Movies and friendships, those are mysteries

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I first heard about "The Other Side of the Wind" back in 1996 when I read film critic and scholar Joseph McBride's fascinating book entitled rather appropriately, "Orson Welles." The film in question, an unfinished marvel and frustrating film-within-a-film-within-a-film was deeply surprising and confounding to read about and the most famous unseen film with a galactic cast. How could a major film by Welles starring John Huston in the lead role of a movie maverick of a director ("The Ernest Hemingway of cinema") not get proper financing from a Hollywood studio? Welles's notorious reputation, of course, was the answer - he was not trusted to direct films, only act in them. "I am subsidizing myself, in other words, I am crazy," Welles once said at the 1975 AFI film awards show that honored him. So, after more than forty years of seeking completion funds to edit and release "The Other Side of the Wind" first thru Welles and then after his death, through fellow director and actor Peter Bogdanovich and McBride and the late cinematographer Gary Graver, Netflix (that streaming giant) bought the rights to the film, had it finished and edited according to Welles' copious notes. Here we are with my review for a film I never expected would see the light of day. How is the film? It is a sensational, purposely messy, purposely confounding, unsettling and often mesmerizing work - perhaps Welles' most unusual film and one not likely to find mass appeal...at all. I am not putting that lightly because the film has a drunken, pot-hazing stupor about it - like a late-night boozy party where everyone who is everyone is discussing filmmaking and slowly finding out who their real friends are.

"The Other Side of the Wind" is mostly confined to the late-night birthday party for Jake Hannaford (John Huston), the wise, safari-shirt-wearing film director who is broke and hopes his budding friend, a hotshot film director named Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich), can get a young studio boss (Geoffrey Land) to finish financing his work. Sound familiar? Of course anyone who has read about the titan of cinema, Orson Welles, knows he had a bad habit of not finishing some of his films, for one reason or another. Bogdanovich himself was a fan and friend of Orson's and it is mentioned in Josh Karp's wonderfully entertaining and distressing book, "The Making of The Other Side of the Wind: Orson Welles's Last Movie" that Orson had hoped for Peter's circle of Hollywood elitists to help with financing (this was not to be).

At this same party, we are introduced to the nosy, Pauline Kael-type film critic Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg); an ex-alcoholic stooge of Hannaford's who has some history with him (Norman Foster), who's always eating gum drops so he won't drink; a striking Lilli Palmer as Zarah Valeska, an actress who had appeared in Hannaford's work and declares she never slept with the legend; Edmund O'Brien as another stooge and former actor of Hannaford's who uses the megaphone to announce screenings of the director's incomplete footage; Joseph McBride as Marvin Pister, the nervously awkward film critic who asks seriously misguided questions like if the camera is a phallus (what on Earth could that mean?), not to mention Mercedes McCambridge as Jake's secretary who tries her best to shield cameras away from Jake's private conversations, and actual film directors like Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom pretty much playing themselves. At this party, the young cineastes ask ridiculous questions to Hannaford and his "Mafia" stooges, or are overheard saying such incomprehensible remarks like, "He can make a bad film look atrocious." No doubt that Welles is poking fun at people who overanalyze a film director's work.

There is also curious, electrifying footage of Jake Hannaford's incomplete movie called "The Other Side of the Wind" with Oja Kodar consistently nude as a Native American wearing various beaded necklaces and carrying dolls with her who is either being pursued or actively pursuing a young man on a motorcycle (Bob Random, playing an actor named John Dale who split thus leaving Jake's film unfinished). Both actors never say one word throughout the film-within-the-film or when they appear as the actors at Hannaford's party.

"The Other Side of the Wind" is a powderkeg of a cinematic punch to the gut (excitingly and daringly edited with a great deal of cross-cutting, some by Welles and most by Bob Murawski, complemented with a jazzy score by Michel Legrand) and it is worth seeing for anyone who calls themselves a movie buff. For average audiences, the historic value of a 40-year-old movie may be all they see and may reject it on that basis (Social Justice Warriors have already decried the racial slurs and how women are objectified despite missing the satire of it all. We were living in an age of Existentialism, followed by Irony, then back to Existentialism to some extent post 9/11, to an age of Meta Nothingness where satire seems to have no place). This film should be a major event and will most likely be forgotten except by select movie fans and Wellesian completists. Shameful because Welles has made an autobiographical, deeply personal film about his love/hate relationship with Hollywood, the industry that shunned him after he made "Citizen Kane." As the 1970's approached, he was loved by the college crowd perhaps but he was not making the films that the new generation of Movie Brats were making (Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin, Hopper to name but a few). Neither is Jake Hannaford, hence the tantalizing, sexually charged film he is making that is meant to either be a spoof of director Michelangelo Antonioni (who helmed "Zabriskie Point" back in the 70's) or youthful, rebellious pictures full of sex and violence that meant little or both.

"The Other Side of the Wind" is full of aloof, drunken regret encapsulated by John Huston's richly layered performance (only one of two lead roles Huston ever played). Any scene with Huston is remarkable due to his nuanced, detailed, often drunken expressions with the voice of a cigar-chomping God of Film - when has Huston ever been boring on screen really? Bogdanovich's Otterlake does his best to help Jake, just as Bogdanovich did with Welles. But the pervasive feeling in "The Other Side of the Wind" is that old Hollywood never catered to artists with knowing, admitted self-expression - they wanted directors-for-hire who knew how to complete a film on time and on budget and could make a killing at the box-office. Art existed only to serve commercial prospects in the studio-run Hollywood of the 1970s. That is Otterlake in a nutshell, as it was with Bogdanovich who later suffered the same fate as many of the Movie Brats at that time - box-office failures and fewer pictures to direct. It is only fitting that an older Bogdanovich narrates the opening scenes - he could best understand now what Welles and Jake were dealing with.