Contentar
Best movie of this year hands down!
StyleSk8r
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Blake Rivera
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
Hollywoodshack
Welles' film is a great comment on greed and the love of riches, and how futile it is when you can't take it with you after life ends. Wealthy Mr. Clay demands his assistant make the story he heard on ships from sailors come true. He pays the daughter (Jean Moreau) of a business partner he ruined and a poor young sailer (Norman Eishley) to sleep together one night so Clay can be the godfather of the child they conceive since Clay couldn't father children with his own wife. There is an ironic surprise for this plan when it completes, Welles using a brilliant color scheme and expert camera angles through every shot and scene. Clay's character is especially good with Welles filling the stuffy, wicked sturdiness of his portrayal almost like greed and evil personified.
orlygur
This was Orson Welles' only film in color apart from the documentary F for Fake which he made in 1973. After this film he sadly did not get the change to write and direct more movies. As mentioned before he made one documentary in the seventies, shot sections of the movie Other Side of the Wind (never finished it), made a bunch of commercials and starred in horrible movies (apart from The Kremlin Letter, Waterloo, Catch 22, A safe Place, Ten Days Wonder and Get to Know Your Rabbitt). So the only great thing we have from Orson Welles as a pioneer movie director during the last 20 years of his live (he died in 1985) is Chimes of Midnight (1966) and this film which he made in 1968 for french television. This film is short and excellent. The way Orson uses color celluloid is spellbinding, i've never seen anything like it, he uses red and green colors like a painter and projects a certain eerie feeling seldom seen in cinema. The story is a typical one by Welles. A rich and powerful older man is lonesome in his mansion and only wants to be loved. For those of you who love cinema, this film is a must see by one of the greatest directors of all time. Based on a story by danish writer Karen Blixen.
Neil Doyle
Having said that, it's strictly an art piece about a bankrupt merchant (ORSON WELLES) who for some unknown reason wants to turn a myth into reality by hiring two people to play out the theme of a story the townspeople have turned into a myth.The setting is Macao, China and the slow moving tale is narrated by Welles as Mr. Clay, a bitter old man with a faithful servant/assistant. Welles, by this time in his career, had deteriorated physically to the point where some of his dialog is hard to understand since he barely moves his mouth when he speaks.He pays his assistant to locate a woman and a sailor who can reenact the tale inside his own palatial house. JEANNE MOREAU is the young woman who agrees to play her part in "the comedy" after being assured that she will be paid handsomely for her contribution to making the old man's story come to life. Moreau talks and talks to the assistant about her background in this very literary tale where there is so little movement to propel the story forward.Mr. Clay himself chooses the sailor, a tattered looking blond whom he invites to his home with the promise of five guineas. And he talks and talks and talks. "It's hard on you being so old and dry," the sailor tells Welles. And indeed, Welles, as Mr. Clay, does look old and dry beyond his seventy years. But Mr. Clay is intent on making a tale that has been invented really happen.Handsomely photographed in subdued color, it's a very enigmatic tale that really doesn't make much sense when it's all over. Chalk it up to another pretentious bore from Welles, who based his screenplay on a novel by Isak Dinesen (author of "Out of Africa").Summing up: A misfire and enigma that Welles originally planned as part of an anthology of stories.
dmanko
This is a very tight ,though highily clestophobic movie, with a simple, almost bed-time-story simplistic script. Nonetheless it is a powerfull message, superbly given...Enjoy!
