“It was hard, he reflected as he had often done before, it was very hard on people who wanted things so badly that they could not do without them. If they could not get these things it was hard, and when they did get them, surely it was very hard.”
– from “The Immortal Story” by Isak Dinesen
A couple years ago I reviewed The Other Side of the Wind, the last film released under the name of Orson Welles. It is an absolute tour de force, and the crowning jewel in the career of a man who may very well be America’s greatest director. However, a considerable portion of The Other Side of the Wind was completed after Welles’s death in 1985, and though the posthumous production found guidance from the notes he left behind, and one could state with reasonable confidence that their efforts conformed close enough to the spirit of Welles’s direction that overall credit still belongs to him, its chimeric nature makes it difficult to say whether or not Welles himself would have approved of the final cut.
There is, however, no such difficulty with Welles’s 1968 drama The Immortal Story, which truly counts as the last fictional feature he directed, from start to finish, and released to the public while still living. It was initially made for French television, and issues with distributors and censors (par for the course, with Welles) bungled its post-production and subsequent premiere so badly that 1) the film played only for a limited time in select European theaters, and 2) certain critics, particularly in Great Britain and the States, rated it poorly enough that it failed to cross over to Anglophone audiences. As a result, The Immortal Story languished in relative obscurity for decades until it was picked up by The Criterion Collection and given a DVD/Blu-ray release in 2016, though to this day I’d wager no one outside of cineastes and Welles devotees are familiar with its existence.
In any case, The Immortal Story is a fine work, quite short—not even topping 60 minutes in its longer English-language version—yet charged with meaning. Welles based it on a tale of the same name by Danish writer Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen), preserving much of the story’s plot and dialogue almost verbatim a la his Shakespeare adaptations. And like those adaptations, his selections are wise, and arranged in a way to best fit the purposes of his narrativizing (the setting and certain smaller details are changed) without mangling their parent structure.
A wealthy American businessman in Macao named Mr. Clay nears death, and whiles away the days in the company of his favored clerk, a Jew named Elishama Levinsky. The avaricious capitalist, alone in his mansion (think Scrooge, think Charles Foster Kane), has Levinsky read the account books aloud to him until he tires of those numbers, and asks for something else. Levinsky then takes out a scroll which had been entrusted to him by an elder Jew from his life in the Old World, and reads from Isaiah 35, in which God promises renewal to his chosen people.
This fails to affect Mr. Clay (or so he thinks) and he disparages such prophesizing, favoring cold hard facts or, if it must be a story, then stories of things that actually happened. He then recounts a story he heard once of a sailor, taking his leisure at a port city, being stopped by a rich, older gentleman who offers him five guineas to wine and dine with him, and then sleep with his beautiful young wife, for she is indifferent to the wealthy man, in spite of his desire for heirs.
Levinsky, however, tells him that he has also heard that story, because it is a story that every sailor tells, and one that never happened. Mr. Clay then makes it Levinsky’s prerogative to find both a beautiful maiden and a young sailor in town so that the businessman can bring the tale to life as the final dispensation of his will.
The casting of these roles, and the night of their encounter, is the bulk of The Immortal Story, which ends in a lonely tableau, with one character seemingly on the brink of self-discovery. It is a kind of triumph that Welles/Dinesen’s narrative cores so deeply into the inherent emotions of what could have easily been some seedy Oriental episode—though such seediness is touched upon. What else could Mr. Clay’s motivations be, for all his posturing, but the venal urges of a despot in decline?
And while the role of the beautiful maiden is given to a harlot past her prime, she is no stereotypical lady of the night: There is history between Virginie and Mr. Clay, as his path towards financial superiority has left corpses in its wake. How she handles compromising what’s left of her dignity for a chance at real revenge is the essence of the character’s interest.
The young sailor, too, is more than meets the eye, though what meets the eye is considerable: a tall lanky specimen with a shock of blonde hair and a penetrating blue-eyed gaze, Mr. Clay spots him lounging on the street as he passes in his equipage. Here is certainly a sailor of heroic enough bearing to win a night of extraordinary pleasure, and the chance to earn the right of truth over that much-told tale—but is pleasure all that this sailor seeks?
And in the center of it all, arranging matters and slinking about Macao in his dark suit, is Elishama Levinsky. This Wandering Jew, this watchful intermediary who dutifully obeys his master whilst avoiding all intimate contact with the world—where does he stand? He lives comfortably in the East but he had fled the pogroms in Poland as a boy; trauma is not announced but implied, for things “not to be recounted and hardly to be recalled still moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind.”
That these few characters are all in search of some escape route—whether it be from society or the consequences of their own decisions—provides an emotional resonance that belies the tale’s slightness. Its title is fitting, for the narrative spareness has an almost elemental quality to it (indeed, the original Dinesen short story is narrated like a Modernist fable), and even the characters seem aware of the stock nature of their parts, though they must all ultimately surrender to what circumstances require of them.
It is this very quality that elevates The Immortal Story to something like greatness, but even if it does vault over that bar, it does not do so unmarred. A more technical defect like the annoyingly mismatched over-dubbing bothers one’s immersion, and there is an overall conventionality to the proceedings that limit the film from reaching even greater heights.
It is shot beautifully, however, courtesy of Willy Kurant, who took over the position after his predecessor butted heads with Welles. Despite it being produced for TV, the lack of high contrast is made up for in sumptuous color, and its almost gauzy softness contributes to that fabular, quasi-dreamlike aspect. Its editing, though credited under many names, was helmed by Welles, and it shows his preternatural gift with the form in spades.
And it should come as no surprise that the acting is stellar down the line, with the lesser-knowns holding their own alongside two screen legends. As for the latter, Jeanne Moreau as Virginie invests even the character’s silences with the sting of wounded pride, and Welles captures the moral rot of Mr. Clay exceedingly well, letting it seep from his velvet-colored bulk in grumbles and long, porcine stares.
One could say that Norman Eshley was miscast as the sailor, for he looks much older than 17, and the blonde is a painfully obvious dye-job, but for what it’s worth, he was only 21 years old when cast, and he does a fine enough job portraying a sense of boyishness strained between adolescence and manhood. (It is a boyishness verging on fey, and, considering the long history of homosexual life/activity on the high seas, this adds another layer of intrigue to the relationship between him and Virginie.)
Roger Coggio has the unenviable position of playing a character, Levinsky, who takes pains to not exhibit any emotion beyond a placid poise. But the catch is that he must also imply those aforementioned movements in the depths of his personality, which threaten to break the surface the nearer his proximity to genuine intimacy (though not his own) becomes. The character could also have easily fallen into stereotype, what with Levinsky being a “scheming” Jew in charge of financial accounts who helps orchestrate the downfall of his master, but Dinesen/Welles/Coggio do not succumb to this trap. The clearest “villain” in The Immortal Story is old Mr. Clay, but even he is given a measure of pathos as a man at the end of his life finally understanding, however falteringly, the worth of things extraneous to material profit.
And, similar to The Other Side of the Wind, one can draw any number of interesting parallels between this late phase entry of Welles and his biography/artistic beliefs. Its concern over “real” and “fake” stories, and the ultimate insufficiency of art as a substitute for life, for instance, are subtle echoes of the issues treated in something like the later F for Fake (1973). Mr. Clay and The Other Side of the Wind‘s Jake Hannaford can also be seen as kindred representatives of that striving for relevancy through art in the face of indomitable time—to varying degrees of success. And, of course, there is that whole notion of the Director as a poor man’s Prospero, trying in vain to manipulate flesh and blood and the outer elements in accordance with his will.
But flesh and blood have their own prerogatives, and stories often transcend the desires of their tellers. Read Dinesen’s tale and watch Welles’s film to witness such transcendence in action.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: His Barbed Vestments: Reviewing Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” (2017), Wight Screens: Reviewing Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse” (2001), The Worst Thing: Reviewing Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama” (2026)