When Orson Welles completed F For Fake in 1976, he never intended it to become the last film of his to play in movie theaters during in his lifetime. Welles would live for another nine years, but his final days alternated between lucrative voiceover and character actor work, and a constant search to find financial backers to get his own productions released.
After F For Fake, he never did. I'm tempted to write, "sadly", but to a certain extent, Welles had only himself to blame: generally speaking, a director must be bankable--his films must turn a profit--and Welles' films rarely did. As I wrote in an early Blogcritics piece about Welles' first and best film, Citizen Kane:
Citizen Kane's inability to turn a profit, coupled with Hearst's actions, ultimately blackballed Welles in Hollywood.Incidentally, Welles was far from blacklisted--a far, far too loaded a word to describe what happened to his career post-Kane. He worked constantly in movies, both in front of and behind the cameras. He just couldn't come to grips with the seemingly obvious fact that movies have to turn a profit, which means they have to connect with a mass audience. Even Kubrick, the most avant-garde of American directors, knew instinctively that he had to build his films around large, popular themes - nuclear hysteria, outer space, horror, Vietnam, and sex. His one film that didn't have a theme that a large audience could immediately tap into, Barry Lyndon, failed to turn a profit in the US. He wouldn't make that mistake again for the three films he had left in him.) Welles couldn't find a plot or protagonist that a mass audience could bond with.
But while Welles never intended F For Fake to be his swan song, it's still quite an interesting film to go out on.
For one thing, unlike the vast majority of Welles' previous movies, it's a documentary. This long excerpt from a Tuner Classic Movies page on the film is an excellent description of how the film came to be:
In the summer of 1968, Spain sent the police to arrest an aristocratic, foppish Hungarian living in a villa on the island of Ibiza. His name was Elmyr de Hory, or at least that was his latest alias. His criminal act was painting art works of great beauty. Normally that wouldn't be a crime but he was in the habit of painting his art in the style of the great masters, forging their signatures onto the paintings, and selling them as newly discovered "masterpieces." Art experts had validated his forgeries as authentic and, since de Hory wasn't talking, there was no telling how many museums had forged Matisses, Picassos and others on their walls.
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