Other Side of the Wind

I've had this attempt at cobbling together Orson Welles' last film on my to-watch list since Netflix put it up last month. But I have to be in the right mood for a film like this, as opposed to the mostly trash I've watching and reviewing since then.

As it turns out, I may still not have been in the right frame of mind last week, because this is a rough movie to sit through. Especially the parts where we get to see Director Haverford's (John Huston) partially completed film. That movie is terrible, which is probably the point. An old director, trying to prove he still has the chops and can appeal to the new audience, when he doesn't understand them at all.

The parts where everyone is filming everything going on at his birthday party, where they're doing a screening of what he's filmed so far, that's more interesting. It's still ugly, all these hangers-on sniping at each other over who gets his approval, Haverford, cruelly undercutting them whenever he feels like it. His inner circle are trying to deal with the ground irrevocably shifting under their feet, all in different ways. Haverford just keeps getting drunker as the night progresses, continuing to creepily hit on a girl probably 50 years younger than him. It'd be pitiful if he didn't have so many people eager to ignore his shit or prop him up in spite of it.

The whole conceit of the party is interesting. Supposedly him trying to get all the press stuff out of the way in one go by giving them all access, but you can see at times he's not up for this, and that at other times, he probably did this because he knows there wasn't going to be a better chance. The movie wasn't going to be finished, his last hurrah wasn't even going to end up being a whimper, or a wet fart. Stillborn instead.