A Christmas gift from the Funhouse: a rare interview with Orson Welles, with English subtitles

As the year comes to a close, I present for your delectation an online present: the entirety of my episode showcasing a filmed interview with Orson Welles, from a never-seen-in-the-U.S. French TV doc.

The year was 1972 and Orson was at work on his Don Quixote film, but he was also prepping The Other Side of the Wind as well. A very famous French actress was recruited to host this pilot for a TV series directed by a New Wave filmmaker (one of the least-known members of that movement, but a member nonetheless, thanks to the period in which he started making films and the fact that both Truffaut and Godard raved about his first feature). It appears that only two other episodes were ever shot.

This particular actress had worked with Orson four times already (although I’m not sure why the unfinished The Deep and the finished Immortal Story never comes up in this chat). She clearly had a deep affection for the Big Man, and that is evident throughout this chat.

I’m not sure if all the stories told here are 100% (or even a lesser percent) true, but that doesn't matter at all. They are told in a grand style, with plenty of cigar-stained laughter, and remind us of what a tremendously engaging storyteller Welles was. (His laugh was always killer.) If any researcher has turned up any of the crime thrillers or science fiction that Welles claims he wrote here under a pseudonym for the pulps, I'd love to hear about it.

I translated this interview myself, so any errors in the English subs are entirely mine. I found Orson’s French to be charming and he is fully understood by his friend the hostess, but when you “map” out his French he did indeed throw in some incomplete sentences that trailed off and used some Americanisms in the language. 

This documentary also included the interview with Jerry Lewis that I posted a few months back (see this entry URL); that one was a lot easier to tackle, since I only had to translate the overdubbing in French, as one could still hear a lot of the English in between the French voices on the dub. With Orson’s interview, I had to make it seem readable and comprehensible and yet still convey in English his, again, very charming but not entirely grammatically pristine French. 

One note, to prevent inquiries of “gimme everything” school of Net correspondence and commentary: This interview runs approximately 27 minutes. Episodes of the Funhouse run 28 minutes. To properly contextualize this interview I needed a few minutes at the outset (also to give all the names and i.d. the production co./distributor who has long held it from being shown internationally), so I removed less than 2–3 minutes of the chat (containing a story he told many times — about the reason he had a scene set in a Turkish bath in his Othello). 

I also had to put another short part of the interview — where he talks about the protagonist of the Other Side of the Wind, who was to be eventually played by John Huston — over my intro to the footage. Thus, you can see the latter (with the subs onscreen) but can’t hear it. This is the best I could do, given the timeslot I have and the time constraints I work under. I could not make a separate “cut” of the episode for the “gimme everything” folks on the Net. 

I do the show as an intense labor of love (for a full 30 years now) and give of my time freely to make it the best it can be. I can work no longer on this particular project — it took hours to convert it into this comprehensible condition. (I literally typed in many of the English subs; others I altered from a very wonky computer translation.) 

Enjoy the episode, and please feel free to share it anywhere you like.

Merry Happy Holidaze from the Funhouse!

Thanks much to my friend, superior cineaste Paul Gallagher, for his help in finding this film and also the translation process.

Arthouse filmmakers reflect on Jerry Lewis

To commemorate Labor Day, I offer up a montage I featured on the episode of the Funhouse TV show that aired this weekend. For the past 21 years I have done a Jerry Lewis episode for Labor Day weekend and, since the end of the telethon, I've been looking for new angles from which to approach Jerry (there are about twenty jokes that could follow that sentence, but I'm not going for any of 'em).

Since I frequently feature “arthouse” cinema on the Funhouse, it was only natural to edit together a montage of scenes in which arthouse auteurs (not all of whom are French, mind you) either talked about Jerry in interviews or evoked him in their films. I came up with seven instances that I think make a very entertaining montage, while also exploring Jerry from pro, con, and “wtf?” aspects.

The contents are (since I don't intend on posting the list on YT; the sequences are already titled in the video):

– Martin Scorsese in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis, 1985
– a scene from Jacques Rivette's “missing” (at least in the U.S.) L'Amour Fou, 1969
– Louis Malle in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis, 1985
– a scene from Luc Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte, 1966
– Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show, 1970
– a scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year with Thirteen Moons, 1978
– Jean-Luc Godard on The Dick Cavett Show, 1980

For those others keeping score, there are a few other filmmakers featured in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis (Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Spielberg) whom I didn't include for purposes of time and/or salience of the discussion.

Those who loathe Jerry will particularly enjoy Welles' remarks. Those who love him will dig Malle's unmitigated praise. For those who want an insightful discussion, we always turn to Uncle Jean, who says about le cinema du Jer: “I think it's very funny – even when it's not funny, it's more funny....”

JLG knows the score.

Polls, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing (well, then again…)

I mentioned below the recent announcement of the Sight and Sound poll of “The Greatest Movies of All Time.” Since there are very few “news” stories that involve classic and foreign film — you know, the  sort of intelligent, important filmmaking that never plays at your local cineplex and is harder to acquire from the lazyman’s video rental scheme (Netflix) — I did want to set aside the seemingly unending flow of Deceased Artistes (a bunch of whom I am leapfrogging over) and talk about the poll and its importance. It’s an excuse to discuss the relative merits of classic and timeless cinema for a bit, which is never, ever unwelcome.

You won’t find me discussing at any length any of the other “greatest film” polls, generally because they are voted upon only by folks in one country (usually America), and they mostly contain whatever is thought to be the best at any given moment (thus, the entry of Titanic into the AFI roster after it had become the biggest box-office hit of all time).

The importance of the Sight and Sound poll is four-fold: it includes a better class of movie; it is voted on by a more serious kind of voter than participates in, say, the Oscars, or a survey conducted by a mainstream magazine or website (I still say “magazine” first — I’m old-fashioned); S&S only conducts the poll once every ten years; and the poll’s results rarely include anything that could be deemed “spankin’ new.”

For me, the last consideration is the most important since, as noted, polls of great movies are constantly littered with what the voters saw most recently, or what has made a lot of money, or has been discussed an enormous amount. The main "news story" concerning the 2012 results of the Sight and Sound poll for me wasn’t the topping of Citizen Kane by Vertigo — it was the fact that not one but three silent films (from three different countries) were in the Top Ten.

Instead of Wings or a Griffith classic (too controversial these days, anyway) or Metropolis, the silents in the Ten were three undisputed masterworks: Murnau’s Sunrise, Dreyer’s truly transcendent Passion of Joan of Arc, and, a surprise for me, Dziga-Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera.

Sunrise is, along with L’Atalante (also on the list at No. 12), one of the greatest movie love stories ever. Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most visually beautiful, well-acted, and spiritually transformative films ever. Dziga-Vertov’s classic is a harder-to-categorize mixture of documentary, essay film, travelogue, and “reality transformed” fiction film. All the films in the Top Ten of the poll deserve to be there, but the presence of Man indicated right off the bat that this was indeed a truly serious survey.

As for the Vertigo vs. Kane “furor,” it’s a non-starter. Kane still came in at No. 2, is on any short list of the greatest films ever made, and is an eternal model for filmmakers (plus an astonishing accomplishment for a first-time, 26-year-old director). Vertigo, on the other hand, is a wildly imperfect film, and that is one of its most alluring aspects.

For me, the importance of Vertigo doesn’t have to do with Hitchcock’s visuals, which are exemplary as always, or the eye-grabbing primary color scheme. Vertigo  is one of the few films in which Hitchcock seemed to surrender to the hero’s plight (The Wrong Man is another). Instead of using Jimmy Stewart as a chess piece or a victimized puppet (as he did with Cary Grant, Farley Granger, Ingrid Bergman, and many more, including a procession of icy blondes), Hitch *inhabits* the character and seems to be sharing his dilemmas.

The trumped-up “battle” between Kane and Vertigo was situated in the online press as being a debate over the relative merits of Welles and Hitchcock — which brings us back to the quote from critic Mark Shivas that I used in my tribute to Andrew Sarris: "Welles is concerned with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people."

What this shifting of positions in the poll more accurately represents, though, is the difference between a perfect film (Kane) and an imperfect one (Vertigo). Hitchcock was clearly so bound up in his protagonist’s emotions and moods that he decided to forego the mystery entirely and reduce the moments of suspense to a single, dreamlike situation — falling from a great height — played over and over again.

This is not to negate Hitchcock’s enormous talent, it is to acknowledge that the film that has become one of the best-regarded of his works is one of the few in which he “lost control” and surrendered to emotion. I remember that when I finally saw the film (at an NYU screening, when it was virtually impossible to view in the early Eighties) I was surprised at its depth of emotion, as well its overt fetishism (there is always fetishism in Hitchcock, but it is front and center in Vertigo).

Thus, in my opinion, Kane would still be the film that can best inspire and instruct young filmmakers (since it has what McLuhan called “an inventory of effects”), while Vertigo is an un-duplicatable character study/melodrama (I know, I know, Brian De Palma's countless "homages" in the Seventies and Eighties… I like some of those pictures a lot). It is a one-off that offers far less of a class in film structure, visual composition, and editing than Kane and the other best-known Hitchcock films.

And while Kane still remains one of the most perfect pics ever made, it’s good to see it occasionally moved aside on the list by yet another revered classic. The strength of the Sight and Sound poll is indeed that the “canon” of classic films does stick around on the list, while newer challenging features by other critical favorites join them.

Thus, the list includes the old masters (Ford, Eisenstein, Fellini, Bergman, Dryer, Lang, Murnau, Antonioni), as well as those who learned their art from watching films (Kubrick, Truffaut), those who went to film school (Coppola, Scorsese), and the modern masters (Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, Kiarostami, Tarr),

Certain filmmakers scored more than one film in the full list of fifty. Tarkovsky scored three, and out of the seven films he made, that’s a cool half of his output — Vigo’s timeless L’Atalante represents one-fourth of his work, but that’s because he died at such a young age.

One of my all-time favorites, Godard, is represented by four films: A bout de soufflé, Le Mepris, Pierrot Le Fou, and Histoire(s) du Cinema, which qualified as the second newest movie in the countdown, since its last installment was released in 1998 (the latest was from 2000 — In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai). Clearly the amount of great films that Godard has made split the vote four ways, so none of his films hit the Top Ten — I’m sure he cares nothing about this accolade, but it’s interesting to consider that his slot may well have been taken by one of his heroes, the man he named his Marxist filmmaking collective after, Dziga-Vertov.

As far as items missing from the fifty films? I’d note that comedy is underrepresented — one Chaplin (City Lights), one Keaton (The General), Playtime by Jacques Tati, and Some Like It Hot by Wilder. No Duck Soup, Annie Hall, The Apartment, or Dr. Strangelove, but then again humor is just as personal as what turns a person on (and there ain’t a single erotic film on the list — unless you want to count the lesbian scene in Mulholland Dr.).

It was interesting to see one musical on the list, Singin’ in the Rain — which is indeed a comedy, but works far better when it’s a musical.

Also missing is any inclusion of a film by the three best-known members of the loosely knit community of filmmakers labeled the “New German Cinema.” I assume that, if Fassbinder was considered, the sheer amount of great films he made once again split the vote. No one would want to go for the most celebrated film, The Marriage of Maria Braun, when he made many better and more challenging works, among them Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Perhaps Wenders is no longer in fashion, but some of his films are among the best road movies and character studies of all time. Herzog remains a major force in world cinema (if also now a show-biz personality whose public persona is better known than his films to many folks). One would think that Aguirre, the Wrath of God would’ve qualified for the list, but perhaps that is “out of fashion” at the moment with critics and academics. I can only think that the German filmmakers of the Seventies will return to this poll in the near future, since several of their films are definitely “for the ages.”

And connecting this all back to my last post, I will note that not only was Chris Marker’s favorite film, Vertigo, voted in at No. 1 on the poll, but his best-known short film — in my opinion another perfect film — La Jetée came in under the wire at No. 50. It would no doubt please Chris that his film was at one end of the poll, and Vertigo — which spawned the tree-trunk scene in La Jetée (see my Marker tribute below) — was at the other.

No. 1: Hitchcock on Vertigo, from the Truffaut interviews (“… she has stripped, but won’t take her knickers off…”):

No. 50: La Jetée with English narration:

Aesop, Orson, and a Sixties pop tune

The Internet is filled with misinformation, rumors, urban legends, and in-depth info about stuff of no meaning or consequence. On the other hand, it holds untold wonder, lots and lots (and lots) of quality free stuff, and, yes, it solves bar bets, arguments, debates, trivia contests, and that hunt for a specific dimly remembered song lyric. I was in the last-mentioned mode the other day, when I just had to sort out what song it was that included the lyric, “…sssssighed the snake…” Within a few clicks I had encountered this 1968 one-hit wonder by Al Wilson that is as catchy as hell:



Hadn’t heard it on the radio in a few decades now, but it was coursing around somewhere in the back of my mind. Of course, the song brought up a certain movie scene that also can’t be forgotten. The question arises, though: why is the same story told by Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin about a frog and a scorpion? It appears that that is the more popular version of the story “often mis-attributed to Aesop” which has a variant known as “the farmer and the snake.” The songwriters obviously wanted to sex the tale up (a “tender woman” is a helluva lot more interesting than a farmer). As the frog and scorpion story (not to be confused with the “Frog and Peach” restaurant), it has had several dozen appearances in popular culture, the best of which has been and will forever be Orson’s telling in his very jumbled and uneven mystery pic Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report,1955). Orson was god.



And totally off the topic of the fable and back onto the pop tune, turns out Al Wilson (who died back in 2008) was not a one-hit wonder by any means. He also gave us the indelible tune “Show and Tell”, and one I vividly remember from my childhood, “The La La Peace Song.” The song was also recorded around the same time by O.C. Smith, but the one I remember was the Wilson version. It’s gotta be the most upbeat song ever to mention racial injustice and skyjacking. Ah, the early Seventies…

FOOTNOTE: And who wrote "The Snake"? Oscar Brown, Jr., who had a very lively life as a singer, songwriter, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist. His Wiki bio can be found here. Nice pedigree for such a memorable tune.

Merv interviews Orson, parts two and three

Actually, these are parts three and four to the interview with the great god Welles, as the second part is on the DVD box set of Merv's Greatest Guests, or whatever it's called. This chat with Orson was conducted literally the eve of his death — he returned home from the Griffin show and never woke up the next morning.

Part two has him talking with Merv about his recently passed 70th birthday, old age (he quotes DeGaulle, "old age is a shipwreck"), and reflections on Rita Hayworth. In the third part, they are joined by Barbara Leaming, whose bio of Orson had just come out. The chat is very amiable, almost silly, but it's interesting to see Orson "protesting" Merv and the giggly Ms. Leaming gossiping about him, when you know he's really eating it up (if there was anything he knew well, it was self-promotion).

The visual quality isn't terrific, but this was taken off of rabbit-ears television the first (and, to my knowledge, only) time it aired. Gotta be thankful to my mother for taping this one while I was off at college. Thanks, Ma.


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In this final portion, Orson is maneuvered into talking about Kane, Chimes at Midnight and The Third Man.

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Merv interiews Orson, in his final TV appearance

On a more respectful note, Merv was indeed my intro, along with the daytime hosts (Mike Douglas and, locally, Joe Franklin), to the wonderful world of vintage talk shows. During my childhood, Merv's program was on in prime time, and when the networks were awful, there was definitely always something to catch on his show. In seeing the recent DVD collection of his shows, I was struck by how cursory the interviews were (even in his most probing mode, Merv was definitely a predecessor to today's "softest" interviewer, Larry King). I still was exposed for the first time to many of the "old guard" on his show, as well as some of my latter-day favorite comedians (from Pee Wee Herman to Bobcat Goldthwait). His show certainly became an institution as it went on, and it was the Tonight Show for those who couldn't stay up late (or, in the case of a kid like myself, weren't allowed to).

The footage below (more to come!) is the last recorded TV appearance of Orson Welles, who came to do some magic ("whamming" — I love it), talk with Merv in an informal mode, and also do a bit of plugging for the new Orson bio by Barbara Leaming. I won't upload the middle segment, as it is availble on the DVD box, but the first and third portions are not.

Orson does his "whamming" best:

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