Martin Bradley Certainly not the late masterpiece some people have claimed it to be but Orson Welles' "The Immortal Story" is still extraordinary in ways so many films aren't. It clocks in at under an hour so it really is the perfect miniature. It is a film about the art of story-telling with only four main speaking parts. Welles could just as easily have done this on the radio and yet visually this is extremely beautiful, (it was his first film in colour), and still typically 'Wellesian'.He adapted it from a novel by Isak Dinesen and he, himself, plays the role of the old merchant in the 'story' of the old merchant who hires a young sailor to sleep with his young wife, (Jeanne Moreau is the woman hired by the merchant to play the wife in the story). The sailor is played by the English actor Norman Eshley and he's painfully wooden but he doesn't upset the flow of the piece; in fact, his banal, robotic diction actually fits it. No masterpiece then, but this short piece, which almost feels thrown together, stands head and shoulders over the best work of many lesser directors.

framptonhollis Admittedly, many of the films that I give a rating of a ten out of ten to on this website are not necessarily deserving of such an honor, and I do abuse such a privilege because I can always find something wrong with even my favorite films (with a couple of exceptions). However, "The Immortal Story" is among the few films that I have seen that seems to have absolutely nothing wrong with it. Orson Welles crafted this masterpiece, shot for shot, in a way that flows with an almost poetic rhythm. Swimming through the dark shores of "The Immortal Story" is a disturbing, twisted, engaging, sad, entertaining, and unique experience.Based on a work by Karen Blixen (the woman behind the novel "Out of Africa" as well as the novella that inspired one of my favorite movies, "Babette's Feast") this is a strange story of awkward and borderline surreal events when an elderly and powerful trader played by Welles himself declares his preference to facts over fiction, and requests to recreate a tale he hears so it could have truly occurred. The results are quite unconventional and inexplicably melancholic. By the end, I nearly shook with a strange feeling of sadness; this movie isn't explicitly depressing, but the subtlety only makes it more gloomy and affecting to the (at least REMOTELY) sensitive viewer. Welles' own narration adds another cryptic layer to the tale, as each and every performance across the board is practically perfect in tone and slight awkwardness. It is a small scale project that has a limited cast and clocks in at only about fifty eight minutes and yet it surpasses a majority of today's huge, two and a half hour long blockbusters. This is an elegant portrait of eccentricity and philosophy, a film about a heavy (in both weight and mind) old man with a slightly deranged way of thinking, and this man is portrayed with all the mumbling might one could expect from one of cinema's main masters, the great Orson Welles!The music accompanies the film perfectly as the tone of Erik Satie's great piano pieces is calm, but slightly sad, which is exactly what I would describe the film surrounding it as. This is not a ridiculous, over the top melodrama, but rather a slow, Bergmanesque tale of bizarre tragedy. Mind blowingly perfect in every way, "The Immortal Story" is a stream that runs with pure delight, but not in the conventional sense for the delight here is made up of moments that will likely depress and destroy, but also provoke.

emwolf Welles continues to amaze me. I've made an effort to track down some of his less available movies, such as F For Fake, and this one. This is closer in style to the Magnificent Ambersons than anything else I've seen. Welles seems to have a love for the people of this world he creates and frames them in vibrant colors with golden lighting. The pace, unlike the majority of his works, is slow and deliberate without the trademarked quick editing. The story, too, is not rushed and the ironic twists are revealed with a sense of sadness, no one's "comeuppance" seemed justified but rather a tragic outcome of each character's personal flaws. I really recommend this for fans of the master. I think many will find this odd and I imagine that many younger viewers (the ones who find black & white dull or Hitchcock overrated) will find this unwatchable.

chaos-rampant Orson Welles directs based on a novel by Isak Dinesen a story about an Ebenezer Scrooge type, the miserly rich old man who doesn't believe in stories and prophecies, who hears a story about a sailor picked up by an old man in a harbor to sleep with a beautiful woman and decides to make the story happen in real life, "so that at least one sailor can tell it from beginning to end, like it happened". This is like an essay on fiction, or like a charcoal sketch, except the charcoal in Welles' hand leaves smudges and we get those smudges as handprints on the canvas because The Immortal Story seems to talk about the anxieties of a storyteller and a magician but also of an aging man and an exile. In parts of the static, dour, style, he channels Bergman, old Dreyer, Beckett, his own work, there's a beautiful piano accompaniment and Jeanne Moreau, in her Pierre Cardin attires, looks ravished and ravishing at the same time. In the end the story is reenacted for the old man's benefit and to his satisfaction, but the sailor leaving the mansion refuses to tell it to anyone because who would believe him anyway. Perhaps Welles is telling us that some things, the important ones in life, we tell as stories because no one would believe us otherwise, so that in the world of imagination they can become as real and so communicate their truth, and inversely that perhaps all stories in the world happened somewhere to someone in some form, and we only hear their echo through the centuries. Or even that we're all as characters in a story, moving at the bidding of a higher authority that pulls the strings, but it's our right and choice to tell our story or not. Food for thought.