Orson Welles: The One-Man Band

Gary Graver and Oja Kodar were Orson Welles' constant companions during the last years of his life. Graver was his photography director for American films and Kodar was his live in girlfriend. In One Man Band, the focus is usually on the films Oja performed in. The secondary message seems to be Oja wants fame and recognition because she was Welles' lover and wants to use him as a stepping stone to promote her own success. Shown is an extended promo for F for Fake where Oja is prancing about semi nude or in sexy clothes every minute of the ten minutes or so of the rejected trailer. The film in fact was a boring comparison of a famous art forger and Clifford Irving who faked Howard Hughes' biography. My main disappointment is that more of Welles' legendary unfinished film was not shown, The Other Side of the Wind. The scene shown is a short semi nude clip featuring Oja again. Gary Graver was said to have a complete working print of the movie, but his documentary featured little or nothing from it at all. A truckload of films are retrieved, but Oja claims to have just a few scenes. This is very hard for me to believe, indeed. A complete film from either Graver or Kadar kept separately from the negative stored in a vault in France seems to have vanished.

When Orson Welles died in 1985, he left behind him several masterpieces, several interesting failures & countless performances in films of varying quality. He also left a massive amount of unfinished work & the legend of a great filmmaker who peaked early & spent the rest of his career struggling to finish projects, most of which remain incomplete.

I'm not sure if this documentary debunks or cements that image, but it doesn't really matter, because the real image one is left with is of a filmmaker as a true artist, experimenting with different techniques & ideas as soon as they occur to him, often abandoning films as one might throw away a rough sketch that doesn't quite work. He carried his editing table around the world with him as a painter might carry his brushes & paint.

The real joy to be had here is in seeing these rough sketches - short comic skits, recitals from Moby Dick & Shakespeare, screentests & so on. Even more tantalising are the brief glimpses of larger projects which were unable to be completed - The Deep, The Other Side Of The Wind & The Merchant Of Venice. There's several appearances by Welles himself in various forums - talking at a university, performing magic & chatting with the Muppets.

Oja Kodar, Welles' longtime companion & collaborator, takes the viewer through this previously unseen body of work & gives a picture of the filmmaker that is in marked contrast to the commonly held image of Welles as some kind of burnt-out megalomaniac.

Underlying this film is a deep sadness at the fact that Orson Welles could have achieved so much more, had he been given the chance & not run into so much bad luck, but it is wonderful that some of his 'lost' films have been allowed to see the light of day.

A hugely enjoyable look at the films that were never completed by Hollywood's infant terrible, Orson Welles - while he was appearing in second-rate films (or taking tiny cameos in good films) he was chasing his dreams of making films like Moby Dick, The Merchant of Venice, and others.

Here we see clips of what is left and see how the failed projects developed, grew, and ran out of money. We also see surprisingly funny stuff such as the One-Man Band segment, alongside more serious stuff like The Other Side of the Wind.

As well as his lost work, this film gives an opportunity to bring sundry TV appearances together - Orson with the Muppets, doing magic tricks and recitations, and so on.

When a person slowly disappears, nobody seems to notice. This is probably what happened to Orson Welles when his film career stumbled into a downhill slope. The man who was arguably the most brilliant filmmaker to emerge on the American scene, ended up doing narration, wine commercials, and magic shows. He died in poverty, leaving behind masterpieces, but also leaving behind dozens of unfinished films. Films that could have been just as magical as his earlier works. 'Orson Welles - The One Man Band" takes a look at those struggling later years when Welles was a ghost hovering around the Hollywood movie scene. Many people knew he was trying to make movies, but many people also knew he could never get them finished. Because of his inability to finish films, no major studio would try to finance him, so he became a gypsy-like filmmaker. Even still then many projects were not finished.

Although it is sad to see a legend struggling so badly, the film does not feel sorry for him. In fact, the film has a very positive outlook on Welles later years. The film is narrator by two people. One is the filmmaker. The other is Welles' companion, Oja Kodar. She had spent a considerable time with Welles in his last years and knew him probably better than anyone else. The image she shows of Welles was not of a burned-out has-been, but of a strong man who still had plenty of creative spark. When watching the snippets and short clips from his unfinished films, one can see exactly what Oja Kodar was seeing. Either it was bad luck or it was his conflicts with studios that could not get his films finished. Or maybe it was both. Regardless, one can see even in his later films, Welles still had incredible film-making talent and vision. One can see that he was also a versatile actor. He could play a wide variety of roles and play them as good as the best actors. When we see how creative he still was, we cannot help but think it was the Hollywood that ruined his career. There could be a lot of truth to this because many people feel he was never the same after 'Citizen Kane' because Welles might have stepped on too many big toes after his brilliant debut feature. But the unknown remains just that. At times, it is the artist who ruins his or her career with their own bare hands.

It is hard to say what happened, but this film does not try to explain that either. It tries to focus on Welles the artist. And he was just that until his death. An artist who had no audience. How frustrating, but we have seen this example time and again throughout history.

Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (1995)

*** (out of 4)

This is an interesting documentary from Oja Kodar who served as Orson Welles life partner. This 60-minute documentary takes clips from various unfinished films by Welles and presents them as parts of his work that simply for one reason or another never got finished. Throughout all the clips we get some stuff from Welles giving interviews where he talks about his craft. One such clip comes from his AFI Lifetime Achievement award and another comes from a Q&A he was giving and he gives an interesting answer about his unfinished films including DON QUIXOTE. We get clips or notes to films such as THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, MOBY DICK, THE DEEP, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ONE-MAN BAND, The Orson Welles Show, THE DREAMERS and a bizarre extended trailer for F FOR FAKE. Needless to say, the ones who will enjoy this the most are fans of Welles because they'll get a chance to see all of this footage, which went pretty much unused for years. I'm sure the success of IT'S ALL TRUE helped get some of this out there. While there's nothing ground-breaking in terms to the quality of the film, I think it remains entertaining as long as you don't mind watching this footage of Welles. I must admit that I thought it was rather sad watching this thing and seeing such a great artist doing stuff that would never come together and eventually sit on a shelf for decades. Kodar is shown on-camera as she shows off some items of Welles as well as some of the paintings that he did. Of course, a more detailed documentary about the life of Welles is certainly something that we need but until then this here is a nice introduction to the work he never completed.