Watch Orson Welles: The One-Man Band For Free

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Orson Welles' archives of unfinished/never released movies and the last years of his life from the perspective of Oja Kodar (life and artistic partner Of Orson Welles in his last years).What is Orson Welles? Is he a visionary, an artist, and a constant creator? Yes. This is a man who was only 26 when "Citizen Kane" was made, and continued to make brilliant work for decades. Perhaps some day we will see more of it (rumors abound that "lost films" will turn up).Why does this film have Muppets? Because it should. And why is the narration in German? This is a bit of a shortcoming. Because so much of it is in English, having the voiceovers in German does not seem to make a lot of sense. At the very least, it could have multiple sound options. (Subtitles are preferable to dubbing, but this would not even be dubbing because the narrator is never on screen.)

When a person slowly disappears, nobody seems to notice. This is probably what happened to Orson Welles when his film career stumbled into a downhill slope. The man who was arguably the most brilliant filmmaker to emerge on the American scene, ended up doing narration, wine commercials, and magic shows. He died in poverty, leaving behind masterpieces, but also leaving behind dozens of unfinished films. Films that could have been just as magical as his earlier works. 'Orson Welles - The One Man Band" takes a look at those struggling later years when Welles was a ghost hovering around the Hollywood movie scene. Many people knew he was trying to make movies, but many people also knew he could never get them finished. Because of his inability to finish films, no major studio would try to finance him, so he became a gypsy-like filmmaker. Even still then many projects were not finished. Although it is sad to see a legend struggling so badly, the film does not feel sorry for him. In fact, the film has a very positive outlook on Welles later years. The film is narrator by two people. One is the filmmaker. The other is Welles' companion, Oja Kodar. She had spent a considerable time with Welles in his last years and knew him probably better than anyone else. The image she shows of Welles was not of a burned-out has-been, but of a strong man who still had plenty of creative spark. When watching the snippets and short clips from his unfinished films, one can see exactly what Oja Kodar was seeing. Either it was bad luck or it was his conflicts with studios that could not get his films finished. Or maybe it was both. Regardless, one can see even in his later films, Welles still had incredible film-making talent and vision. One can see that he was also a versatile actor. He could play a wide variety of roles and play them as good as the best actors. When we see how creative he still was, we cannot help but think it was the Hollywood that ruined his career. There could be a lot of truth to this because many people feel he was never the same after 'Citizen Kane' because Welles might have stepped on too many big toes after his brilliant debut feature. But the unknown remains just that. At times, it is the artist who ruins his or her career with their own bare hands. It is hard to say what happened, but this film does not try to explain that either. It tries to focus on Welles the artist. And he was just that until his death. An artist who had no audience. How frustrating, but we have seen this example time and again throughout history.

Orson Welles fans, this may be the best you'll get in terms of 'lock-box' finished films from the prolific, perpetually f***ed over father of maverick-style cinema (i.e. few films made in Hollywood, with Europe his only safe place for his very independent ways as an actor/writer/director/producer/editor). Like an author who's smaller, in-the-vault kinds of works put together by an editor into one compilation, One Man Band, like the documentary It's All True, is a sort of collector's item in and of itself. Along with giving the fullest possible glimpses (as far as we Welles fans know) of the films as part of Welles's un-official scrapbook, there are some revelatory insights from his longtime companion Oja Kodar, and clips from a public interview in an auditorium (a very funny one) that shines some light on a couple of issues. The director here is the editor, assembling the pieces at times in the essay style of F for Fake (and this film is now included with it on the brilliantly packaged Criterion DVD), though not as frantic in style and purpose.Here we get something very special, in spurts, and even when the interest is a little more low-key than expected (though fun, the novelty isn't exceptional of Welles reading excerpts from Moby Dick and The Merchant of Venice), one can't look away. The best parts include the intact scenes from the Deep, London, the filmed excerpts of Merchant of Venice, the little moments of Welles's odd, hilarious imitations, and the one that still could be completed, the Other Side of the Wind. That last film is maybe the most fascinating film of the lot, as it goes even further with montage and experimental style than F for Fake. It's wild, it's rambling, and I could only get an idea of what was going on, but that's all I could've asked for anyway. The veneer of Welles's personality, as well, is stripped a bit away through Kodar's insights, how he was more of a modest man than the overwhelming, megalomaniac personality people made him out to be. At the end of the day he was, as the film makes clear without a shadow of doubt, one of the true poets of 20th century cinema, and like other controversial artists his major works were practically all censored, while the minor works barely left his traveling-alongside film cans.To see a filmmaker at work, at least in retrospective, can be many things, from dull, to over-indulgent, to really passing all of that and showing a man at work. While there isn't footage of Welles at work on a set like with Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie or A.K., the footage here compensates for that. One can see through the little bits of film done, the ones that showed his determination to keep rolling along instead of getting stuck in the past, that it isn't too much of a surprise that he got a little sick of people tipping the hat to Citizen Kane and nothing else he did in his career. His story is one of the tragedies of the artist's world, though it's good to know that he never got too depressed to not quit at the magic and voices. It's a real treat.

Orson Welles: The One-Man Band, which is one of many excellent extras on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of Welles' film F for Fake (Vérités et mensonges, 1974), is a 90-minute documentary, put together (co-directed) by Welles partner/companion Oja Kodar and filmmaker Vassili Silovic. It examines Welles' career primarily via a focus on his unfinished projects, and is of great interest to Welles fans for presenting (sometimes extended) clips of those unrealized films. Although this documentary is put together in the style of F for Fake, it's not nearly as successful artistically, which probably underscores what a genius Welles could be when he was in charge.The unfinished or lost works prominently featured include Moby Dick, The Merchant of Venice (1969), The Other Side of the Wind (1972), and a kind of surrealistic "biopic" that Welles was working on, set in London, called One Man Band. There is also a fascinating question and answer session with Welles filmed on a college campus, bits of a television show with him talking to various Muppets (it appears to be more of a talk show than something taken from The Muppet Show), a few instances of Welles performing magic tricks, and quite a few scenes filmed specifically for this documentary. The latter tend to have the best cinematography. The clips from unfinished films that Welles shot or supervised tend to not be properly processed. They need color correction; they need to be cleaned up, and so on.Just seeing the Welles film clips out of context like this tends to undermine their potential impact for me. For example, the surrealistic Merchant of Venice scenes and the bizarre sex scene from The Other Side of the Wind are both fascinating, but with improperly processed prints and with just snippets that should have arrived in a full film in the same vein, neither quite work, and in the context of this documentary, they tend to slow it down too much. The bits of Welles reading sections from Moby Dick at the camera in close-up and the brief scenes from an unrealized film called the Dreamers do not work at all for me. The snippets of One-Man Band are primarily interesting in that they amount to Welles doing his best Benny Hill impersonation.Although I was drawn to the documentary by seeing the unfinished clips, what ended up being the most significant aspect of The One Man Band for me was the exploration of Welles' difficult relationship with the film industry, his occasional bad luck (such as losing or having the negatives of Merchant of Venice stolen), his efforts to fund his projects, which tended to always surmount what he could arrange financing for, and his public comments, which mostly downplayed the unfinished works, and in which he presents himself both as a carefree, somewhat modest "artiste" and a deep pessimist. In some of these respects, Welles had a career similarity to other maverick outsider artists, such as Frank Zappa.Relatively simple shots, such as driving by the outside of the big Hollywood studios and the Director's Guild of America, have significant symbolic impact in this context, as we're seeing the "closed door" to Welles' creative ideals. There are aspects of Welles that I would have liked to see explored more in depth in this documentary, such as his visual artworks (both the works intended as ends in themselves and those intended as tools for film-making), but this is a fairly successful, if somewhat sad and disheartening look at a very unique talent.