Perhaps
the most startling thing about Orson Welles’s
F for Fake is its youthful energy. By the
time it premiered in 1972, Welles was 57 years old,
and he knew intimately what it felt like to work
on a film and never see its release. Even the ones
that he finished could take forever: he worked on
Othello for nearly four years, and he occasionally
had to replace its actors in the middle of shooting.
And some favorite projects – like Don
Quixote and his last work, The Other Side
of the Wind – never made it onto the
big screen at all.
So first-time
viewers familiar with Welles’s travails may
be stunned at how downright ebullient F for
Fake is.
There are probably
several reasons for the obvious joy Welles felt
making the film. It was stunningly easy to make,
compared to Welles’s other projects; the themes
it explored were personally close to Welles; and
he didn’t actually have to shoot all the footage
himself. In a sense, Welles acted as the writer
and editor in a film that he transformed from a
straightforward documentary into an episodic, freeform
essay that may be unique in film history.
It started out
as a straightforward project. François Reichenbach
had made a documentary about the art forger Elmyr
de Hory and his biographer, Clifford Irving, and
after it was shown on TV around the world, Reichenbach
offered all his interview footage – both used
and unused – to Welles.
Welles accepted
the offer, but something far more intriguing had
happened since Reichenbach shot his interview footage:
Clifford Irving, whose de Hory biography was called
Fake, wrote a biography about Howard Hughes,
and he claimed the famously reclusive billionaire
had worked closely with him on it. Irving’s
descriptions of clandestine meetings with a disheveled
Hughes proved irresistible with the public (as well
as McGraw-Hill and Time Magazine, which
arranged to publish the biography). The story captured
headlines around the world, as did Irving’s
subsequent downfall (and prison sentence) once his
fraud was unmasked. (Instead of printing excerpts
of the canceled book, Time gave him a cover
story as “Con Man of the Year.”)
For Welles, it
offered a cunning new layer to Reichenbach’s
interview footage: the biographer of a forger turned
out to be a forger himself, and Welles perhaps naturally
added another layer to the material by presenting
himself in the film as another happy charlatan with
a long history of malfeasance. F for Fake,
Welles tells us in its opening minutes, is about
bigger ideas than simply one forger. It’s
about trickery, fraud and lies – and, by extension,
storytelling itself. (“Almost any story is
almost certainly some kind of lie,” Welles
says, with a straight face, and he notes later that
“We hanky-panky men have always been with
you.”) Welles’s exploration of these
more abstract themes is not linear, to put it mildly,
but it’s certainly a fun ride.
The film, which
clips along at a breathless pace for most of its
88 minutes, thus opens with Welles performing magic
tricks for children; cuts to voyeuristic footage
of his mistress drawing men’s attention in
the street (another bit of trickery: some of the
footage is actually of her sister); then dives headlong
into the de Hory / Irving fray. Welles then takes
over the narrative again, recounting his own fakery
with the “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast
as well as a few other flights into fakery.
The film finally
takes another turn – a slower one –
when Welles stages another fraud: his mistress,
he claims, was previously Picasso’s lover,
and through somewhat shaky means, she had come to
possess several unknown Picasso masterpieces. (As
a measure of Welles’s playfulness here, he
opens the film with a promise that what you’re
about to see in the next hour is all true; the catch
is that the Picasso material shows up after that
hour has passed.)
As fun as it can
be to float along Welles’s stream of consciousness,
it’s the film’s editing that will amaze
you. Its rhythm is fast and unexpected, and it’s
an altogether refreshing experience to watch Welles
work so buoyantly. (For all its apparent breeziness,
the editing process was intense and extended. In
an interview that appeared in Dominique Villain’s
Le Montage au cinema, F for Fake’s
chief editor reported that Welles worked on editing
the film seven days a week for a year.)
As a measure of
how brilliant Welles’s editing is in F
for Fake, compare it to the staid if informative
“Almost True: The Noble Art of Forgery”
included on the Criterion Collection’s top-notch
release of F For Fake. There’s nothing
wrong with this 52-minute documentary about
de Hory (it was released in 1997). It simply wilts
next to Welles’s frenetic genius.
Ironically, while
Welles lived another 13 years, F for Fake
was his last completed feature. He stayed busy with
commercials and various appearances on TV as well
as in other people’s films, but he never managed
to bring another film of his own to closure. Footage
from some of his unfinished projects is included
on the Criterion release of F for Fake,
and judging it based on snippets, none of it seems
worthy of the director of Citizen Kane
and Touch of Evil – or F for
Fake, for that matter. The budgets are clearly
threadbare, so the technical elements suffer, and
sometimes the drama seems woefully slow and ponderous.
Through it all,
though, Welles still beams youthfully, somehow. |