The Immortal Story (1968)

The greatest story about storytelling from the greatest storyteller, "The Immortal Story" makes a challenging and profound statement while presenting itself as the simplest tale. It begins with an old sailor's yarn about a raggedy sailor who encounters a rich man and is paid a large sum of money to come to the rich man's house and perform a task. This story-within-the-story becomes the obsession of rich old Mr. Clay (Orson Welles) who, irritated at learning that it's only a legend, decides to make it really happen.

What follows doesn't stray far from this simplest of plots, and yet as it takes us deeper into the drama, peeling back each character's motivations (there are only 4 characters in the entire film), we realize that this tale exposes the very fabric of society and why "people run north, south, east, west." Even deeper, it exposes the machine driving all these people: in this case a withered old man intent on proving his omnipotence. For, having conquered the world in terms of money and material success, what left is there?

Clocking in at under 60 minutes (this was made, to much fanfare, as the first color program to air on French TV), "The Immortal Story" proves that a film doesn't need to be a 3 hour epic to be a masterpiece. It's all neatly encapsulated here in under an hour, the perfect length for watching over & over. You can hang on every word, you can soak in every detail of the magnificent sets or the revolutionary way Welles used color (notice how distant backgrounds are lit in a dreamy soft yellow, giving us a tremendous sense of depth), and of course you can lose yourself in the incredible acting. Ultimately all of these things feed into the main point Welles is making about storytelling through the ages. "The Immortal Story" is indeed the immortal story.