This is the shortest of Orson Welles’ feature film and in fact for originally meant to be shown on television in France. It is an adaptation of a short story by a Danish writer named Karen Blixen so this is a film that is small in scope and ambition as well as length. It’s also one of the rare examples of Welles working in color though he seems to have been forced to do so. I’m not too impressed with the story or the themes but I feel that it sets the mood rather well and that’s good enough for a short film like this.

Mr. Clay is an immensely merchant in Macao who is old and has nothing but his wealth. Yet he is not regretful at all of having amassed his money by being utterly ruthless and unsentimental. One day he attempts to tell an amusing story to his assistant Levinsky about a young sailor being offered money by a rich old man to impregnate his wife. Levinsky explains that the story is apocryphal and commonly told in ports all around the world. This offends Clay who professes hatred of prophesies and false stories and so he decides to make the story true. As he does not have a wife himself, he sends out Levinsky to hire someone while he goes out in the streets himself to look for a sailor. Unbeknownst to him, the woman he procures is the daughter of his old business partner who he drove to bankruptcy and suicide long ago.

I consider this to be a mood piece above all. There is a very pleasing kind of poetic sensibility about a story that is endlessly and retold, an immortal story, and a rich man who wants to prove his omnipotence by killing the story’s immortality by making it real. The setting and sepia color tones impart a timeless and otherworldly quality to the film and I really enjoyed how it even feels like an adaptation of a short story. Unfortunately the plot itself isn’t that appealing to me and while I can see how sailors might tell this story to each other as a kind of fantasy, I fail to see what’s so special about it. One thing I did like was how the young sailor mistakes the woman, played by Jeanne Moreau, as being his own age, while she herself feels well past her prime. It’s an indication of deeply the sailor buys into the fantasy himself even if he has heard the story many times before.

Overall I found this entertaining enough in a very old-fashioned way but it’s nothing truly outstanding. Not to dunk on Welles, but I feel that this sort of quality wouldn’t be out of place in one of our modern anthology television shows. It’s an indication of how high production quality standards have risen in our time.