COMMENTARY : The Lost Piece to the Welles Puzzle : A fascinating new documentary, ‘It’s All True,’ recounts the story of the legendary director’s raucous trip in Rio in 1942; while he was gone, RKO took ‘Ambersons’ away from him

It is one of the curious aspects of film criticism that, frame for frame, more is probably written on the frustrations of Orson Welles than on the successes of most other directors.

Not that there isn’t good reason for this imbalance. For one thing, those frustrations are often more dazzling and better directed than conventional successes. For another, not only did Welles find endless and diverse ways to come a cropper, but the debate still rages as to whose fault all those unhappy endings were, with fat volumes of biography arranged on all sides of the question.

Was the director, as Charles Higham indicates in his “Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius,” his own worst enemy, profligate, wasteful and self-destructive? Was Barbara Leaming correct in her subject-friendly “Orson Welles” to see him as a martyr to forces beyond his control? Or perhaps Frank Brady’s “Citizen Welles,” with its more measured approach, is closer to the truth?

What everyone agrees, however, is that Welles’ abortive 1942 documentary, “It’s All True,” is a key piece of the puzzle. Called by critics “one of the great mysteries of film scholarship” and “perhaps one of the greatest feature documentaries never made,” everything about it, from the circumstances it was made under to the quality of its footage, has been shrouded in dispute.

“It’s All True,” a fascinating and remarkable documentary about that fabled film that opens Wednesday for nine days at the Nuart in West Los Angeles after a New York Film Festival debut, goes a considerable way toward answering those questions. Part investigation into the Welles film’s origins, part reconstruction of a key segment based on 309 cans of pristine nitrate footage undiscovered until 1985, “It’s All True” (co-directed by Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel and Bill Krohn) also helps explain why Welles himself apparently felt the film had an all but fatal influence on his subsequent Hollywood career.

After the release of the stunning “Citizen Kane” in 1941, Welles, only 26 at the time, was at that dizzying point of his career when everything seemed possible. He simultaneously began working on two features, “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Journey Into Fear,” at his home studio of RKO, and also thought about an omnibus documentary, tentatively titled “It’s All True.”

One segment, with the possible help of Duke Ellington, was to be on jazz; another, based on a short story by Robert Flaherty called “My Friend Bonito,” was set in Mexico and dealt with a boy’s friendship with a fighting bull. No one had quite figured out what was ultimately going to link the segments, but Welles was not the type to worry about such things.

Then Pearl Harbor was bombed and World War II changed everything. Nelson Rockefeller, a key RKO stockholder and a major player in the government’s attempts to keep South America on the right side of the conflict, thought it would be a swell idea for Welles to make a film in Brazil to help better relations between the two countries. Maybe “It’s All True,” with its Bonito sequence already filming, could be turned into a Latin American omnibus film?

“I was told it was my patriotic duty to spend a million dollars shooting Carnaval,” is how Welles grandly puts it in the new documentary, but things were never quite that clear. Although he rushed down to Rio to film Carnaval with 4,500 pounds of Technicolor equipment, leaving an unfinished “Ambersons” behind him, neither Welles nor anyone else had any clear idea of what kind of film would result. Whenever he was asked, the director would respond, “Ask me again in six months.”

Once in Rio, however, several things hit Welles almost simultaneously. He became intoxicated with the rhythms of the samba he heard at Carnaval and decided that a history of the dance would be one segment of “True” and that to do it right he would have to film in the city’s favelas , slum neighborhoods in the hills around Rio.

Another segment of “True” had suggested itself to Welles on the flight down to Rio, when he read a Time magazine story titled “Four Men on a Raft.” It described the odyssey of four fishermen from Fortaleza in the remote northeastern corner of Brazil who had spent 61 days traveling without a compass on a six-log sailing raft called a jangada to reach Rio and petition the country’s president for much-needed social reforms back home. Their story electrified the country and, meeting the jangadeiros , as they were known, Welles felt he had his film’s central segment.

Welles also, not to put too fine a point on it, found time to have fun in Rio. As secretary Shifra Haran reported, “He had not just one-night stands but afternoon stands, before-dinner stands, and after-dinner stands. Quickies by the thousands!” Trusting, as “Citizen Kane” publicist Herbert Drake had predicted, “to his genius and/or charm to get him out of any situation,” he felt the quality of the work he was doing or had planned was justification enough for his presence and his pace.

Back at RKO, however, folks were not so sanguine. For one thing, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which Welles had hoped to edit in Rio but was not allowed to, had previewed to disastrous results. Reported president George Schaefer, Welles’ biggest supporter but soon to be shunted aside in a palace coup, “It was like getting one sock in the jaw after another for over two hours.”

Nor was the Brazilian government too keen on Welles’ filming in the favelas : This was not the kind of tourist-oriented material they had envisioned. And the RKO execs, unsympathetic or simply oblivious to Welles’ artistic aims, didn’t know what to make of all the Carnaval footage--200,000 feet in all, some documentary, some on sound stage, some in color, some in black-and-white--of people of color dancing in the streets. Typical were the sentiments expressed in a letter home by RKO publicist Tom Pettey: “If all the film we’ve shot was laid end to end, it would reach to the States, and there would be enough left over to serve as a marker for the Equator. As for the film story, only God and Orson know; Orson doesn’t remember.”

Then disaster struck in Brazil. While Welles was filming a re-creation of the jangadeiros’ triumphal entry into Rio harbor, a freak wave struck the craft and Jacare, the group’s leader, was drowned. Both Welles and the country were horrified; a Brazilian newspaper editorialized about the men that “they should have stayed on their own sand dunes . . . without having seen the seductions of Babylon, without ever meeting the American movie men. They should have stayed there far away, without ever meeting Orson Welles.”

It was just at this juncture that an increasingly recalcitrant RKO, unhappy at the way costs were rising, decided to pull the plug on “It’s All True.” Feeling especially distraught because of Jacare’s death, Welles arranged a compromise. He was given $10,000, 45,000 feet of black-and-white film stock, a skeleton crew including longtime collaborator Richard Wilson, and two months to go back to Fortaleza and film the jangadeiros’ story where it began.

Welles finished as planned, but nothing else happened the way it was supposed to. “The Magnificent Ambersons” was taken away from him, drastically re-cut and released on a double bill with “Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost.” RKO also fired Welles and took possession of all the “It’s All True” footage, and, despite years of efforts, Welles could never get it back and complete the film to his satisfaction. What he got instead was the start of a lifelong reputation for spending money with nothing to show for it.

What this new version of “It’s All True” shows is how very much there was to show for it. For what Paramount executive Fred Chandler found when he opened a film storage space in 1985 was not only all 45,000 feet Welles shot in Fortaleza, but good chunks of his spectacular color and black-and-white Carnaval footage plus parts of “My Friend Bonito” as well as color shots of hillside favelas , all amazingly well-preserved.

Spearheaded by Welles associate Richard Wilson, who died in 1991 and co-filmmakers Krohn and Meisel, “It’s All True” strings together a whole variety of film, video and sound sources to tell that long-ago story clearly and passionately.

Most impressive, however, is the work that was done with that 45,000 feet of rushes. The filmmakers and editor Ed Marx have followed Welles’ lead (economy forced him to try to edit in the camera) and, discreetly adding sound effects and a sympathetic score by Chilean composer Jorge Arrigada, have done the footage as much justice as could possibly be expected.

And how good is that footage, now turned into a 49-minute featurette that forms the second half of the new “It’s All True”? Reminiscent in its thematic earnestness of everything from Robert Flaherty’s “Man of Aran,” the Flaherty-F. W. Murnau “Tabu” and even Sergei Eisenstein’s similarly ill-fated “Que Viva Mexico,” this segment is also filled with the kind of glorious shots and stunning compositions that mark everything Welles put his hand to. When how little money he had and the primitiveness of his operation (he, director of photography George Fanto and operator Joe Biroc used only an old Mitchell silent camera) are factored in, the results are even more impressive.

Will the whole truth about “It’s All True” ever be known? If it isn’t, Welles himself, a superior raconteur, will be at least partly to blame. The current documentary opens with a clip from a mid-1950s British documentary in which Welles tells a riveting story about how, when RKO suspended filming, a cranky witch doctor stuck a long steel needle with a length of red wool attached into a script, thus putting a voodoo curse on the film.

It’s a great tale, but the only trouble is that Dick Wilson told co-director Bill Krohn it didn’t really happen that way. There were three women, not a towering witch doctor, they talked to Wilson, not Welles, and they used a ring of smaller needles, not a melodramatic red-tipped spike. But the Welles version is so spine-tingling, it’s next to impossible to object to it, and that ability to mesmerize, finally, is yet another reason why so much attention is paid to that supremely gifted and frustrated man, Orson Welles.