Like his later documentary F for Fake (1973), The Immortal Story is perhaps best appreciated as an autobiographical, reflective work about the nature of art and artifice. The story takes place in the mid-19th century in the Chinese port city of Macao, which was under Portuguese control. The central character is Mr. Charles Clay (Orson Welles), an elderly, wealthy merchant who lives alone in the house of his former business partner, an apparently decent man who Clay cheated and drove to suicide (we learn about this via the chatter of several people in the streets, a narrative tactic reminiscent of The Magnificent Ambersons). Clay has no contact with other people; he is a grotesque island of a man, with no friends, no family, no loved ones. (The connection between Clay and Welles’s most famous cinematic character, Charles Foster Kane, is obvious, particularly in an early shot in which Clay dines alone in a room filled with mirrors, which is visually reminiscent of one of the most famous shots in Citizen Kane in which the elderly, broken Kane marches silently down a hall of mirrors.) The only person with whom he communicates is Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio), his reserved accountant who survived the Jewish pogrom in Poland in 1848. Levinsky is as isolated as Clay, although we sense that he is more a broken soul, rather than a wicked one like Clay, who has spent his entire life manipulating and controlling others.

That desire for absolute control becomes the driving force in the film when Clay begins to tell Levinsky a story he heard about a sailor who was approached by a rich old man and offered five guineas to spend the night with his wife and conceive a child. Levinsky says that he has already heard the story from another sailor and that, although it has been passed around among sailors for ages, it has no basis in truth. This infuriates Clay, as he declares, “I do not like pretense. I do not like prophecies. I like facts.” Thus, he becomes determined to make this fable reality by constructing a situation in which he will play the role of the rich old man (he is both actor and director in his real-life play). As he has no wife he must find a beautiful young woman to play the role, and he puts Levinsky in charge of securing someone. Levinsky approaches Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau), the daughter of Clay’s former business partner who now works as a prostitute. Virginie resists as first, but ultimately agrees to the role because she thinks that in some way it might help her exact revenge on the man who broke her father. Clay himself picks the sailor, a destitute man they find sitting on a street corner. The man, Paul (Norman Eshley), turns out to be a recently rescued castaway who is looking for passage home.

Thus, each of the “roles” is filled by someone who doesn’t quite fit the bill: Rather than being a beautiful young bride, Virginie is a slightly older prostitute, and rather than being a lusty sailor, Paul is a virginal oddball who has spent the previous year alone on an island. Isolation is one of the film’s driving themes, with all of the characters living lives that are cut off from the warmth of fellow humanity, which is what makes the ultimate sexual encounter between Virginie and Paul, which begins awkwardly but soon takes on both an erotic charge and a compassionate sense of real connection, so compelling. Welles conveys the sexual encounter in a series of rapid cuts of static close-ups, which is quite powerful in conveying the intensity of the moment. It is one of the truly great sequences in the film, which is fascinating, but also madly uneven.

The style in The Immortal Story is unlike many of Welles’s previous films, as it relies much more on static tableaux rather than moving cameras. It gives the film an almost dreamlike storybook aura, which helps compensate for the patent absurdity of the plot itself, which is best ignored in favor of the underlying themes about isolation, control, and art. There are several shots that remind us of Welles’s genius, including several deep-focus compositions and use of objects in the extreme foreground; an evocative use of color, particularly in the red-and-gold-hued dining room where Clay first takes the sailor; and a fluid integration of architecture into the compositions. The film’s style is sometimes hampered by technical issues stemming from limited finances (a bumpy handheld shot alongside Clay’s buggy would have surely been done on smooth dolly tracks had Welles had the time and budget), but overall it both draws on familiar aesthetics from Welles’s past while also looking forward to the more modern stylistics of his later films, including F for Fake and the still unfinished The Other Side of the Wind.

The performances are all quite good, although also slightly mannered, partially due to the characters’ fundamental isolation from each other and failure to connect. Welles himself is one of the biggest liabilities in this regard. His performance as Clay is generally impressive, as he conveys the man’s brutal ego and complete disregard for others while humanizing him with a touch of the pathetic and the desperate. Yet, Welles chose to enhance himself physically with a false nose and obvious greasepaint that makes the character older and more physically grotesque (he was only 52 at the time), but also visually artificial. Welles, who was so handsome as a young man it was almost painful, was always attracted to the grotesque—we can see that in his portrayal of the aging, decrepit Charles Foster Kane, in the sweaty, corrupt sheriff he played in Touch of Evil (1958), and even in his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine as a 23-year-old rising star of Broadway and radio, where he hid his youthful good looks behind what biographer Barbara Leaming describes as “his grotesque octogenarian disguise for Heartbreak House,” the George Bernard Shaw play that Welles had successfully staged in New York with his Mercury Theatre in 1937. Unfortunately, that artificiality, although in keeping to some extent with the dreamlike, unreal nature of the film itself, is distracting, especially in Welles’s sometimes crucial close-ups, although it is not enough to pull us completely out of the film. For this and other reasons, The Immortal Story will never be considered one of Welles’s greatest accomplishments, but it is testament to his continued importance as an artist late in his career and evidence of how much we are still missing in not being able to see the other, still incomplete projects that littered this stage of his life.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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