Orson Welles’ tarnished legacy

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:20:00 +0000

John Baxter's new foreword to the 1956 novelization of Orson Welles' "Mr. Arkadin," aptly called "No Pilot Known," correctly discloses on its penultimate page that the novel was actually written in French by one Maurice Bessy, who adapted Welles' original screenplay. This fact is verified by the recent recovery in France of the correspondence between Welles and "Arkadin's" producer, Louis Dolivet. But none of this has prevented the novel's latest edition, like all the previous ones, from trumpeting the name of Orson Welles as sole author on its cover.

This should come as no surprise. How can a publisher expect to sell the uncredited English translation of a French novelization of an unfinished film, especially if the novel was written by a forgotten film critic? For starters, it has to assume, contrary to Welles, that the film is (or was) finished. This is also why the Criterion box set, released in 2006, insists on calling itself "The Complete Mr. Arkadin," even though Welles wasn't able to complete any single version of it.

Films of the decade: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:12:00 +0000

I'm not the only one to consider "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it's also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can't begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense -- an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what's human and what isn't, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

Salon.com > Jonathan Rosenbaum

Orson Welles’ tarnished legacy

Films of the decade: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”