The Welles Run Deep

F for Fake

Directed by Orson Welles

Hallelujah! is the proper reaction to Criterion's new DVD release of Orson Welles' F for Fake. This 1972 essay-drama rebuts the persistent idiocy that Welles "never fulfilled the promise of Citizen Kane." Not just a work of genius, F for Fake bursts the categories of greatness that limited Welles' reputation and still plague moviegoers. Just last week a national newsmagazine published an arbitrary list of the greatest films of the past century. All attempts to categorize high art that don't make room for F for Fake prove that the canons have backfired. In the face of nonsense like the Dogma movement or the currently rolling digital bandwagon, Welles' F for Fake redefines great cinema by keeping it alive and surprising.

F for Fake reports the early-70s scandal of Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer, the American writer Clifford Irving, who exceeded good fortune by producing a forgery of his own: a biography of Howard Hughes that caused a worldwide sensation. Welles gives an account of de Hory and Irving to address the mystery of creativity and the folly of public celebrity. It's the same theme as Citizen Kane's parody of William Randolph Hearst, but done in a nonfiction format. And yet it's startlingly personal-an autobiographical film about Welles, the boy wonder whose 1938 radio broadcast "War of the Worlds" caused a global sensation and whose first feature film still ranks as the finest ever made. In F for Fake, Welles redefines himself as a virtuoso, an enigma, a gregarious and gallant Kane.

No one expected the artist who implanted German Expressionism into the American psyche (in Kane and especially The Magnificent Ambersons, thus kick-starting film noir) to make a late-career Nouvelle Vague movie. Age 55 when he made F for Fake, Welles still possessed the creative energy that first inspired the New Wave (Truffaut famously stated, "Kane started more directors on their careers than any other film.") F for Fake's delirious, somewhat disorienting opening sequence is a dot-dash semaphore of images that mixes Welles' topic with his penchant for games, showmanship and sexual ardency. (A girl-watching montage introduces his gorgeous companion Oja Kodar stopping traffic in a mini-dress.) The self-reflexive themes announce the film's unusual structure, its modernism.

Like Godard, Welles intercuts verbal graphics, contemporary issues and personal romanticism with dizzying speed. The only equivalent to such virtuosic editing would be Abel Gance and Dziga Vertov, silent masters who, like Welles, delivered the visual and cerebral texture of film-a delight now lost in senseless digital editing. It takes a while to realize that even with quick cutting, Welles' images still carry the weight of artistic contemplation and readable composition. It all holds together-stylistically coherent and increasingly rich in meaning. The documentary format allows Welles to penetrate real-life celebrity. He divulges the moral spectrum of high-living jet-set folk-from de Hory's mischief to Irving's and his own-while making the most of its inherent drama.

"For the next hour, everything I tell you will be true," Welles narrates, setting this spinning top in motion. It's all true, then it all becomes art. F for Fake has a vertiginous narrative, whirling viewers in and out of truth and fiction, sincerity and hoax. Welles' brand-new generic finesse is comparable to what Norman Mailer had innovated with his nonfiction novel The Armies of the Night (but that Mailer could never do in his own film experiments). Welles submerged himself in contemporary hubbub and exposed its secrets. Bemused by the subject of tricksters, Welles identifies with de Hory, Irving and Hughes. (Too bad Martin Scorsese doesn't know F for Fake, or else he'd never have squandered the Hughes subject in The Aviator). Going further, Welles connects these world-class confidence men to Pablo Picasso. His audacity is capricious but apt. What other 20th-century artist could look Welles in the eye?

Pauline Kael's withering re-appraisal of Kane as "a shallow masterpiece" in her 1971 book Raising Kane came too early to appreciate the ingenuity that F for Fake confirms. His baroque yet playful esthetic was always astonishingly well balanced. The Picasso segments show Welles' unique mixture of elation and gravity. (His chiming vocal resonance is the best acting, a jovial expression of emotional depth.) There's nothing else like F for Fake, although it has a bastard offspring in Robert Altman's 1973 The Long Goodbye, a modernist update of Hollywood noir tropes that recruits Clifford Irving's mistress Nina Van Pallandt (whom Welles briefly glimpses) into its mobius-strip satire. Welles himself always turned movies into life. From the first moment he walked onto a film set to the final moment he walked off one (say, his wily and wise soliloquy in Henry Jaglom's Someone to Love), he brought liveliness to cinema. The rediscovery of F for Fake revitalizes Welles' legend. It helps you understand Welles and cinema better and shakes up everybody's idea of a canon.

The Longest Yard

Directed by Peter Segal

Adam Sandler removes everything that made Robert Aldrich's 1974 The Longest Yard funny and interesting. That hard-boiled comedy about an ex-football star serving time in a southern prison, where he's forced to coach the inmates in a game against the guards, was tailored to Burt Reynolds' 70s parody of machismo. But the idea of stress and fatigue (the last yard being the longest yard) also expanded Aldrich's standard inquiry into men's moral choices. Sandler (in the Reynolds role) treats incarceration as no thang, retreating into tv-style skits, pulling the same schmucky detachment as Ben Stiller. (Catch the quick shot of the prison guards dressed in Nazi uniforms before the big game.) The film's emphasis on the prison's white/black, guards/convict ratio winds up turning each character into a sad clown. Too bad Sandler, director Peter Segal and screenwriter Sheldon Turner don't deepen these characterizations the way Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence did in the Aldrich-worthy prison classic Life. Sandler loses yardage by retreating from the social insight he showed in Spanglish and Big Daddy back to his usual bratty gags. (Imagine Happy Madison in a grid-iron version of Anger Management.) Maybe if modern audiences had the chance to rediscover Aldrich's cop movie The Choirboys along with rediscovering F for Fake, they'd realize what they were missing. Aldrich was another auteur possessed of a singular sense of humor and seriousness. (The Choirboys projected social hysteria into a vision of chaos as in his more celebrated Kiss Me Deadly.) Aldrich and Welles set high, unexpected standards. Asking less of Sandler demands less of ourselves. -A.W.