From my favorite movies..

Excellent, a Must See

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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.

Orson Welles only Color Feature Film, (not counting the Mockumentary "F for Fake" (1973), is Basically only of Interest to Welles Fans and Admirers. It is so Slow and Literary that Today if not Viewed as a "Staged Play" can be Glacial in Style but Not Without Beauty.The Metaphorical Tale that Welles uses is not only Immortal in Folklore but to the Director/Actor Himself. Tragically Mounted with Soft Brown-Red-Yellow Hues, it's a Dusty Ditty of Talk as the Sands in the Hourglass are Squeezing through the Aperture of Time Immemorial for the Character and Welles.Unable to Sleep in His Declining Years, the Wealthy Mr. Clay is Read Bedtime Stories by His Accountant. The Readings Consist of the Lonely Man's Ledgers of "Dry" Figures and Bottom Lines of a Life left Meaningless when all is "Said and Done".The Boring Brutality of the "Facts and Figures" leads to an Off Handed Remark about a Story supposedly Told by Sailors on Long Voyages. Mr. Clay Laments that the Story is Useless because it is Fictional and Decides to Pay People to Actually "Live" the Tale so it can have "Real" Life Meaning.The Film is Well Acted with Welles in Heavy Makeup Looking like "Death Personified" with His Face Projecting an Evil Discompassionate Life of a Capitalist Bloodsucker. It's most Interesting Aspect, Ironically, is not the "Story", it's the Pictured Colored Palette that Welles Frames with the Words and Meaning of the Whole Thing Secondary to the Audience, Especially Today.Originally Shot for French TV, it Runs Only One Hour, and as such is Worth a Watch for the Curious. Those having No Interest in Orson Welles Career might want to Pass.

Orson Welles directs based on a novel by Isak Dinesen a story about an Ebenezer Scrooge type, the miserly rich old man who doesn't believe in stories and prophecies, who hears a story about a sailor picked up by an old man in a harbor to sleep with a beautiful woman and decides to make the story happen in real life, "so that at least one sailor can tell it from beginning to end, like it happened". This is like an essay on fiction, or like a charcoal sketch, except the charcoal in Welles' hand leaves smudges and we get those smudges as handprints on the canvas because The Immortal Story seems to talk about the anxieties of a storyteller and a magician but also of an aging man and an exile. In parts of the static, dour, style, he channels Bergman, old Dreyer, Beckett, his own work, there's a beautiful piano accompaniment and Jeanne Moreau, in her Pierre Cardin attires, looks ravished and ravishing at the same time. In the end the story is reenacted for the old man's benefit and to his satisfaction, but the sailor leaving the mansion refuses to tell it to anyone because who would believe him anyway. Perhaps Welles is telling us that some things, the important ones in life, we tell as stories because no one would believe us otherwise, so that in the world of imagination they can become as real and so communicate their truth, and inversely that perhaps all stories in the world happened somewhere to someone in some form, and we only hear their echo through the centuries. Or even that we're all as characters in a story, moving at the bidding of a higher authority that pulls the strings, but it's our right and choice to tell our story or not. Food for thought.

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.