I don’t know where Netflix got involved in the process, if their millions helped round up and finish (with shots still missing) a film notorious for being “lost” in this fire or that hasty/didn’t pay his rent and fled Orson Welles move.
It’s not just his final film “in the can,” it’s a last look at performers from John Huston and Mercedes McCambridge to Edmond O’Brien and that young whippersnapper Peter Bogdanovich.
Lilli Palmer and Paul Stewart and Cameron Mitchell and Susan Strasberg — all these people who worked on this fits-and-starts film over the years — here they are, preserved on celluloid, “lost” performances or snippets of performance, resurrected like The Great Man Himself with this final finished/finally finished movie about a movie maker in the winter of his career.
But as for Netflix? Bless them for getting “The Other Side of the Wind” into homes this Nov. 2.