It’s been disconcerting to read, over the past several weeks, of no fewer than four Hollywood projects in the works that purport to be by and/or about Orson Welles. Three of these are based on Welles scripts that he never found the money to produce: The Big Brass Ring (an original with a contemporary setting), The Dreamers (an adaptation of two Isak Dinesen stories), and The Cradle Will Rock (an autobiographical script set in the 30s). Yet all have been extensively rewritten, and the fourth–as recently reported by Todd McCarthy in Daily Variety–is a series of whole-cloth inventions about the making of Citizen Kane, presumably with a few facts thrown in, called RKO 281, written by Chicago playwright John Logan.
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Writing in the 50s about Sacha Guitry’s Royal Affairs in Versailles, Roland Barthes noted that the use of stars enabled movies to popularize history and history to glorify and dignify movies–a trade-off enjoyed by cinephiles and historians alike: “For instance, Georges Marchal passes a little of his erotic glory over to Louis XIV, and in return, Louis XIV imparts some of his monarchical glory to Georges Marchal.” I suppose a similar sort of barter might be taking place between various Hollywood hopefuls and Orson Welles in the aforementioned projects. But I fear it will be Welles, not these bozos, who winds up with the short end of the stick. What they want from Welles, it seems, is enough of his artistic glory to dignify their own lack of ideas, but what these dim, well-financed projects are supposed to give Welles and his legacy is anyone’s guess. Accessibility? Posthumous acclamation? Thanks a lot, fellas.
Some of these thoughts were prompted by von Trier’s Medea, a video production made for Danish TV based, after a fashion, on a script written by Carl Dreyer with Preben Thomsen in the mid-60s, in the hopes that Dreyer would get the money to film it himself. The 46-page manuscript was subsequently translated into English with the help of Elsa Gress and published in a catalog for a Dreyer retrospective (which never made it to Chicago) edited by Jytte Jensen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1988–the same year von Trier shot his version of the script in Danish. This English version is the one I’ve had access to. Gress explains in her introduction that the script is based on Euripides’ tragedy “and follows his conception of the characters in all essentials, while emphasizing the universal human features and reducing the importance of the mythical material and the specifically Greek apparatus.”
Is this what the Facets press notes mean by calling this Medea “faithful to the script,” claiming that von Trier “retained Dreyer’s laconic dialogue and spartan style”? I suppose I buy the laconic dialogue, but if anything ever committed to film or video by von Trier, including Medea, is spartan, then–as critic Elliott Stein once observed in a different context–“Take Me Out to the Ball Game is the memorable life story of Soren Kierkegaard.”
Yet Sunday has plenty of fine things to say about the everyday routines in and around a men’s homeless shelter, and even more about an impromptu one-day affair between two touching middle-aged washouts, a former IBM accountant named Oliver (David Suchet), who leaves the shelter for the day to walk around in numbed isolation, and an out-of-work English actress named Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), recently separated from her manic husband (Larry Pine), who’s carrying home to her cluttered digs a huge potted plant she found on the street.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Sunday film still.
