Michael_Elliott
It's All True (1993)*** (out of 4) Fascinating documentary about the trouble Orson Welles fell into with RKO when he finished up THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and went to Brazil to film what was basically a South American trilogy. Welles was involved in three films: MY FRIEND BONITO, filmed in Mexico about a boy and his donkey; CARNAVAL, which footage shown here is in glorious Technicolor; and FOUR MEN ON A RAFT, which contains the majority of the footage here. IT'S ALL TRUE isn't going to be a movie for everyone and I'd imagine that most people would find it deadly dull and lifeless. Film buffs, however, should get a real kick out of it but the sad thing is that you could remake this movie a dozens times because it happened so often to Welles. The documentary starts off at the end of CITIZEN KANE when Welles was already considered controversial. It then moves onto the disastrous screening of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS where Welles thought he'd have a chance to re-edit the movie but instead the studio did it behind his back. We then get into the filming of the three films and learn of the various issues that happened including the lack of money, a curse from a voodoo man and eventually the studio taking the films away. In a bit of great luck, the footage to the three movies were discovered in 1985 and seeing the footage is interesting. CARNAVAL really stuck out to me because of the amazing colors, which just leap off the screen in Technicolor. The footage looks remarkably well and just look at the wonderful details in the costumes that the people are wearing. The stuff on FOUR MEN ON A RAFT has the most footage and also gets quite a bit of a backstory about the real event, the real tragedy and of course how Welles got involved and what he did to try and save the film. Film buffs and fans of Welles will certainly want to check this out. We get some nice interviews with people who worked on the film as well as relatives to those actual people that the film is based on.
Narrator_Jack_dot_com
From "This Is Orson Welles" by Bogdanovich On the film: "I've never seen any of what we shot, not a foot. Nobody ever saw the rushes." On filming in South America: "I didn't even like it particularly. I liked samba, but I didn't want to go down and live in South America--it's my least favorite part of the world." On filming: "I had this enormous crew sent down--I didn't want them, but they gave me two camera crews. So I'd sent a crew out there and said, 'Shoot 'em marching up and down.' I had to keep them busy; they were always saying, 'We want to get home--we're trapped here.'...So there must have been an awful lot of junk shot, because I wasn't even there."
flitcraft
I loved this examination of Welles' South American misadventures, because it challenged and successfully overturned my prejudices towards Welles; namely, that in his early years he squandered much of his talent and potential while becoming Hollywood's "bad boy," partying in the streets of Rio on RKO's tab until they had no choice but to pull the plug on his project. Instead, the filmmakers paint a much more sincere portrait of Welles as a committed filmmaker and artist, with circumstances beyond his control ultimately destroying not just his hard work, but the hopes of an entire oppressed underclass.Amazingly, the filmmakers were able to locate the survivors (and their relatives) to piece together, first the chronology of Welles' stay in Brazil, and eventually the raw footage itself, to give us at least a glimpse of what Welles had planned to release. It's also a fascinating look at the early documentary tradition pioneered by Robert Flaherty and John Grierson (though ultimately I think the evidence suggests Welles may have been more influenced by Eisensteinian agit-prop).For anyone interested in a sympathetic portrayal of American cinema's most praised and controversial director, I highly recommend IT'S ALL TRUE.
alice liddell
Welles was apparently asked by Nelson Rockefeller to make a film cementing USA-Latin American relations during World War II, to forestall possible Nazi influence in the South. It's easy to feel resentful about this film, especially if you've read David Thomson's majesterial 'Rosebud: The Story Of Orson Welles'. He relates how Welles' persistant and eventually pointless devotion to this project led directly , through his own lapses, to the destruction of his greatest film, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.On the other hand, this is a major act of cinematic restititution, the equivalent of finding a lost Shakespeare play, or Bach cantata. Any scrap of abandoned Wellesiana is vital, and needs to be seen, for its inherent brilliance of style and ideas, whatever its superficial shortcomings; and to give a more coherent grasp of an awesome, mercurial career.The only problem is that the project, even if it had been completed, seems to have been wrongheaded, especially in consideration of Welles' particular talents. I had seen snippets of the samba sequence on TNT a few years ago, and they seemed redolent of a certain, loveable Welles - anecdotal, entertaining, sympathetic, larger-than-life, perceptive. A large element of the Welles aesthetic is play. The flaw of this film is that Welles abandons this because he wants to be seen in serious, selfless, unpatronising mode. This attitude today, however, can seem as simplistic, and even dangerous, as the worst pieties of Italian neo-realism.The restoration is structured as a documentary, as we get a brief background to the story: both Welles' involvement, and the plight of the Brazilian people he portrayed. The film itself was intended to be a triptych. We only get snippets of the first two parts - 'Benito' has some remarkable camera angles later used more meaningfully in OTHELLO and THE IMMORTAL STORY; a loving capturing of Mexico, which, like DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D'ELLE, manages to aestheticise poverty; and a lovely shot of flying sheep. The second story was supposed to be about the roots of samba - we get some amazing, evocative colour footage of a Rio carnival, all the more moving and alive today when we think that this was going on in the middle of a black and white war.The centrepiece of IT'S ALL TRUE is a supposedly complete 'Four Men On A Raft' (with an unintentionally comic reminder of 'Three Men On A Boat'): a reconstruction of four peasant fishermen's 1650-mile sea voyage to the Brazilian fascist leader, the appropriately named Vargas, to protest about their atrocious living and working conditions.This is a silent work of the most ravishing beauty, with some of the most extraordinary images ever filmed, utilising, yet far superior to, Eisensteinian composition: the fishermen at work; life in the community; the sea voyage; visits to beautiful Mexican churches; the arrival of the men at a Rio beach. There is a jaw-dropping funeral sequence, a dwarfed procession under a weltering sky, which is among the best things in Welles (i.e. cinema).It's just that I, personally, can't stand this kind of filmmaking. It's main influence is the unbearable Robert Flaherty, and besides a trite, TABU-style love story, there is an unthinking romanticising of the peasantry, ignoring them as actual human beings who might prefer not to be seen as so saintly, that verges on the offensive; a benevolent version of the white man's burden. Of course, Welles, politically, was a very decent, liberal, passionate man, but none of the methods used to politically expose, as well as humanise, Charles Foster Kane, are used here: that would be to trivialise the project.It's this air of repressive earnestness that kills IT'S ALL TRUE for me. Welles could be a brilliant documentary maker - see F FOR FAKE - but this film, for all its peerless beauty, seems little more than propaganda, with Welles' atypical lack of ego making it feel unWellesian and underdone. This is doubly apparent during the closing credits, over which is played a wonderful, amusing encounter between Welles and Carmen Miranda, who explains to him various aspects of the samba. The heroic restorers deserve laurels, medals and a place at the celestial restoration of AMBERSONS, but if you want to see a great 'Good Neighbour' film, watch the magical THE THREE CABALLEROS.
