His original plan for The Immortal Story was to make it part of an anthology of Dinesen stories-either a TV series or a sketch feature-along with “The Heroine” (1942), which he started to shoot with Oja Kodar in Budapest while he was still editing The Immortal Story (and then had to abandon a day later when the promised budget evaporated) “The Deluge at Norderney” (1934) and “A Country Tale” (1957). As early as 1953, he planned to include an adaptation of “The Old Chevalier” (1934) in a sketch film for Alexander Korda called Paris By Night, whose other episodes would all be written by himself and as late as 1985, on the very night that he died, he was planning to shoot part of another sketch film, Orson Welles Solo, that would have included his recounting of that same story. I had only to keep silent and our affair would last-on the most intimate terms-for as long as I had eyes to read print.” (“Tania” was Dinesen’s nickname to intimates, and one wonders whether Welles might have named Marlene Dietrich’s aging, world-weary prostitute after her in Touch of Evil.)Īlthough Dinesen’s “The Immortal Story”-included in her final story collection, Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), and her personal favorite in that volume-was the only one of her tales that yielded a completed film from Welles, at least half a dozen others attracted his attention as a screen adapter at one time or another. What could a casual visitor presume to offer except his stammered thanks? The visitor would be a bore, and the lover was too humble and too proud for that. Welles once even made a pilgrimage to Denmark to meet Dinesen, but after a sleepless night in Copenhagen, he backed away from the prospect and flew home: “I’d been in love with Isak Dinesen since I’d opened her first book,” he later wrote. This is especially true when it comes to the architectonics of “The Immortal Story.” Perhaps even more relevant to this discussion, both were also tireless polishers of their own art, whose apparent simplicity and directness conceal a great deal of subtle craft and nuance. Both were florid, masterful storytellers, with a developed taste for paradox, irony, and a kind of artifice that unabashedly calls attention to itself. Both were cosmopolitan twentieth-century aristocrats with nostalgic yearnings for the nineteenth century, who loved to critique the same romanticism in which they enveloped themselves. Even though she was born thirty years ahead of him, they shared a capacity for standing outside of their own eras. “But for all that it is still a pattern.”Īside from William Shakespeare, no writer excited Orson Welles’s imagination more than Isak Dinesen, the pen name of Karen Blixen-a Danish baroness who wrote mainly in English-especially when it came to the films he wanted to make. “As in a looking-glass,” she repeated slowly. “Only,” he went on, “sometimes the lines of a pattern will run the other way of what you expect. She frowned a little, but let Elishama go on. Virginie had a taste for patterns one of the things for which she despised the English was that to her mind they had no pattern in their lives. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.
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