At the beginning of F for Fake, Orson Welles is performing magic acts for a little boy at a train station, making a key turn into a coin and vice-versa. In the background, peeping from a train window, is a woman (Oja Kodar) waiting for that boy. Before letting him be, Welles asks the boy if he ever heard of Robert-Houdin. Obviously the boy never has. Orson then proceeds to quote Houdin, whom said that “A magician is just an actor…” Welles adds “Just an actor, playing the part of a magician”.

Undoubtedly, Welles would be one to fully agree with this quote. Performing magic acts since he was a child, Welles was always able to mix in magic somehow into his movies or into the characters he played. In Citizen Kane, for example, Welles’ Charlie Kane uses shadow puppets to entertain Susan Alexander. In The Third Man, Welles’ Harry Lime was a former childhood magician, whom, as it turns out, hasn’t lost his touch. In Touch of Evil, the brothel owner played by Marlene Dietrich is also a gypsy (When Welles’ police captain enters her saloon for the first time in years, another police man wonders what the captain thinks she could have done. One of the other men says “Maybe she’ll cook chili for him, or break out the crystal ball”).

“Ladies and gentleman”, Welles says, “By way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud. About lies…almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie”. Welles, however, promises that this movie will be different, and even puts it in writing:

FOR THE NEXT HOUR EVERYTHING IN THIS FILM IS STRICTLY BASED ON THE AVAILABLE FACTS.

Things in F for Fake may certainly be factual, but directors can distort and play with the facts all they want. Welles does that, no doubt, but things also came out bizarre as well, in a storyline "rotten with coincidence" as Welles later remarked. The story began originally with a project directed by Francois Reichenbach. Reichenbach was making a documentary on art forger Elmyr De Hory. De Hory was probably the greatest art forger of all time: Name it and he would paint it. He once did a Van Dongen which Van Dongen himself later studied and swore was his own! Museums have purchased works by Elmyr believing them to be genuine (One museum in Europe, which could not be named, has an entire renaissance painting collection that is actually Elmyr’s forgeries). Welles took over Reichenbach’s project and created a bizarre but visually dazzling concoction; not a documentary, but a “film essay”. The story is not just of the greatest of art forgers, but also of trickery, fraud, lies and Welles himself. Using editing tricks such as slow and fast motion and pausing, reversing and replaying scenes, he creates a movie within a movie (Indeed, Welles uses various transitions to get from one scene to another, and there are several scenes throughout with Welles doing narration while he’s shown watching the movie in the editing room).

The story deepens with the introduction of author Clifford Irving, whom researched and talked with Elmyr and wrote a book about him called Fake! It turned out, though, that Clifford Irving was a faker himself, and he would become more notorious then Elmyr. You see, while the movie was in production, Irving published what he called the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes. In it, Irving claimed to have met Mr. Hughes by the pyramids in Mexico, described the current disposition and health of Mr. Hughes, and even had artist’s renderings and written documents to prove that he had met Hughes. If it sounded too good to be true, that’s because it was. Howard Hughes, in a telephone press conference (He refused to be photographed), blew Irving’s cover by flat out denying that he ever met Irving or that he had ever even heard of him, while the documents- which had at first been authenticated- turned out to be forged. Clifford Irving confessed to the hoax [Ironically, after all the jail time and lawsuits had been done with, Clifford Irving became a bigger star afterward]. By writing the Hughes autobiography, Cliff Irving proved just how correct Elmyr was when Elmyr told him about how easy it is to fool “experts”. Cliff Irving was voted Time Magazine’s 1972 “Con Man of the Year”, with his cover portrait done by…Elmyr De Hory.

The next segment in the movie is focused primarily on Welles, both his stories and his experiences. Welles first recounts how he knew Howard Hughes, telling tales he heard about how Hughes would have a mysterious package put in a tree every night at his Beverly Hills bungalow, should he feel the need to get it during a midnight sleepwalk. Or about how Hughes, when living aloof in a Vegas motel room, would be reported to be walking around at night wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet. What was in Hughes’ package? Did anybody really see him in Vegas? Watch the movie to find out.

Orson Welles gets help during this from special guest stars: Fellow Mercury Theater actors, including Richard Wilson, Paul Stewart and Joseph Cotten, the latter of whom tells about his involvement in Citizen Kane. Cotten claims that he was initially to be the lead actor in Citizen Kane, and that the tycoon whom Charlie Kane was originally based on was…Howard Hughes. Believe that if you want.

The final segment of F for Fake concerns the female we are introduced to early in the film: Oja Kodar (Whom would become a close acquaintance of Welles right up to his death). Miss Kodar is extremely wealthy, but how did she get it? She claims to have black mailed Picasso, but is that the truth? Of course, that’s what the whole move is trying to figure out.

Welles’ bottom line is that we live in a world of fake: A world of make believe and con artists (Some of whom hold the higher reigns of government in their hands). During one line of the movie, while discussing Elmyr’s forgeries, Cliff Irving says, "When judging the quality of a painting, it's not so much whether it's a real painting or a fake; it's whether it's a good fake or a bad fake". Another sequence shows Welles' larceny: The girl watching sequence at the start of the movie. Welles' points out that the men shown in the movie are indeed being tricked by being filmed, unknowningly, peeping at and observing Oja Kodar as she walks through the streets. But, according to critic Johnathan Rosenbaum in his great essay on the movie, there is another fact: The woman shown is not even Ms. Kodar (It's actually her sister's legs that are shown), and Ms. Kodar is not used until the end of the shot when she comes into plain view. It's larceny on top of larceny!

F for Fake is the last movie Welles completed and released, although it was not intended as such. Following his death in 1985, he left behind several other films, all in various stages of completion. Contrary to most people’s assumptions, Welles had actually continually been working on movies right up to his death (One film he actually finished filming on, but he was never able to get it edited). Due to financial and resourceful reasons, he was never able to get any of them finished. Perhaps he did know that this would end up being his final completed movie. During a scene focusing on the Chartres cathedral- the design and construction of which is a mystery- Welles says in the narration:

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them… but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing."

By this point in his career, Welles was used to his "songs" being silenced, or at least studio edited (As was the case with The Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil). Even so, that did not stop him from still pulling out his bag of tricks, which is what he does here with this: His final completed movie. It's a fitting "last magic act".

The Criterion Collection two-disc DVD is outstanding. Disc One has the movie in a digitally restored presentation, with an audio commentary by Oja Kodar and director of photography Gary Graver. There is also an introduction from Peter Bogdanovich and the nine minute film trailer (Which was never released publicly). Disc Two has the documentaries Almost True: The Noble Art of Forgery, which tells about Elmyr De Hory, and one on Welles’ unfinished work called Orson Welles: One Man Band. There is also a 60 Minutes interview with Cliff Irving and, finally, the audio of the Howard Hughes press conference.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8