Watch The Immortal Story For Free

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Certainly not the late masterpiece some people have claimed it to be but Orson Welles' "The Immortal Story" is still extraordinary in ways so many films aren't. It clocks in at under an hour so it really is the perfect miniature. It is a film about the art of story-telling with only four main speaking parts. Welles could just as easily have done this on the radio and yet visually this is extremely beautiful, (it was his first film in colour), and still typically 'Wellesian'.He adapted it from a novel by Isak Dinesen and he, himself, plays the role of the old merchant in the 'story' of the old merchant who hires a young sailor to sleep with his young wife, (Jeanne Moreau is the woman hired by the merchant to play the wife in the story). The sailor is played by the English actor Norman Eshley and he's painfully wooden but he doesn't upset the flow of the piece; in fact, his banal, robotic diction actually fits it. No masterpiece then, but this short piece, which almost feels thrown together, stands head and shoulders over the best work of many lesser directors.

I just saw The Immortal story for the first time today thanks to TCM. I was impressed by the otherworldly quality of the film. Reading through the IMDb reviews I was surprised that no one speculated as to why Wells chose this story. To me the answer seems obvious. The film is about a lonely old man who wants to bring a story he has heard to life. He knows that he cannot accomplish the task alone so he turns to a minion in his employ to arrange the set piece and hire the players. Ironically even when he succeeds, it becomes clear that no one will ever hear the recounting of the story. This is how Wells probably viewed his own life. ​Throughout his film career he struggled unhappily with his dependence on the help of producers and his need to control actors in order to bring his artistic visions to life. Sadly, even on the few occasions when he successfully got films completed, to him it seemed as if he never really had an audience.

This film is hardly a disaster, and certainly the themes are Wellesian. It's just not terribly interesting or believable. Old Orson Welles is a rich old merchant in Macao who believes that all the stories he hears should be factual. Accordingly, he is dismayed when an old sailor's tale he was told -- in which a sailor is hired by an aging merchant to impregnate his much younger wife -- is revealed to be false. So old Mr. Welles sets out to act out the story by finding a young woman to play the wife and hire a sailor, so that, when future sailors tell the story, they will be narrating a true tale.In addition to this plot, there are a number of underdeveloped plot points. The sailor Orson finds was just rescued from a year lost on a desert island. The lady Orson finds used to live in Orson's house, back in the days when she had a rich father. None of them really add anything to our understanding of the characters. In the end, we have a beautifully shot but glacially paced film where characters make long pointless speeches, Jeanne Moreau gets pleasantly naked, and the film ends with a very literary irony that probably worked fine in the source novel, but does not impress in this film. In other words, this is a pretty typical European art film of the 60s, right down to the plot that could, without much alteration, be remade as a porn film. If you like these kind of movies, this film will be a nice surprise. If you are like me, and tend to find these sorts of things pretentious and dull, go watch Touch of Evil instead.

This is a very tight ,though highily clestophobic movie, with a simple, almost bed-time-story simplistic script. Nonetheless it is a powerfull message, superbly given...Enjoy!