It’s All True provides a missing piece of film history. In 1942, while Orson Welles was completing The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Citizen Kane, he went to Mexico and Brazil to shoot footage for a new film. Envisioned as a compilation of three separate segments, the film was never finished and the remains passed through various hands until they came to be regarded as lost. Then, in 1985, the year Welles died, the footage was discovered in a Paramount vault. Since no screenplay ever existed and Welles had done no editing, the co-directors of It’s All True assembled the footage as best they could figure. What we end up with is hardly a fluid film. It’s a documentary made after the fact about an aborted project by one of the cinema’s greatest artists. Lost for over fifty years, the discovery of the footage has now made it available to film historians and curiosity seekers. Granted, that may be a limited audience, but for those people It’s All True is a must-see. And even that group will find parts of it tedious. Yet even in its redundancy, it is nevertheless fascinating. The original inception for the film comes from Nelson Rockefeller, the coordinator of the federal Office of Inter-American Affairs and a major stockholder in Welles’s studio, RKO. It was to be an anthology film that would help promote FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy. Welles envisioned three segments: “My Friend Bonito,” a story about a Mexican boy and his pet bull; another that celebrated the annual carnival in Rio de Janeiro and the history of the samba; and the third to be determined on location. The third turned out to be a re-enactment of a true story about four Brazilian fishermen who had recently sailed their modest raft across great ocean waters in order to make a case for social justice. Co-director of It’s All True, Richard Wilson was Welles’s assistant in Brazil and assembled all the unedited shots into a seamless 20-minute story called “Four Men and a Raft.” Though fascinating, it’s almost too seamless and ordered. Long close-ups of interesting faces slow the pace of the narrative and the editing rhythm is more Rossellini than Welles. It would perhaps be more interesting to view Welles’s footage in its rough state. RKO began to worry about all the money Welles was spending in Rio as well as the money that finishing Ambersons was costing them. So they pulled the plug on It’s All True and diddled with Ambersons. Now all we have are these little windows into what might have been. Assigning stars would be inappropriate in this particular case. You know who you are and whether for you, personally, this film is a must-see or a must-to-avoid.
This article appears in February 11 • 1994 (Cover).
