Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★

  Welles’s most outwardly poetic work - Mr. Clay's subplot is essentially the epilogue to Citizen Kane, but imbued with the classicalism we see in Ambersons and Chimes. Here, it feels like a almost floating film. It’s equal parts the most tender and erotic film Welles ever made; the latter an anomaly in Welles’s cinema, and the bedroom sequence is my favorite part of all his movies. Is it minor? It's smaller for sure, a real cinematic short story - but it hits notes Welles would never hit before or since.

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★½ 5

  "It is very hard on people who want things so badly they can't do without them."

  Like most of the films the accursed auteur Orson Welles managed to make following his Hollywood exile, The Immortal Story (Une histoire immortelle) rather lucked its way into existence, arising as it did from a fortuitous meeting at the 1966 Cannes film festival. Old friends who enjoyed their professional relationship on The Trial and Chimes at Midnight, Welles and Jeanne Moreau were desirous of another pretext to work together (which adds up when one considers that both were uncommonly independent personalities notwithstanding their international stature).

  Moreau's agent—and aspirant film producer—Micheline Rozan introduced Welles and her client to Claude Constantine, the newly appointed director for the…

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½ 2

  Orson Welles is so good at movies that it makes me mad.

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

  Find someone who loves you as much as Orson Welles loved wearing dodgy makeup.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

  Kind of a shock to see Welles do something not just in color but in such a still, minimalist style as this but he does it well and it's easy to see what drew him to this material about artificial storytelling having the ability to create something more emotionally real than poisonous money ever could.

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  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★ 2

  Orson Welles breathes briny life into an old seafarer’s myth as millionaire Charles Clay in The Immortal Story. Conceptualized for French television, Welles’ adaptation of the Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dineson) short story is palpably dank, the atmosphere corroded by Clay’s callous demeanor. A Damoclean curse hangs over Clay as he orchestrates via his agent (Roger Coggio) a sexual rendezvous between a penniless sailor (Norman Eshley) and a prostitute he has employed to play the part of his bride, the ruined daughter of his late, ousted business partner, Virginie (Jeanne Moreau).

  Jeanne Moreau is transfixing in her role of the scathingly vengeful orphan-cum-courtesan Virginie. Pierre Cardin masterfully recreated the 1880-90s period attire, especially the corsetry for Moreau’s beautifully displayed décolleté.…

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  Review by Film Bart ★★★★ 3

  "He's full of the juices of life. There's blood in him... I suppose he's got tears. He longs and yearns for the things which dissolve people-- for friendship and love. Such things a man's bones are dissolved."

  "I have heard it before... long ago... but where?"

  Welles is perhaps the screen's greatest poet of regret.

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  Review by benhack ★★★★½

  A regret for a legacy of avarice, the malaise of an aging magnate of whom has grown tired of life's transience and the pretences of existence.

  He finds such a resonating rapture in the lusty myth of an austere old man, similar to himself, employing the youth of a young unkempt sailor in order to inseminate his wife. It's a tale that is tangible only from the words of the storyteller, yet this such an eluding capacity is not enough for Charles Clay's (Orson Welles) empty soul. A pastiche to be imbued with a sentience and realism.

  Perhaps a greater melancholy is to be discerned of Clay, perhaps it will take more than mere theatrics to fill an insatiable vacancy in a empathy bereft cold and callous heart.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  Somehow spare and containing a whole world because that’s what fiction allows as the movie itself remind us. The colors are wonderful and one can see traces of his 70s work taken form.

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★½ 2

  10th Orson Welles

  Welles's first colour feature is a beautiful piece of cinema and also a brilliant black comedy about the frailties of power and the limitations of money. Mr Clay's obsession with a single story (which, ironically, everyone knows) morphs into his obsession with making it come true, a task that he thinks will make him the master of memory, or at least A memory. Of course, real life and fiction don't mix, but Clay never twigs this and the series of events he manipulates to get his perverse wish (perverse both sexually and in a more generally unnatural manner) ultimately doesn't go the way he wants it to, but because of various circumstances he's never aware of this,…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★

  57/100

  The last Welles feature I will ever see for the first time (unless The Other Side of the Wind finally escapes). It's beautifully made, but the titular story turns out to be kinda bland, especially given how much time is spent building it up. Hard to believe sailors have been repeating that tawdry tale for decades, which means that the film's power (and that of Blixen's story, presumably, though I haven't read it) resides entirely in the performative meta-narrative, plus a quartet of strong performances. Roger Coggio, as the bookkeeper, provides a master class in servile strength, and I kept wanting him to go full Bogarde/Pinter. Ending's a little cute—wonder whether it was Welles or Blixen who hoped that announcing it in advance might help. In any case, there's no denying that almost every other picture Welles completed has a stronger claim to immortality.

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  Review by Dante ★★★★½ 1

  to be an old fat guy in a funny carriage and making elaborate plans to watch Jeanne Moreau fuck a blonde twink. if i was in that situation i would do the same thing. of the Orson Welles films that i've seen this might be the one that's most obviously by somebody with a background in theatre, the blocking in this is very stagey and i really enjoy that.