Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 27, 2015

There’s an interesting and rather telling disparity lurking as a data point if one attempts to compile a list of 20th century cinematic icons who helped to define film in their era and who are generally accepted as, for want of a better term, auteurs. If we start with the thesis that names like (in no particular order) Ingmar Bergman, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa and, yes, Orson Welles should (perhaps must) be included on such a list, a fascinating element soon becomes apparent. All of the above filmmakers, with the exception of Welles, have a laundry list of classic films to their names, so many in fact that if you were to quiz any two cineastes, chances are you’d get two different answers as to what any given filmmaker’s “greatest” achievement was. But Welles? For better or worse, and admitting that any real Welles aficionado will have plenty of talking points to counter this assertion, Welles is generally consigned to having “only” one true masterpiece to his name. Now it’s notable that that singular achievement is of course Citizen Kane, still considered by many critics (at least those of a certain age) as being the greatest film of all time, but, still—Welles' reputation still is perched precariously on the almost unimaginably daunting achievement of his first film, an achievement which stands in stark contrast to the troubled path the rest of his career would take. This assessment is not to disparage or discredit any of Welles’ later works, as my own reviews of such post-Kane Welles outings as The Lady from Shanghai hopefully indicate. In a way, it’s perhaps even more amazing that Welles should have ascended to the top tier of filmmaking luminaries based largely (if not solely) on one (undeniably epochal) film. The foregoing is both covered and countered in Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, an interesting reassessment of this titanic figure of 20th century Art (not necessarily limited to film) made by Chuck Workman, the Academy Award winning documentarian (What Is Cinema?, Precious Images) who is perhaps best known to the public at large for having helped to create the In Memoriam montages for many Oscar broadcasts.

One of the things Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles makes perfectly clear pretty much from the get go is that Welles should not (and in fact can not) be “judged” or even remembered on the basis of Citizen Kane alone. While the famous “Rosebud” moment from that film is one of the first images Workman gives us (probably unavoidably, considering the mythos of both the film and Welles in general), within moments it’s abundantly obvious that however roiling Welles’ Hollywood career was, it was only one piece of a larger, rather monolithic, puzzle. Workman spends a bit of time detailing Welles’ youth and early theatrical activities, showing that Welles was every bit the child prodigy (and, later, wunderkind) that one Charles Foster Kane is portrayed as being.

As might be expected given Workman’s background, the documentary is largely spliced together out of contemporary interviews (including with Welles’ collaborators like Norman Lloyd, still fiesty well into his 90s if not his actual 100s when this was filmed), archival interviews (including lots of great first person Welles material), and snippets from Welles’ films, films about Welles, and, lastly, some of Welles’ iconic theatrical exploits. Workman doesn’t really indulge in any stylistic bells and whistles in this piece, preferring instead to create something akin to “montage theory” in some of the mashups (particularly of Welles himself speaking at various points in his long life).

While there’s nothing earth shattering revealed here, and certainly nothing that any Welles aficionado worth his or her salt won’t already know, some of the interviews are quite winning and it’s a lot of fun to see Welles responding to the various indignities of a life in show business, especially as he got a bit older and perhaps a bit more curmudgeonly. If there’s a fault in Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, it’s that Workman’s piece plays very much like one of the documentarian’s vaunted montages for the Academy Awards. There’s a surface glossiness to the assembled footage, but any depth must be left squarely to the viewer to extract from the various comments. In other words, Workman doesn’t impose an “artistic vision” of his own here, and is instead content to let Welles speak for himself. Considering how eloquent the icon routinely was, not to mention the pure sound of Welles’ voice, that’s probably the correct approach.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a rather bewildering array of aspect ratios, but with the baseline (newer sequences especially) hovering at 1.78:1. As should be expected from something cobbled together out of such disparate source material, there's a rather wide disparity in sharpness and clarity, though of course the newly filmed interview sequences look sharp and appealingly well defined, with a natural appearing palette and some nice fine detail in close-ups. Archival interviews are somewhat more variant, with some elements culled from television video having various anomalies like ghosting on display. Older (filmed) interviews fare a bit better at times, though can look fairly soft when compared to the newer interview segments. Film clips generally look very good to excellent, while some on the fly backstage footage of theatrical outings is relatively ragged looking.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hey, Cohen! Stop it! (There, do I finally have your attention?) Once again whoever is authoring Cohen's discs has had this default to the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 track included on the Blu-ray, rather than the preferable lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (so for you audiophiles, make sure to check your settings once the feature starts). The 5.1 track may be a bit of an overkill in any case, as this is by and large a talky enterprise, one not able to offer a lot of immersive opportunities. Fidelity remains excellent, though there are of course disparities in source quality given the huge array of archival material Workman has knit together. Aside from "built in" damage in some older elements (all of which is relatively minor and never problematic), there's nothing to cause concern.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:06)


• A Conversation with Chuck Workman (1080p; ) is hosted by Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

"It was all downhill from there." Welles seemed to have a somewhat trenchant sense of humor of how quickly he ascended to the top echelons of Hollywood, only to have the veritable magic carpet snatched from beneath his levitating feet. There's a certain bitter melancholy running through some of Welles' later comments, but always within the context of a sort of impish sense of self deprecating humor. The Welles elements in this "super montage" are often extremely interesting, as are many of the other interviews, especially with those who knew and/or worked with him (as is often the case, "fans" like Julie Taymor or Simon Callow don't offer quite the same level of insight). Not especially profound, but full of fantastic archival material, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles helps to make the case that judging a man solely on the basis of one (however singular) achievement is a fool's errand. Technical merits are generally strong on this release, and Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles comes Recommended.