It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles

It's All True (1993)

*** (out of 4)

Fascinating documentary about the trouble Orson Welles fell into with RKO when he finished up THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and went to Brazil to film what was basically a South American trilogy. Welles was involved in three films: MY FRIEND BONITO, filmed in Mexico about a boy and his donkey; CARNAVAL, which footage shown here is in glorious Technicolor; and FOUR MEN ON A RAFT, which contains the majority of the footage here. IT'S ALL TRUE isn't going to be a movie for everyone and I'd imagine that most people would find it deadly dull and lifeless. Film buffs, however, should get a real kick out of it but the sad thing is that you could remake this movie a dozens times because it happened so often to Welles. The documentary starts off at the end of CITIZEN KANE when Welles was already considered controversial. It then moves onto the disastrous screening of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS where Welles thought he'd have a chance to re-edit the movie but instead the studio did it behind his back. We then get into the filming of the three films and learn of the various issues that happened including the lack of money, a curse from a voodoo man and eventually the studio taking the films away. In a bit of great luck, the footage to the three movies were discovered in 1985 and seeing the footage is interesting. CARNAVAL really stuck out to me because of the amazing colors, which just leap off the screen in Technicolor. The footage looks remarkably well and just look at the wonderful details in the costumes that the people are wearing. The stuff on FOUR MEN ON A RAFT has the most footage and also gets quite a bit of a backstory about the real event, the real tragedy and of course how Welles got involved and what he did to try and save the film. Film buffs and fans of Welles will certainly want to check this out. We get some nice interviews with people who worked on the film as well as relatives to those actual people that the film is based on.