
Welles intended The Other Side of the Wind to be a
kind of bookend to his career – a final epic that might counterbalance the
weighty legacy of his first acclaimed feature, Citizen Kane. Like Kane, it is, among other things an appraisal of
a man’s life through the prism of his death. This is not a light entertainment,
although it certainly has a sense of humor. But it’s not nearly so polished as
the earlier masterpiece. It feels like a jumble at times and like an
inspiration at others. It is very much a picture of its time – the early 1970s
– which sometimes makes one cringe a bit – at a few jokes that by current
standards are inappropriate or politically incorrect for example. The targets
of Welles’ satire – the hollowness of many of the era’s experimental, arty
films for example - sometimes seem dated; yet at the same time, the movie’s
barbs are often surprisingly contemporary and universal – one example being the
evisceration of privacy that is the price of celebrity. The cinematography,
principally by Gary Graves, is often startlingly beautiful – particularly in
the otherwise intentionally pretentious film within the film.
With the aim of shaking out some financial backing for
his project, an old friend, Zarah Valeska (Lilli Palmer) has arranged a big
birthday party for Jake, to which she has invited all sorts of movie-biz folks:
old friends, money people, youthful directors from Hollywood’s new guard of the
early seventies (which is when the movie is set, i.e. contemporary with when it
was conceived and shot), and various celebrities and beautiful people of the
day. Hannaford’s unfinished film is shown at the party; and so, interspersed
with the “real” goings on, we get a movie within the movie – also called “The
Other Side of the Wind”. The movie within the movie is broadly patterned after,
and intended to satirize, the recent spate of new wave art-house pomposities,
such as Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point – beautiful but incoherent filmmaking in search of a story. The party scene, on the other hand is shot documentary style, with lots of cuts and jumps, seemingly from a multitude of cameramen.

I’ve seen Welles’ movie twice so far, once at the 2018 Telluride
Film Festival, and again, more recently, streaming from Netflix. The first time was the North American premier
of the movie on September 1, 2018. Going
in without much of an idea about the style of the picture or what it was about,
I was mesmerized, dazzled, confused, intrigued and by the end, uncertain what
to make of it all. It seemed like a
jumble, but a fascinating one.

Since then, most critics have rallied to The
Other Side of the Wind. It has a quite favorable Metacritic score of
80. Larry Kikta wrote in Film Threat: "It’s a parody, a biopic, a comedy, an experimental film, and God knows what
else. It may sound crazy to say, but The Other Side of the Wind is quite
possibly Orson Welles most ambitious picture and that might explain why it
remained unfinished for so long.” And Sam Adams in Slate describes the film thusly “a mess about messes, pretension
about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And eerily,
it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own
unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists
is astonishment enough.” Finally, here’s Chris Nashawaty’s recent take in Entertainment Weekly: “The
Other Side of the Wind (both the movie and the movie within a movie) is
a hypnotic, magical mess of a film. It’s a lot of story and not enough of one.
Still, there are shots that are so haunting and beautifully composed that you
want to get out of your seat and take up residence in them.”


Bogdanovich too is quite good and credible as Otterlake, the
Hannaford disciple whose rise to success has paralleled Hannaford’s tumble from
grace, and who is struggling to balance loyalty to his mentor with his own
self-interest. Another standout is Norman Foster as Billy Boyle, a loyal, if
not always effective aide and companion to Jake, and Paul Stewart as his
personal assistant. And lovely Susan Strasberg is very effective as a cinema
critic, Julie Rich (supposedly modeled after Pauline Kael), who asks a lot of
questions but isn’t getting a lot of answers. She doesn’t hesitate to puncture
the balloon of macho posturing of Jake and his cohort, theorizing perhaps
correctly that homo-eroticism may be behind this veneer.
The Other Side of the Wind is a movie well worth seeing. It may even be great. I probably will have to watch it again. If this review has piqued your interest, by all means you should see it. Heck, it’s on Netflix!
122 minutes
(Not rated, but features a fair amount of nudity and some cussing.)
Grade A-
Exclusively streaming
on Netflix.
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