes into the picture about halfway through. That’s the first time you actually see him, after you’ve spent so much time picturing him in your mind because everyone has been talking about him and thinking about him. So that might be the best revelation—or the best reveal, as they say—in all of cinema.
Yesterday would have been Orson Welles’ hundredth birthday, so now seems as good a time as any to repost the retrospective of his later career I wrote a few years ago for Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second.
Yes, yesterday would have been a better time, but I’m as punctual as Welles ever was.
On a more cheerful note, this week’s episode of 99% Invisible is great, as usual. It’s about the Ghost Army, an American World War II troop whose job it was to deceive the Nazis.
On the battlefield, the Ghost Army also did “sonic deception.” The sonic deception unit would record the sounds of troops amassing in tanks and trucks and then be able to play those sounds back over loud speakers.
The Ghost Army had a library of recordings of different engines moving over different terrain. Sonic Deception was so new to the Army that they made a top secret film (screened for a chosen few) to explain how it worked.
Before the war, Hitler had made fun of Americans for reacting to Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds Hallowe’en Prank. Nice to see his army essentially being punked by the same trick.