'The Fountain of Youth'
Fine Arts Cinema, Thurs/20-Tues/25

AHEAD OF HIS time in so many ways, Orson Welles – in death as in life the best promulgator of his own mythology – seemed to anticipate our current Video Watchdog-Psychotronic Cinema-etc. subculture of rarities-lusting cineast by leaving so many projects unrealized, unfinished, or legally entangled. Will we ever see some or all of The Dark Side of the Wind? Or know just how many scattered parts there are to be scooped up from Don Quixote? Maybe the real tragedy of Welles wasn't that of genius thwarted but rather that of short-attention-spanned genius in love with the vain image of genius being thwarted. One serious Welles obscurity gets excavated this week at Berkeley's Fine Arts Cinema (soon to be defunct, but programmatically eccentric to the end). The Fountain of Youth is a 1956 pilot for a projected Orson Welles Presents dramatic omnibus produced by Desilu, then-reigning pop couple Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball's TV company. It failed to win over tube executives, and no wonder: this curious half-hour dramedy is perverse and ironical to the extreme, with Welles looming all too centrally as an on-screen narrator. Presiding over slides, projected backdrops (à la Hans-Jurgen Syberberg), and scenes with live actors amid expressionist sets, he practically hog-wallows in the artificiality of the simple parable. A scientific genius of glandular research (Dan Tobin) improbably wins the heart of the reigning va-voom stage glamazon (platinum blond Joi Lansing, deftly channeling her concurrent role model/parody source Marilyn Monroe). During his prolonged professional sojourn, however, she weds a vacuously handsome tennis champion (Rick Jason). The science nerd devises a viciously clever revenge that slowly drives a wedge betwixt the beautiful couple. Based on a short story by early-20th-century magazine fiction demigod John Collier, the teleplay is at once wickedly witty, too theatrical, avant-garde, and obvious. This maxi-minimalist opus is aptly featured at the Fine Arts with Paul Thomas Anderson's 1998 Magnolia, whose every-which-way-excessive three hours place the genius-quack auteur concept under the most viewer-divisive form of microscopic stress. (Dennis Harvey)'