Mank (2020)

I was wrong: This 2020 Academy Best Picture nominee took even longer to come to fruition. Too bad the writer, Jack Fincher, father of director David, didn't live to see it. Anyway, once again, I gave it priority among the nominees only because of its availability.

We tend to think of Citizen Kane as exclusively an Orson Welles (Tom Burke) work, but Herman J. "Mank" Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) gets credit as a co-writer. Exactly how much credit he deserves is disputed, but in this telling, he writes the entire first draft. This is not easy for him to do in a timely fashion, because he has a drinking problem, a broken leg from a car crash, a half-estranged wife (Tuppence Middleton), the hostility of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) over this imminent unflattering depiction, and general unpopularity for not opposing the California gubernatorial run of Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye).

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Don't read too much into the year of release: Most of the work -- the recording, at least -- was done in the '70s, which is part of why I chose it out of my recent-skewing Netflix list. You might call it Orson Welles' most troubled movie of all, and that's saying something.

The title is also of a fictitious unfinished art film within the film. Its director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), is "celebrating" his 70th birthday by showing snippets of footage to potential funders; answering obnoxious reporter questions or, more often, having protégé Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich) answer for him; philandering; passing out party gifts; and expressing contempt for the leading man (aptly named Bob Random), who walked away before they could finish. Little does anyone know, as the up-front narration indicates, that Hannaford will die that night.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

I had seen only two Charlie Chaplin movies that were not even partly silent: The Great Dictator and Limelight. They were about on par with his silents, so I wanted to see a hit that came out in between them. Well, sort of a hit. It bombed at the box office and got little U.S. appreciation when new, but it enjoys high marks across rating sites now. Chaplin himself had an extra high opinion of it.

In what I take to be 1930s France, albeit with 1940s fashions and only the star attempting a French accent, Henri Verdoux (Chaplin), a laid-off banker, cannot find similar work. His solution is to travel frequently, assume several aliases, court several women, and mooch off or steal from them -- and murder them one way or another when he thinks it'll help him get away with theft. He's not above offing anyone else who stands in his way, either. But he weaves a tangled web and can sustain only so much luck....

The Stranger (1946)

Finally, another true oldie! Not to mention my first Orson Welles movie in more than two years. He wasn't completely persona non grata in Hollywood yet, so he's not the only star of note here. More importantly from a historical perspective, this was his one immediate box office hit, tho Welles himself liked it least.

Franz Kindler (Welles) may have been the Nazi Party's best-kept secret, a Holocaust architect who always avoided the limelight, so the UN War Crimes Commission has little idea what to look for. Commission member Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) makes the irregular move of setting loose condemned "smaller fish" Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) and tailing him. Meinike flees to a small Connecticut town, discovers Wilson, and knocks him out before meeting Kindler, who now masquerades as seemingly American teacher Charles Rankin and will soon wed a Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young). To stop the trail cold, Kindler kills Meinike in the woods and buries him, however shallowly. When Wilson comes to, he finds his mission a little harder than he'd hoped.

F for Fake (1974)

It makes sense to me that the last movie to be directed by Orson Welles would be quite different. Not just from his other works but from pretty much any other. Some reviewers have reservations about calling it a documentary, tho I don't know how else to classify it unless "essay" counts as a genre.

The project had begun as a doc on Elmyr de Hory, possibly the world's most successful art forger. (Of course, a more successful one might never get caught.) It still focuses on him in large part, but Welles expanded it to liars in general, including Clifford Irving, phony biographer of both de Hory and Howard Hughes; Oja Kodar, Croatian actress and muse of sorts; and...Welles himself.

Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report (1955)

Mr. Arkadin (ar KAH din) is notorious for having an especially problematic production, even for one featuring and directed by Orson Welles. You see, he had missed one deadline too many and gotten dismissed from the creative process by producer Louis Dolivet (better known for politics than film). At least five edits saw theatrical release, none with Welles' approval. The cut retitled Confidential Report, running 98 minutes, is neither the most widely seen version overall nor the one thought to be closest to what Welles ultimately had in mind; more likely it stems from an earlier draft.

Like in Citizen Kane, the plot involves examination of the past life of a rich man played by Welles. This time, the man in question actually calls for the examination -- confiding to narrator-protagonist Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) that he himself can't remember who he was before 1927. Guy travels to multiple countries to find answers, and the picture he pieces together is a good deal uglier than Kane's. Gregory Arkadin (sporting a strange yet aptly hybrid accent for Welles) wants this information forgotten from the world -- at all costs.

Moby Dick (1956)

Even after getting burned by Lynch's Dune, I make a point to watch adaptations from famous novels I'm unlikely to read. Oh, I do read long and heady books for leisure, but enough people have deemed Herman Melville's classic dull that I'd rather take a chance on a two-hour vicarious boat ride, particularly one with respectable IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores as well as reputedly decent fidelity. (I didn't trust the facetious stage musical.) Being in a poor position to evaluate the fidelity, I must settle for the cinematic quality.

You should all know the story's gist: Nineteenth-century whaling ship captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) unwisely seeks vengeance on the oddly named white whale. Little did I imagine how late in the story narrator Ishmael (Richard Basehart) sees Ahab's face or hears his voice. I think the island savage Queequeg gets more screen time. Guess Ahab, for all his obsession, has the most stand-out personality on the Pequod. I hardly know how to describe first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn), and he's one of the more famous characters. We learn a lot more names, but in this capsulized edition, they hardly seem worth remembering; only the cabin boy gets my sympathy.

Chimes at Midnight, a.k.a. Falstaff (1965)

You can tell it was pretty late in the directing career of Orson Welles. Not having enough friends left in Hollywood, he turned to European production companies I'd never heard of before. His use of black and white at this point probably had more to do with budget than artistry. Oh, other famous people still got involved -- Harry Saltzman, John Gielgud, and Jeanne Moreau come to mind -- but a sizable portion of the (rather few) credited names reflect Switzerland, France, or especially Spain for a reason. Thanks to contested distribution rights, you'll be lucky to find the film in the U.S. My luck took the form of a Welles festival at the AFI Silver Theater.

As you might have guessed from the second title, Welles plays Sir John Falstaff, a popular minor character from several Shakespeare plays. His moderate-length screenplay combines mostly relevant portions of the tetralogy consisting of Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V, plus some dialog from Merry Wives of Windsor and details from a 16th-century history text. Believe it or not, Welles saw fit to lose weight for a role consistently described as obese.