Reviews

If you looking for action here or, if aware of the plot outline, expect a bit of soft porn, you will be disappointed. "The Immortal Story" is more of a visual and acoustic painting than a narrative. Especially since, according to another commentator, this was actor-director Welles' first venture into colour, he has used the unaccustomed medium masterfully both in his interiors and exteriors, and with the addition of the strident and insistent cicadas and refreshing dawn chorus has rendered the subtropical oriental night and its golden dawn beautifully realistic.

The Orson Welles' character, Charles Clay, a powerful expatriate merchant established in Macao, approaching seventy and dying from gout, is like a motionless fat spider in the centre of his web who controls everything and everybody within his range. As a control -freak he even wishes to make factual a much told sailors' yarn about a couple manipulated through bribes and some coercion to go to bed together. He is obsessed with this story but cannot stand fiction, (he rails at his personal assistant, the Jew Lewinsky, against the biblical prophecies he reads to his master). Facts he already controls, fiction must also come under his sway.

The enforced but, from the point of view of both the bully Clay and his victims, successful liaison between Jeanne Moreau and the young Danish sailor (satisfactorily played by an obscure British actor), the latter losing his virginity in this encounter, is tasteful, beautiful and not in the least prurient. That is except for the D.O.M. (écouteur?)listening at the keyhole, whose nocturnal presence we, however, spontaneously forget about. The couple appear to fall in love under these strange circumstances, though future relations seem to be highly doubtful. Just a couple of points bother me here: when the sailor tells Moreau (whose character's name is significantly but inappropriately Virginie) that he is 17 and is informed by her that she also is 17, it is quite evident that both, and especially Mlle. Moreau, are much older Maybe we are to assume that she lied to the ingenuous young man in order not to spoil the idyllic illusion of love-at-first-sight. The other point worrying me is why the attentive Chinese servants, besides feeding him, neglect to give the young man a good bath as well, especially as he had refrained from entering Clay's open carriage explaining that he was covered in tar and would soil the upholstery. And so he enters the nuptial chamber in his original torn and filthy clothes. Who knows, perhaps a whiff of tar has aphrodisiac properties...

Lewinsky the down-trodden but still spunky assistant/companion to Clay is well played by Roger Coggio. A Jew - Moreau calls him "the wandering Jew" - he has lost his parents in an Eastern European pogrom, and is inured to the blows of fate, and politely imperturbable when upbraided by his imperious master or slapped in the face by an outraged Moreau.

Fernando Rey, for decades Spain's foremost actor, equally able to perform in French and English as well as his native tongue, is included in the cast in a cameo part merely to spread the gossip about Clay's/Welles' ruthless machinations. I suppose the French TV company who commissioned this film was able to afford his services too because the cast was so small: apart from those mentioned above, there are only a few Caucasian listeners in Rey's audience, and half-a-dozen silent Chinese menials who would have cost little to hire.

The location on which the film was shot I was unable to ascertain, but it could have been anywhere in the world where there are large elegant 19th Century European houses, the colonial Portuguese element being supplied by one company sign with the word for export in Portuguese and the Chinese by the garish signs and notices with which the street is cluttered. Perhaps it is the old quarter of Marseilles.

I saw this film for the first time yesterday on the local Spanish channel which runs a series of classics in the original language, so that I saw it in French. This meant that Welles' unmistakable resonant and commanding basso profundo, so appropriate to this rôle was dubbed by a relatively mild-mannered francophone with a much higher register. With his over-brimming culture and long European residence, it seems very likely that Welles could have managed the French dialogue himself, just as Jeanne Moreau can perform equally well in English. Maybe he didn't because he was a perfectionist, even though the character portrayed is not a native French speaker

There are just two further points I should like to make that nobody else has touched on thus far:

First, the story for the script is from the pen of Danish raconteuse Karen Blixen, magnificently portrayed by Meryl Streep in "Out of Africa", who, Sheherezade-like, beguiled her lover and his friend with her fluent and fascinating tales.

Secondly, at the end of the film, the departing Dane about to take ship presents the old man with a mother-of-pearl-like conch he had acquired during his year of solitude on a desert island, and said by him to be virtually unique. As the young man moves away with a backward glance through a wood whose floor is auspiciously tinged with brightness by the rising sun, the shining conch falls to the floor of the verandah from the dead fingers of the merchant. No equivalent of "Rosebud" is uttered, but the incident is obviously a reprise of the ending of "Citizen Kane", Welles' early black-and-white triumph.

I saw this film for the first time on TV the other night and was at first quite impressed. Denzel Washington is a consummate character actor and really lived the part. The boy taking refuge from his alcoholic parents was pleasant, sincere and convincingly supportive to the allegedly greatly wronged black ex-boxer. Dan Hedaya makes a very convincing bigoted cop who is supposed to have pursued, framed and persecuted the hero throughout his life in an even more ruthless and unfair manner than with the equivalent two characters in "Les Misérables". The do-gooder Canadians were very bland and sheepish, but that is probably how Americans think of Canadians so they were presumably doing what the director wanted. The boxing sequences thanks as much to skillful camera work as nifty footwork seemed authentic, at least to a non-boxer, which is by no means always the case.

As the film progressed I asked myself how it was that I had never heard of the particularly flagrant injustice on which the film was based when I was familiar with so many such stories emanating from the States and even from the U.K.. The reason became apparent when I looked at the chronological list of comments on this site and saw that I had almost certainly had the wool pulled over my eyes. From what was said by the less gullible commentators, the true character of the "Hurricane" was in fact more like that of the nasty murderous cop Denzel had played in "Training Day" than this persevering family man who has up to this point triumphed over undeserved adversity. (There is a hint of adulterous intent when Hurricane confesses why he was where he allegedly was on the night of the triple murder, but this flaw is put in to make him appear more human - a Persian rug salesman will show a customer the underside of a carpet and say "Look at the mistakes" which serve actually to increase the value.

I tried to access the URL quoted by one negative critic to read what the real facts of the case were, but it didn't work. So I looked up Hurricane Rubin Carter in the Wikipedia On-line Encyclopaedia, read the bare facts there, then moved to one of the links listed entitled "The Other Side". With carefully detailed and abundant documentation, the whole white-wash of this black boxer that the film attempts so successfully (if you don't check up afterwards) is utterly negated.

Whether the nice black boy ever existed I do not know, for Lazarus who in the New Testament arises from the dead seems to be an incredibly apt name for one who is given a new life by the nice Canadians, who also may or may not have existed. Whether they did exist or not, Hurricane did receive a lot of help to try and spring him from people some of whom must have believed in his innocence and others for political reasons.

However unfavourable the statistics are for reasons of social depression,one must not tend to believe a man is more likely to be guilty because he is black, any more than one should believe out of political correctness that he is innocent because he is black. I hope that we have generally left all that behind us by now. The fog produced by the element of alleged racism in the Simpson case was what allowed O.J. to slip through the net.

It would have been alright if they had changed the name to a fictitious one and made no claim to veracity. But I suppose this was impossible because Hurricane wrote both the book and the script and it would have been like pleading guilty if he had changed the name. As fiction I would have given it up to eight, as a barefaced lie four is generous.

Hurricane has done twenty years "bird" which, since often only five years is served per murder in States where they don't execute, this would give him a little change , and furthermore he shared his murders with an accomplice so that I suppose he has "paid his debt to society" and does seem to be acting as a useful citizen now.

As there are already many excellent, detailed, and comprehensive comments on this film, mine shall have in the main a more general approach. North America (not including Mexico), to a much greater extent than South America, really doesn't have all that much history when compared with practically anywhere else apart from the antipodes. My apologies to my American (USA) and Anzac cousins, but this is a fact. That is why we see the same chunks of American history recycled again and again, with a great many contradictions from film to film. (Though why they don't exploit the two wars with Britain long after the War of Independence I have never understood, especially since neither of them could really be considered an American defeat). One can understand, however, why movie-makers had up to now kept the wraps on, or swept under the carpet, this particular piece of history. Though doubtlessly exaggerated but true in essence, this movie shows us a vast panorama of a variegated and divided community, who like rival colonies of ants slaughter one another to take sole possession of a disputed ant-hill. I cannot recall a more brutal and callous struggle for the survival of the fittest ever shown on such a large scale on the screen that wasn't a bona fide war-film. And, mark you, the combatants, male and female, are, except right at the end, exclusively civilians. Here we see all the prejudices, hatred, megalomania, corruption and cupidity that still, to some extent, vitiate American society even up to this day, and which are the cause of such conflicts. And all this mayhem occurs among inhabitants of that hub of civilisation, the Big Apple, when one would be less surprised if it were taking place among the head-hunters of Borneo in the depths of the primaeval forest(my apologies also to any Bornean headhunters who happen to read this piece). I can quite understand others avoiding or heartily disliking this film, because it certainly isn't suitable fare for the squeamish, and shows ,as I have said, the ugly side of American society that some would prefer to forget. Daniel Day-Lewis is convincingly multi-facetted and gives a superlative performance. How this bloodthirsty bully and the last of the Mohicans can possibly be being portrayed by the same actor staggers the imagination. Di Caprio gives a fairly convincing performance as a young vendetta-seeker, which is certainly stronger than that of "Titanic" when he refused to turn blue despite his long sojourn in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.( Perhaps such a hue would have rendered him less romantic, though it did a lot for Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"! ). Liam Neeson does a short but competent job as a harsh but loving father and a bold and chivalrous skirmisher. By the way, the nasty-looking assortment of weapons used to gouge, slash, and disembowel adds much verisimilitude to the slaughter, before which the "rumbles" in "West Side Story" pale into insignificance. Cameron Diaz makes a convincing pickpocket, and does her best work since the very different rôle in "Very Bad Things". She manages to look much more attractive than usual, so how Leonardo manages to resist her feminine charms after being locked up in a religiositous reformatory for sixteen years is difficult to understand. The camera work is fantastic: the scene where we get a "de-zooming" bird's eye view of the opposing warrior bands in the snow is like a painting of Hell by the Dutch renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch! One thing puzzles me though, which must be the fault of the scriptwriter: how can Bill the Butcher be so incredibly accurate in his knife-throwing when he has no depth vision for lack of one eye? Unfortunately, I saw this film dubbed into Spanish, which, although I understood everything that was said, and the dubbing here is probably the best in the world, much may have got lost in translation, and, of course, I was deprived of the timbre of the actors' real voices and the variety of accents and dialects (all were speaking flawless Castilian)and, possibly, Anglo-Saxon curses, which must have figured prominently in the original dialogue. Had I seen it in the English-language version, I would most likely have given it a nine or ten instead of an eight.

I rented this film two years ago, yet it is more vivid in my memory than some I have seen quite recently, because it was so incredibly irritating. A hoary-headed Anthony Hopkins, the length of whose tangled locks and bodily strength equal those of Samson, demonstrates the contrasting abilities of living au pair with the gorillas in the jungle like Dr Doolittle and later escaping from a high-security nut-house with the aid of a ball-point pen (why didn't he use a paper clip to disguise at least this particular plagiarism?). The other examples of plagiarism have been adequately dealt with by earlier commentators; there are so many of them, that it is a wonder somebody didn't sue. But the recycling, or perhaps more appropriately, "cannibalization" of so many good movies did not combine their virtues, but rather produced an unlovely Frankenstein's monster of a film. I can only imagine that the indubitably talented Hopkins desperately needed to meet some financial emergency. What Gooding's and Sutherland's excuses are, I know not.