Over nine months, Welles wrote a script, scouted locations and commissioned Alexandre Trauner to design sets for a film he expected to direct and star in. Welles was drifting from studio to studio as a Hollywood director-for-hire when, in 1948, he relocated to Europe to work with producer Alexander Korda, on an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac that Welles had considered since his time at RKO. Surviving elements, including the film’s entire third segment, appear in the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. Invented on the fly by Welles, the film had already gone through several iterations when a management reshuffle at RKO saw studio support for it (and Welles) withdrawn and the miles of footage already shot repurposed or dumped in the Pacific. Intended as Welles’ third feature for RKO after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, It’s All True was to be a docufiction comprising three stories set and shot in Latin America. Orson Welles in production on It’s All True Chaplin later declared this “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career”, but, in a 1960 interview, Welles insisted his version would have been better. Chaplin, intrigued by the idea of taking a dramatic role but reluctant to be directed in a film by someone other than himself, instead bought the rights and ultimately turned Welles’ story into the black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
#CYRANO DE BERGERAC FILM 1960 STREAMING SERIAL#
Not long after the release of Citizen Kane, Welles pitched a ‘dramatised documentary’ to Charlie Chaplin provisionally entitled Lady Killer, to be written and directed by Welles and to star Chaplin as a character based on French serial killer Henri Landru. Shelving his epic Christian western, Welles decided to instead swiftly move on to The Magnificent Ambersons, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington that he considered less challenging. It would have been a reimagining that retained the language of the Gospels while transporting Christ to the 19th-century American west, but a combination of factors eventually put paid to the idea: the potential for religious controversy, the vagueness of Welles’ overall plan and the fact that RKO was displeased with the time Welles was taking to develop such ambitious projects. The Life of Christ (1940-41)Īfter Citizen Kane, Welles toyed with the idea of filming the story of Christ (with himself in the title role, natch). Welles wrote the script, cast actors, meticulously planned camera set-ups and even shot test footage – but RKO, concerned that the war in Europe would harm the already over-budgeted film’s box office chances, pulled the plug. Having already put Joseph Conrad’s jungle odyssey Heart of Darkness to radio in 1938, Welles set about making a feature film in which he would star as both narrator Marlow and the mad, mythical Kurtz, and which would be shot entirely from Marlow’s point of view. Yet the studio ultimately balked at the price tag for his proposed debut. RKO had shown great faith in Welles when in 1939 it signed the theatre and radio wunderkind to a highly lucrative contract, one that would allow Welles total control of his first two movies as writer-director-star. In anticipation of this new Welles film finally seeing the light of day, we charted the history of 10 unmade and unfinished Welles projects, some of which we may yet still get to see in one form or another. But a recent Netflix deal to finalise post-production means that the feature – Welles’ 14th – is set for a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, then a release on Netflix from 2 November. As with all too many late Welles pictures, it remained unfinished in the director’s lifetime – the footage tied up in rights disputes. One such film, until recently, was The Other Side of the Wind, a Hollywood satire starring John Huston as an ageing director, which Welles shot sporadically from 1970 to 1976.
On his death in 1985, Welles would leave behind numerous projects unmade, unfinished or unreleased. Turning his back on the studio system after control on films such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947) was wrestled from him in the final edit, Welles entered the precarious world of early independent filmmaking, spending whatever money he could get hold of on productions that might last for years – and which Welles might abandon if at any moment he felt the material wasn’t up to his standards. Considering that by the age of 26 he’d conquered the theatre (with his radical stagings of Shakespeare), radio (with his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast) and cinema (with a film considered by many to be the greatest of all time), few could blame Orson Welles for struggling the rest of his life to live up to his own artistic legacy.
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