Chance's Corner: The Other Side of the Wind Review

It’s been 40 years since Orson Welles filmed The Other Side of the Wind, and now, 40 years later, and 33 years since Orson Welles passed away, it has finally been edited and released through the combined efforts of director/actor/historian Peter Bogdanovich (among others) and Netflix. I can’t emphasize just how important that is. Okay, maybe I can - this is film history!

The Other Side of the Wind mainly serves as a director's lament on the passing of Old Hollywood, and a satire of the radical, sometimes vapid, ideas to come out of New Hollywood (post-1967). Shot in a guerrilla mockumentary style, in high-contrast color and black and white, Wind is perhaps Orson Welles' most personal and biting work, with Jake Hannaford (John Huston), a creature of the Old trying to fit in with the New, being a thinly-veiled interpretation of Welles and his own doubts and desires. In the film, Hannaford is an aging director, surrounded by an entourage of has-beens, who has a bold idea for an experimental comeback film, something that’ll really get his career going again, if only he can get the financing for it (life imitating art, it seems!). Wind picks up at the end of this attempt, and at the end of Hannaford’s life, showing his final hours on the eve of his birthday, which is being celebrated at a ranch house in the desert.

Interspersed between the alcohol-fueled birthday celebration, we get to see parts of the comeback film – the real The Other Side of the Wind – as Hannaford shows some of the completed footage to ravenous, almost contemptuous, reporters. In contrast with Hannaford’s last hours, this film is controlled and kaleidoscopic. Sensical? No. As a would-be investor puts it, Hannaford seems to be just making the film up as he goes. Maybe so, but in reality, Welles seems to be parodying Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, a key film in the counterculture/New Hollywood movement. While it is a parody, the film within a film showcases some incredibly inventive work from Welles (no surprise there), and he conjures up some of the most striking visuals to be seen in decades, and this was made in the '70s! That's Welles, for you, always getting the last laugh.

I'm very interested to see just how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will handle this, as the direction, performances, editing and cinematography are all hard to ignore. If it is awarded anything, the award will most likely be posthumous, as most, if not all, of the heavy hitters in the film are long gone, excluding Bogdanocivh, of course!

If you’re interested in seeing this film, you can watch it now on Netflix.