Orson Welles' Second Best Film: F FOR FAKE -- An Artistic Summing up.
Written: Aug 28 '00 (Updated Apr 27 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: As amusing, inventive, and thoughtful a documentary as you are likely to see.
Cons: As almost all Welles' films, several cuts run 83 or 85 to 95 minutes.
The Bottom Line: Welles' last great film: A personal essay/montage of Art and Life as he found them in his time. April 2005 Update: Fine new Criterion 2-disc DVD issued. Many extras.
F FOR FAKE (1973-75) is the last complete feature film Orson Welles directed in his lifetime; it is also his most entertaining, obviously personal, dazzling, playful -- one the best and most fully realized films he ever made. It is his summing up, his credo, his last attempt to recapitulate and reconstitute his genius. It involves magic, puzzles, the nature of Truth, the nature of Art, the nature of Love, the nature of the Human Spirit -- in other words, the subjects that consumed his artistic life.
Few people have seen it.
The Year 1971 was a particularly tough one for Orson Welles. Although hard at work in Carefree, Arizona, on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (not, as of today, released), Welles was dogged by an inability to adequately finance it. His third marriage had cooled. While he and the Contessa Paola Mori remained together, he had taken up with Oja Kodar, a young Yugoslavian artist and actress.
Then, too, John Houseman, his old collaborator, had just published Run-Through, first volume of a projected autobiography, in which the forming of their Mercury Theater and the making of CITIZEN KANE, indeed their friendship, were described as both extraordinary and chaotic. Short on to this widely reviewed volume, came Raising Kane, doyen critic Pauline Kael's essay on the creation of CITIZEN KANE. Her conclusion, substantially challenged now, was that most of the credit for CITIZEN KANE should have gone to Herman J. Mankiewicz, veteran co-writer on the project. Kael included a transcript of Mankiewicz's first draft, American, and suggested that Welles had concealed his older partner's contributions. Late that year, 5,000 miles away in Spain, Actor/Writer Robert Shaw and his Actress Wife Mary Ure, leasing Welles' home Fincha mi Gusto, had a fire of unknown origin. Much of 30 years in notes, letters, scripts, films and tapes belonging to Welles was destroyed.
Welles found himself without the evidence to reply to his critics, and at the same time, as a result, lost what little financing he had for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, after he and his new love Oja Kodar had invested $750, 000 of their own money.
His dead game answer to all of this misfortune was Verites et Mensonges, as it is known in France (where a lot of it was made).
Capitalizing, then, on his desire to use the techniques of television, and his experience in making documentaries for British and French TV in the mid '50s, he cut together from half a dozen sources a personal film essay about Truth in Art (and Life). Narrating and appearing as Himself, with The Girl (Oja Kodar), a collection of artists, swindlers, art forgers, film directors, and old Mercury Players, Welles fashioned the brilliant meditation known (if it is known) in America as F FOR FAKE.
The theme (which recurs in all Welles' work) is the magic of what's in name, here as it applies to the creation of Art.
F FOR FAKE begins in one of the great Parisian Gares de Les Trens. Welles in a black wide-brimmed Spanish hat, gloves, and cape is entertaining a small boy (Julio Palinkas) with coin tricks. As Welles makes the coin disappear and reappear, he remarks that he is about to tell the boy a story. "This is a film about trickery, fraud . . . about lies."
The little boy laughs, transported with delight at the magic.
"During the next hour," Welles tells him and us, "EVERYTHING you hear is True and based on SOLID fact."
From the window of a nearby train carriage, The Girl (Oja Kodar -- gorgeous in Russian Sable from head to foot) smilingly observes: "Up to your old tricks again, eh?"
Indeed, Orson Welles, master film-maker, is up to his old tricks, slyly examining his entire career and the current moral climate, among other things. He has lost none of his genius in editing and story telling.
The promised hour, following the credits (in part over old B-film footage of Martian spaceships destroying Washington), is a kaleidoscopic examination of how all of us, at one time or other, are distracted, fooled, sometimes enchanted and enriched by everything from chicanery to great Spiritual Art.
Welles shows us some film he had shot "by hidden cameras" of The Girl in a short silk dress making her way along a busy European street. Scores of men gape, freeze, drop their cigarettes . . . suddenly and entirely preoccupied by the simple sight of her.
Then, he introduces us to Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger, subject of a documentary, part of which is used in our film, by distinguished Documentarian Francois Reichenbach (L'AMERIQUE INSOLITE, 1959), who also produced F FOR FAKE. In connection with de Hory, we meet Clifford Irving and (I believe) Nina Van Pallandt posing as his wife Edith. We see them and others at elegant parties on the Spanish Island of Ibiza, where they all lived in the early 1970's. As Welles ironically and self deprecatingly observes, we are now "among us Beautiful People." [A term widely used in the period, and later.]
The forger de Hory is known to have produced faux works resembling paintings and drawings by Braque, Dufy, Matisse, Modigliani, and perhaps a few under noms de guerre. Dehory tells his guests about a tour of Mexico, Canada and America he made by car. At each stop, he dashed off a masterpiece, which he claimed he sold cheaply, no questions asked, for cash, to museum directors. "Never," proclaims this little man, chin jutting, "was I challenged, never was I turned down." At the time of the film, de Hory was hiding out (in plain sight) on Ibiza. [Though it is thought some of his forgeries may still hang in major galleries, he eventually went to jail and a bad end. Not too long ago, a collection of his work was shown to some critical acclaim in San Francisco.]
Welles punctuates the narrative montage with sequences of Laurence Harvey, star of Welles' THE DEEP (unfinished), assisting his co-star in that film, The Girl (Oja Kodar). Or with Welles himself compressing The Girl to the size of a briefcase.
Clifford Irving, for his part, had written a book about de Hory, but later Irving, a fairly well known novelist, ghosted a fanciful autobiography of Howard Hughes, for which the legendary reclusive millionaire ex-playboy, film director, flyer, manufacturer, studio head, political influence, casino owner, had issued a release through McGraw-Hill, saying: "I believe that more lies have been printed and told about me than any living man -- therefore, it is my purpose to write a book which would set the record straight."
Hughes didn't like the record that Irving created for him, however, and disavowed the whole thing, claiming the book was a fraud and a hoax. The publisher sued to recover a large advance made to Irving. Irving defended himself, using the confusing testimony of his wife Edith and his mistress, the Baroness Nina Van Pallandt, but the jury did not believe them.
[Van Pallandt, as a result of the notoriety, was starred in a number of films, notably for Robert Altman (THE LONG GOOD BYE, 1973, and A WEDDING, 1979); but also AMERICAN GIGOLO (Schrader, 1980) and CUTTER'S WAY (Passer, 1981) before slipping into oblivion.]
Irving and his wife went to jail for a time, but not before Irving (a small monkey astride his shoulder, picking his scalp) suggests in our film: "If you did not have an Art Market, then fakers could not exist."
The parallel of Irving (a novelist accused of fakery, entangled by a faithful wife and a new mistress) with Welles -- a film maker accused of fakery, entangled by a titled wife and a passionately loyal mistress -- gradually assumes a curiously ironic sub-text.
Welles' main connection to this part of the "story" is that Howard Hughes, from the late 1920's through the 1940's, lived a life which fascinated Welles. Hughes, who inherited a fortune at age 21, made the classic HELL'S ANGELS (1930) at RKO, broke flying records, captured or paid for many female hearts, and after Welles left RKO, Hughes bought the Studio. Joseph Cotton makes an appearances to confirm that he was brought to Hollywood by Welles in the belief that he would star as a figure based on Howard Hughes in CITIZEN KANE.
Welles segues from reflections on Hughes to his own young manhood traveling in Ireland and Europe: How his interest in magic led him onto the stage, and then to radio and the Invasion from Mars Hoax; how that took him to Hollywood. He wanders in these haunts until he comes onto the plain before the magnificent medieval Cathedral of Chartres. He reflects that we and most of our possessions are destroyed or wither to dust, and nothing remains but the Art we may leave behind, or in some way is preserved. Perhaps, Chartres -- "this one celebration of the glory of God and of the dignity of Man" -- will remain. No one knows the names of the men who built it. "The scientists tell us we live in a disposable world . . . perhaps it doesn't matter . . . all that much . . . as long as we go on singing."
The last third of the film is given over to a delightful fable, cut to an addictively insinuating melody by Michel Legrand, about how Pablo Picasso saw The Girl one day, fell for her, and painted 22 nudes of her, which she later attributed to her Hungarian Grandfather, and displayed in Paris, much to the consternation of Picasso, the most financially successful of all Modern Artists.
Right in the "wake of Watergate," the flying saucers perhaps about to destroy a lying White House (as in INDEPENDENCE DAY later), Welles hoped for a major release of F FOR FAKE in America. He thought it might influence a new type of film on the big screen and on television. He dared imagine he would sign a contract with one of the major Networks to produce, direct, and narrate such films in a TV series. Although the mark of F FOR FAKE is on Al Pacino's LOOKING FOR RICHARD (1994), and acknowledged as an inspiration by Francoise Truffaut for his late documentaries, nothing happened for Welles.
The nine minute trailer he, Kodar, and Cinematographer Gary Graver produced to introduce the film to American Audiences lay unused. F FOR FAKE was never given wide release in America during Welles' lifetime. It was shown at a few film festivals in 1974, scheduled later on TV a couple of times.
Welles moved back, more or less permanently, to Arizona and California. His TV career consisted of appearances on Merv Griffin and in wine commercials, an occasional gig with Dean Martin or Jackie Gleason. Though he never gave up trying, he was through as a film director.
Welles is clearly nuts for Oja Kodar in this film, and she regards him with supreme affection. Near the end the little boy, Julio Palinkas, whom we saw in the beginning, pops up, and we remember that Oja Kodar's real name, before Welles changed it, was Olga Palinkas. She remained with Welles (as did his wife Paola Mori) until his death.
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles s free-form documentary F for Fake, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages ...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.