Shakespeare’s King Lear (Omnibus) (E1) is stripped down to a fleet 70 minutes for this landmark live TV event, staged for the prestigious CBS series Omnibus in 1953. Peter Brook, then the phenom director of British stage, was brought in to stage this production for the cameras, Virgil Thompson wrote a minimalist underscore and Orson Welles (not even 40 years old at the time) was brought in as the aged Lear, his theatrical stature still of some name value even if his marquee was not. This presentation, which was (after the introduction by host Alistair Cooke) played straight through without commercials on its original broadcast, is so whittled down that it feels almost abstracted from the play. Brook prepared this version specifically for TV, chopping out subplots and cutting away on secondary characters to focus on the deterioration of Lear. So while the slow build of the sisters’ schemes comes on pretty fast here, the slide of Lear into madness takes on a momentum that is thrilling. Arnold Moss channels the great profile and theatrical dignity of John Barrymore as the Duke of Albany as he becomes appalled at the scheme he has been a part of and Micheal MacLiammoir (surely brought in with the blessing, if not the urging, of Welles, who had just cast him as Iago in his film of Othello) is a deft Poor Tom, who brings a little soul to the tragedy with his wit and his loyalty.

Orson Welles is King Lear

There’s a reason that this production has stood the test of time: while it suffers in many ways as a Shakespeare adaptation, it also shows the possibilities of TV to combine theater and cinema with the intimacy inherent in TV, and the expressionist solutions to production challenges of live TV and multiple sets needed for such a production. Brook moves the production from the formal throne rooms and banquet halls of the royal castles to more expressionist locales created with the limitations of TV in mind: a storm on the heath on a bare hill of artfully windswept grass against a simple black cloth, the rickety gears of an ancient windmill in which Lear and his loyal followers take refuge, the abstracted suggestions of tents on a sketch of a beachhead. The sets become increasingly alienated and despairing as they get more stylized and expressionistic and lighting adds to the dark night of the soul with slashes of illumination and beams of shadows falling across the cast. Andrew McCullough directs the television portion with a visual sensibility beyond anything that was being done in live TV at the time, anticipating the dynamic staging and effective use of extreme close-ups that directors like John Frankenheimer would bring to live TV.

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[Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.]

The Third Man, Carol Reed’s Continental noir masterpiece set in the bombed-out ruins of a post-World War II Vienna carved up by occupying Allied forces, is more than half over when Harry Lime makes his memorable entrance. He’s just a dark presence in a doorway off a cobblestone street, noticed only by a stray cat, until the sudden spill of light from a nearby apartment sweeps away the shadows and catches him like a fugitive in the spotlight, revealing the chagrined look on the face of … Orson Welles! He simply flashes an impish smile to Joseph Cotten and skitters down the alley, his long shadow stretched across the walls behind him.

It’s more than just a getaway. Welles makes off with the entire movie in that moment — we just don’t realize it yet. His Harry Lime is a charmer, a lover, a scamp, a baby-faced crook carving out his place in the rubble-strewn underworld of postwar Vienna, and he dominates The Third Man with barely 10 minutes of screen time.

Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles

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I review the new Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition DVD on Turner Classic Movies:

Orson Welles hadn’t directed a film in Hollywood in almost ten years when he was offered the reins of Touch of Evil, a budget-minded crime potboiler that Universal was prepping for production. It wasn’t even Universal Studios’ intention to have Welles direct; they only wanted him for the supporting role of a corrupt American detective whose investigation of a murder on the stateside line of the Mexican-American border soon becomes tangled between the two countries. It was, by all accounts, the film’s leading man, Charlton Heston, who suggested that Welles direct. “It genuinely seemed to strike them as a radical suggestion, as though I’d asked to have me mother direct the picture,” Heston wrote in The Actor’s Life – Journals 1956-1976. But they made the deal and hired Welles, at no extra fee, to rewrite and direct the film. As with The Lady From Shanghai, his last major studio production (he made Macbeth as a low-budget prestige piece for second-tier studio Republic), Welles was handed a pulp thriller and turned a straight commercial assignment into a baroque murder mystery directed with stylistic bravura. … All Universal Studios wanted a routine crime film with star glamour and an uncomplicated happy ending. They ended up with a grandiosely bravura B-movie crime opera, a portrait in corruption and racism in a grimy, tawdry bordertown netherworld straddling a kind of moral no man’s land between Mexico and the U.S.. This was a border where the edges blurred with all the crossings back and forth (it could only have been done in a time before 9/11), and populated with a gallery of grotesques and eccentrics. The film was taken from his hands and re-edited by studio cutters.

Read the complete feature here.

I previously explored the history of the film and the 1998 revision in the essay The Making, Unmaking and Reclamation of Touch of Evil and a collection of interviews on Parallax View (most of them conducted by me in 1998)

Walter Murch (editor of the 1998 revision)

Rick Schmidlin (producer of the 1998 revision)

Bob O’Neil (Universal studios head of preservation and restoration)

Charlton Heston

Janet Leigh

I also reviewed the DVD for this site here.

It takes chutzpah to monkey with Orson Welles, even for the best of reasons, and without a doubt this unprecedented revision of Touch Of Evil was undertaken with the best intentions. While I can quibble with a few details, the result is a remarkable success. Forty years after the fact, producer Rick Schmidlin and Oscar winning film and sound editor Walter Murch have given Welles his due and made Touch Of Evil into the film he wanted to make.

Now let’s be clear on one thing: this is not a director’s cut, although it’s as close as we may ever come to one. “(A)n academic example of what Welles intended,” is how revision producer Rick Schmidlin describes it. In fact Welles never completed his own cut. After studio executives viewed Welles’ work in progress in 1957 they assigned a new editor and asked Welles to step aside. To make a long and very complicated story short, Welles viewed the studio’s rough cut months later and wrote a detailed 58-page memo describing the changes he felt needed to be made to save the film. Discovered a few years back by Welles scholar (and subsequent project advisor) Jonathan Rosenbaum, this memo became the primary source in Schmidlin’s innovative project: using Welles’ very specific instructions to reconstruct Touch Of Evil.

Orson Welles and Charlton Heston survey the (planted) evidence

Even in its various compromised versions (between film and video there are no less than three existing cuts of the film), Welles’ baroque border town murder mystery is a wild masterpiece, sleazy, grimy, jittery, and ultimately dazzling work of cinematic magic. Charlton Heston plays straight-arrow Mexican government Mike Vargas agent whose planned honeymoon with his American bride Susie (Janet Leigh) is derailed by a sensationalistic murder. Enter police detective Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), a bloated, blustery grotesque with a doughy face and an ill manner. An instant antagonism develops between the educated Vargas and the misanthropic Quinlan which intensifies to a rabid hatred when Vargas uncovers evidence that Quinlan has framed a suspect.

Fans of the familiar Touch Of Evil will notice the differences in this revision immediately. The famous opening crane shot turns into a riveting dramatic scene with the removal of the credits and the revelation of the Welles’ dense sound design, previously buried by the brassy opening theme. My initial response was a sense of loss – that bongo beat and the growling horns had become a part of the familiar experience, so married to the image it seemed inseparable. But as the camera follows the parallel journeys of the car (carrying a ticking bomb) and the strolling newlywed couple as they weave their way through the bustling Mexican border town, the rediscovered soundtrack (with musical additions by Murch as per Welles’ instructions) gives a specific sense of place of movement with its street sounds competing with car radios and nightclub music weaving in and out of the mix.

With the abrupt explosion Welles’ style becomes more expressionistic – looming low angles, jittery handheld shots, edgy editing – and the new cutting design outlined by Welles serves this style better. The subsequent scenes are tightened up with insistent intercutting between the Vargas/Quinlan confrontations on the American side of the border and Susie’s run-in with racketeer “Uncle Joe” Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) in Mexico, creating a driving pace with a greater sense of urgency and tension. The subsequent changes are less obvious (a trim here, an insert there, a couple of short scenes cut), but the film never looked or sounded better, and Walter Murch draws all of his sources from the original soundtracks. The painstaking restoration of film elements shows in every frame. For my money it’s never worked better either.

Universal’s two-disc set features both the original 93-minute theatrical release and the longer “preview version” discovered in the Universal vaults in mid-seventies along with the revised version, which makes this release the DVD debut of those earlier versions.

All three cuts are included in this two-disc set, along with four commentary tracks spread over the three versions. Rick Schmidlin hosts a track with stars Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh (obviously recorded years before but never heard until now), with Schmidlin commenting on the changes in the “restored version” and drawing production stories and experiences from the stars. Welles historian/consultant Jonathan Rosenbaum and fellow Welles historian James Naremore discuss the “preview version” with a mix of production details and interpretations. Critic F.X. Feeney and Schmidlin also offer solo tracks. Also includes two featurettes (one on the making of the film, one on history of the various versions and the process of reconstructing the new cut) and a reproduction of the original 58-page memo that inspired the entire project.

I review the film in my MSN DVD column here.

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What’s with the question mark? Only that I delved into what should be, in any rational reality, the most important DVD release of the month and found nothing but wasted potential. I mean the DVD titled Orson Welles’ Don Quixote, a devastatingly misguided accumulation of raw footage passing itself off as a version of Welles’ vision of his never-completed “lost dream project.” I explore the film and the failures of the reconstruction project helmed by Jesus Franco at Parallax View:

Francisco Reiguera as Don Quixote

From what I know about Welles and the history of the film, Franco’s version is not even an approximation, never mind a reconstruction. There’s no story here, simply a random succession of events and images and a whole lot of narrative detours. But even as a visual record of Welles’ raw footage it’s a travesty. It’s a given that much of the existing rough cut footage is in rough condition, showing the signs of wear and tear from years of tinkering on moviolas and dragging the reels from country to country. But Franco and company have, if anything, compounded the problems with hazy, blurry copies of the master footage and video noise introduced as a result of the project’s most egregious crimes against Welles: the video manipulation of footage to layer images one on another. At one point, the sails of a windmill are stretched across the screen (to suggest a windmill come to life and reach out to Quixote? was that in the notes, Franco, or was it all your inspiration?). The soundtrack is no better. Franco uses fragments of recorded dialogue (with Welles providing the voices of both Quixote and Sancho as well as the narration) and fills in the rest of the film with voices that barely resemble Welles’ work. You have to have to watch the mouths move just to pick out the speakers in this dissonant audio mess.

I had the opportunity to watch an eighty-minute version of the film, cut down by Kodar and Graver to, at the very least, cut down the clutter of Franco’s all-in approach. That version is a disappointment, to say the least, but this is a travesty. And it’s the only version available.

Read the complete piece here.

I also review the film in my DVD column for MSN here.

This isn’t a restoration — Welles never completed the film — and it’s not really a reconstruction of what might have been; it’s more a compendium of recovered footage edited into a rough narrative by cult director Jess Franco, who assisted Welles on the production. The footage varies wildly in quality from shot to shot, the awkward, indifferent editing only draws attention to the weakness, and Franco piles in footage that Welles never intended to use in the film.

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Charlton Heston died on Saturday night, April 5 2008, at the age of 84 at his home in Beverly Hills, California.

Read the New York Times obituary here and Los Angeles Times obit here. A complete list of his credits are here on the IMDb. More links at GreenCine Daily here.

Heston was a American actor whose commanding presence defined his characters, a beefy slab of American leading man who anchored many an epic with the strength of his sturdy physical bearing anchored on the foundation of an intent gravelly voice and given life with eyes that focused his resolve into a dare. He was the human rock upon which films such as The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking and Planet of the Apes were built upon. But he was also a classically trained actor with great pride in his craft and he interspersed his Hollywood epics and genre pictures with excursions into Shakespeare (like Julius Caesar in 1970 and his 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which he also directed). And he proved himself a solid character actor with strong supporting turns in films as The Bog Country and Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, playing the scheming Cardinal Richelieu with an almost bemused attitude.

Off screen, Heston was also quite famous for his work in the NRA. He was a legitimate target of the left for his outspoken views on gun control, but he could also be quite self-effacing about his politics – his appearance as a guest host on Saturday Night Live in 1993 included an NRA spoof as well as skits built around Planet of the Apes and Moses from The Ten Commandments. In his final years, he also suffered from a condition similar to Alzheimer’s since 2002, which makes Michael Moore’s ambush of Heston in the documentary Bowling For Columbine, which ended with Moore railing against Heston (who had long since left the scene so Moore could place his camera where Heston had been), a fairly despicable act on all levels.

I have no single favorite Heston role, but in 1998 I had the rare pleasure of interviewing Mr. Heston for the release of the Walter Murch-supervised “restoration” of Touch of Evil (1958), based on the detailed notes give to the studio by Orson Welles (and largely ignored at the time). It was supposed to be the center of a essay on the film, but the article was canceled and the review never published. I publish it here for the first time.

I’ve been doing some research and I’ve read your journals and autobiography where you go into magnificent detail on the making of Touch of Evil.

Well thank you.

So I wanted to talk about some other things that I haven’t heard you talk about in interviews or read about in your books. One thing that struck me as I read your piece was that it seems like you had quite a rapport with Orson Welles.

Yes, that’s true. I had never known him before but of course I had see Citizen Kane and for that matter I’d seen Othello. And his reputation then as a filmmaker then was remarkable. I was amazed that the studio, when I suggested he direct the picture, they acted as though I’d suggested directing the picture but his work on the film was extraordinary, I thought.

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