F for Fake

This review is an excerpt from my book “Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies On Video You’ve (Probably) Never Seen,” which is available as an ebook on iBooks. If you enjoy this review, there are 236 more like it in the book (plus a whole lot more). Check it out! F FOR FAKE: “I’m a charlatan,” Orson admits in his introduction. “And this is a film about trickery. About fraud. About...lies.” It’s all that, and much more. There are four principal players in this story “rotten with coincidence.” The first is Elmyr de Hory, the world’s greatest art forger, who paints in the style of every modern master (we watch him paint a passable Matisse on camera, for example), and claims to have works hanging in every major gallery in the world. The second “character” is author Clifford Irving, who wrote a book about Elmyr entitled “Fake”—and who would later become famous for attempting his own hoax, obtaining an enormous advance for a book based on an alleged interview with billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. The third character is Welles himself, a man who began his career with a spectacular hoax (the “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast) and who then headed for Hollywood with the original intention to film a thinly-veiled biography of an eccentric millionaire—not William Randolph Hearst, but Howard Hughes. If it sounds as though the film comes full circle, be aware that the above synopsis is only the first of numerous wheels-within-wheels revolving within the pinwheel of Welles’ penultimate film. This mind-boggling movie is a trip through the looking glass of truth and lies, which chase each other’s tails to the point that they become indistinguishable. (Consider the story of the man who paid for a forgery with a bouncing check, or Welles’ attempt to distinguish between real fakes and fake fakes, and you might see how these strange loops of deception spiral deeper, ever deeper.) It’s a very personal document as well: a meditation on Art, and on the art of larceny. As Pablo Picasso (who becomes the fourth major character in the film) said, “Art is a lie—a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Welles would never confess to “committing masterpieces,” but at least he left us this final magic trick: a Chinese puzzle box for the intellect.