The Other Side of The Wind - Critical Opinion of The Film

Critical Opinion of The Film

As a member of the cast, film historian Joseph McBride saw the rushes, and later saw a two-hour rough cut assembled by Gary Graver in the late 1990s to attract potential investors. McBride wrote that the film "serves as both a time capsule of a pivotal moment in film history - an "instant" piece of period nostalgia set in the early seventies - and a meditation on changing political, sexual and artistic attitudes in the United States during that period." However, he differentiated the bulk of the film - which he praised very highly - from the footage of Hannaford's film-within-a-film:

I found that while the languid visual style of the film-within-the-film interludes would give the audience ample time to recover from the frenetic pacing of the party scenes, a more serious obstacle to the film's playability is the largely undramatic nature of much of the material putatively shot by Hannaford. Little or nothing happens in these sequences except for Oja mysteriously wandering seminude around picturesque locales and Bob Random doggedly roaring his motorcycle through expressionistically lit landscapes. The footage is beautifully shot, and there is some stunning photographic magic, such as a sequence filmed among the skyscrapers of Century City with the two characters' images vanishing into ten mirrors arranged invisibly among the stone steps and glass columns of the coldly geometrical modern office buildings...However, in the rough cut assembled by Graver to show potential investors, the film-within-the-film sequences not only interrupt the narrative but also go on at such length that they lose their satirical point, becoming exasperating examples of what Welles was trying to spoof.

Film critic and historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has seen most of the film, either in rushes, or in scenes cut by Welles, and has praised "its complex and shocking reflections on machismo, homophobia, Hollywood, cinephilia, eroticism, and late-60s media, not to mention its kamikaze style", and has contrasted this with the opinion of David Thomson, who has not seen the film, and who wrote in his highly critical biography of Welles, "One day, it may be freed. I hope not. The Other Side of the Wind should stay beyond reach." John Huston described a private screening in which Orson Welles showed the unfinished film to some friends: "I didn't get to see it, but those who did tell me it is a knockout."

Andrés Vicente Gómez, who was originally involved in the film's production, has been quoted in the press stating his opposition to the film ever being completed - he believes it would be an "act of betrayal". His argument is that the film was always unlikely to be finished because Welles's "physical condition was delicate. He didn't have the energy to cut it." However, as Gómez was accused by Orson Welles, Dominique Antoine, Peter Bogdanovich, Mehdi Bouscheri and others of embezzling $250,000 of the film's budget and absconding with the proceeds, he does have a strong motive for wanting the film to not reach wider public attention. Additionally, Gómez's links to the film were severed in 1974; but filming was not finished until 1976 (which is when most of the editing started), so Gómez was in no position to know whether Welles was up to editing when editing actually began.