Orson Welles is always watchable, and there are a number of movies, which I don’t have to give a run down of for you to know them, that are masterpieces. This is one of them.
The thing I like in these movies is the restraint that is present. It isn’t just a restraint in the characters themselves, but also in the story telling. Time unpacks slowly. Things are allowed to simmer. Pieces slowly arrive in the places where they need to be. The tension is present, and it doesn’t need to be telegraphed.
There is a lot of canted framing at use here — it tells you that the ground you are on is uneven … psychologically, existentially, and also narratively. What you are watching isn’t going to be revealed by following a straight line.
I first watched it as part of a course about film adaptations of novels, which doesn’t totally hold true for what the novella was — it was written by Graham Greene as a treatment for the screenplay that Green was writing. It’s a slim book, and the prose is lean. What we see translated to shadows and light on the screen is all there in psychological shading on the page.
This is a film I could watch time and again, but really haven’t watched much since that first time back in 95 or 96. It’s inspiring. It is an education in film making and storytelling; one that it is enjoyable to partake in.