MAGICIAN: THE ASTONISHING LIFE AND WORK OF ORSON WELLES (2014)

Master editor Chuck Workman’s workmanlike documentary on Orson Welles gets the basics more or less right, and makes a perfectly fair & reasonable intro for neophyte Wellesians looking for the quick tour.  But regrettably conventional for such an iconoclast, a man who blew up all the performing arts except for acting where he’d rumble away using his natural talent (and weight) at being what he called a 'King Player.'  But after his prodigal teen years (that’d be before he was officially dubbed Boy Wonder), Workman can’t convey the seismic before-and-after shift he brought to stints in theater, radio and film; all popular media remade by his imagination by the time he was 25.  And, in spite of what’s usually written about his early fade-out (true enough if you swallow the idea that Hollywood is the sole measurement of achievement), actually peaking when he hit 50, not really such an unusual age for an artist to stop fresh growth.  And while Workman manages to hit on a few useful Talking Heads to interview (or just let blather), the ratio of wheat to chaff is the standard 50%.  (Note that Steven Spielberg, who largely repeats expected encomiums, could have really made a difference for Welles in the year before his death, when Welles came tantalizingly close to setting up an autobiographical drama about the 1937 staging of Marc Blitzstein's agit-prop musical play THE CRADLE WILL ROCK with Rupert Everett playing the 21-yr-old Welles, co-starring the then Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving.  Imagine if Spielberg, rather than saving up platitudes for a future documentary on Welles had just put up the 2 mill to complete the film’s financing.  Instead, Tim Robbins made that film (CRADLE WILL ROCK/’99) with a starry cast, his own script and a budget ten times what Welles had asked for.  Told with unearned snarky tone, Robbins’ unlikable ode lost what Welles’ film would have cost ten times over.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  In the decade since this appeared, two major Welles resurrections: The twisted legal rights to both CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’65 and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND/’18 have been solved, making the first available in a superb restoration (with good audio!), and the later, at long last, finished.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-other-side-of-wind-2018-1970-75.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/chimes-at-midnight-aka-falstaff-1965.html

DOUBLE-BILL:  Richard Linklater’s ME AND ORSON WELLES/’08 is best of the Welles’ bio-pics.