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. […]