Watching Orson Welles' first film is like listening to one of the early (emphasis on early, like pre-pubescent) compositions by Mozart- you know things can only go up from here. What Welles' decided to do before he reached the heights of fame as a theater actor/director and with his Mercury company, he tried his hand at making a film. According to the commentary on the DVD, it's an intentional spoof of Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, and Bunuel's first surreal efforts. In that sense it's actually very interesting, as it doesn't make sense plot-wise, but is evocative and spooky when just soaking in the images. There's Welles' himself with a mask of Death. There's a friend of Welles' as some odd character. Then a piano plays. Symbols seem to come and go as they please. Simply put, The Hearts of Age succeeds best at being an test of skills and technics/visual ideas more than a concise film with a carefully structured story as with Citizen Kane or The Trial. However, if you took it out of the context that it's directed by the future 'wunderkind bad-boy' behind some of America's most cherished and truncated artistic works, as just a short film by a college-aged chap it's not that bad (to put it another way, I've seen worse).
Review of The Hearts of Age
