In 1958, Orson Welles made a television program so far ahead of its time that we still haven’t caught up. There are films and filmmakers who seem to exist outside our normal understanding of the grammar they operate under; Tony Zhou of Every Frame A Painting once remarked that the movies of Yasujirō Ozu pointed to a completely different direction movies could have evolved (especially when you compare them to his rival Akira Kurosawa, who did set up how movies operate with his influence on Spielberg, Scorsese, and other New Hollywood directors). “The Fountain of Youth” was a pilot Welles made in hopes of producing a longer anthology series in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone.
One immediately sees the difference. For one thing, whereas those series have their narrators pop in at the beginning and end, Welles is present all throughout “The Fountain of Youth”, being about as active as a narrator as you can without actually being a character. He doesn’t just set up the story and provide sly commentary at the end; he’s constantly talking all the way through and editorialising heavily (such as half-embarrassedly correcting himself when he refers to the female lead as an actress – “She’s one of those creatures that stands for something more than talent.”). His closest cousin is Terry Pratchett’s narrator in the Discworld series; polite, highly literate, concerned with you having a good time, and more than willing to dissect the characters brought onstage (as you can tell from that line).
The other thing one immediately sees is the creativity on display. When discussing his Citizen Kane, Welles often remarked that the reason it was so wildly creative was because he and his crew were simply too naive to realize what they were doing was wrong; they simply saw that the medium was capable of something and did it. The filming on display here does have some ideas developed by the industry later – mainly because the work sets up Welles’s own F For Fake, which may not have influenced the MTV-style editing popular from about the Nineties onward with its groundbreaking style but definitely presaged it. But, for the most part, this feels like Welles and his crew simply finding useful solutions to basic storytelling problems caused by television as a medium.
A lot of his solutions seem almost diabolically, even stupidly simple; for one thing, Welles knows that he has a magnificent voice and unstoppable wit, so many of the scenes are simply him narrating over still pictures, saving the expense of shooting scenes and hiring actors for minor parts. I’m awed by Welles’s performance here; he has a mask of reserve that he seems to be dropping when he starts talking more to himself, as if he’s revealing something to you in moments of unintentional intimacy, which makes the commentary he drops about life and love come off less as hectoring and more as revealing things about himself because he’s comfortable with you. He tells you that we all do things to avoid ageing, and what he’s really saying is that he does things to avoid ageing, which gives you permission to feel wistful about ageing and the things that you do to avoid it, which of course, brings you back to the characters and their actions.
What’s present under this is the genuine craft of filmmaking. There are so many tiny things Welles and his crew do to keep this visually interesting; the background behind Welles is often moving to keep his shots visually interesting, there’s a great moment where Welles physically steps in the way of a photograph to adjust the scene from it to him, and there’s another where a scene changes by having the lights go down on the protagonist, his costume is adjusted, lights go back up, and we go straight into the scene. My favourite is the simplest – when they cut to a picture of the protagonist, except it’s out of focus – so the camera adjusts, giving us an interesting way of centering him. Sometimes it’s even as simple as Welles narrating over footage of the characters talking to each other.
The crew also has the sense to slow down when it comes to the interesting, novel parts. You don’t have to explain how two people can fall in love or break apart, but you do have to explain how the protagonist gets away with tricking the love of his life and the man who took her into drinking a mystery potion. Unfortunately, this calls attention to the weaknesses of the work; the weaker acting of the non-Welles actors and the cliche nature of the story. One would expect this with any anthology from time to time, and the pleasure would be in the style around it and hoping at least every other episode is great. Obviously that did not come to pass.
Where I’m most fascinated is in how it sets a model for cheap television. Hitchcock rejected the subjective headspace almost entirely; he said that early in his career, he tried doing framing that symbolized an idea, but found audiences usually didn’t notice and when they did, they didn’t care – I suspect he was thinking of the scene in The Lodger where we look up at see him pacing around from below. Audiences tend to respond more strongly to the feeling that they’re looking at an objective situation, and I won’t lie about being bitter about how hard it is to get people to empathize – although I admit, I take it in stride when writing my own work.
Welles, on the other hand, is fully embracing subjectivity here, and it works because he’s approaching it in a fun and breezy way. Where cheap movies and television fail is that they reach for realism in a way that they can’t back up; “The Fountain of Youth” doesn’t even bother most of the time, and its confidence and total belief in its story makes it very fun to watch. I watch this and I can picture in my head making something in the same way; there’s even a particularly good local actor I can picture in the Welles narrator position, and particularly good local writers I can picture putting words in his mouth. In a lot of ways, “The Fountain of Youth” ought to have been the Velvet Underground of television; it shouldn’t have just spawned a single show, it should have spawned a whole ethos.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Guess I know what I am watching after work. (Just thirty seconds of Welles’s presence makes me want to take the morning off and keep going.)
Yeah, this sounds utterly fascinating. Will have to watch ASAP.
What did we watch?
Hadestown
Specifically, the show as performed exclusively by teens. My partner, who has seen an adult staging, remarked that it actually made more sense as performed by teens; aside my their taste for singers who are slightly awkward but emotionally sincere over note-perfect stuff (they agreed with Stephen-Sondheim-via-me-quoting-him for preferring actors who can sing over singers who can act), they made the compelling point that this is really a teenager story, requiring passion and sincerity and rage at unfairness.
I was shocked that the whole show is wall-to-wall music; even lines connecting songs have rhyme and meter, sometimes to the point of goofiness. I enjoyed the overwhelming nature of this; the staging backed it up, where there was always someone on stage moving to prevent monotony and overwhelm the eye; the big example being in Orpheus’s first big number showing off to Eurydice, which was staged with him walking over a series of tables placed in his way by the extras, with them constantly moving the same four tables without him breaking pace. The best example being the final showdown between Orpheus and Hades, where the two of them are circling each other while a small group of extras are crouching in the middle and the rest are standing around the area Orpheus and Hades are circling.
It also helped that the music is intensely bluesy and American; my favourite is “Why We Build The Wall”, which has a) cool music, b) a cool message (best expressing the anti-capitalism of the play) and c) a cool structural trick of the response in the call-and-response keeps getting longer and longer. I got caught off-guard by the ending; I couldn’t see any way that the traditional ending of the story of Orpheus could work with what the play was doing – particularly because Eliza Mudge, who plays Orpheus, was so convincingly sincere – so obviously it’s heart-stopping when it happens, and then circling back makes it make sense in the context of the play again. Also notable: as far as I know (not knowing how anyone identifies), the entire cast and crew are female save Cameron Palmer as Hades.
Happy Endings, Season One, Episode Eight, “Mein Coming Out”
“Did you make these yourself?”
“It couldn’t have been easier! [a bunch of shit I’m not writing down] and then flip them every five minutes for an hour and a half.”
“Are you crying?”
“I am just… so tired…”
“Are people still named Roger?”
“You telling me one single date with some stranger is more important than what we fake-have?”
“I mean, for someone who behaves nothing like a gay guy, you have even less idea how to act like a straight guy.”
“It’s only because I thought I had someone better!”
“Hey, I got a thought.”
“Put you in a dress and lipstick like sexy Bugs Bunny?”
“My parents don’t see colour, they just see ‘sleeping with our daughter’.”
“Oh, I sleep the sleep outta that.”
“Are you enjoying your reward points, Mr… Hitler?”
“If you’re ever thinking of getting into a country club and need a fake white husband, I’m your guy.”
“I wiki’d World War II just for this conversation!”
“Hope he’s Mr Reich.”
Wayans is incredibly funny when he’s playing ‘think he’s about to get some’.
“You seem a little too into it.”
[rips off notepad and reveals ‘Jewish’ crossed out]
“Now that’s going to be hard to explain.”
“Hey guys! Guess what. I finally decide I’m into Hitler and it turns out I’m too much of a Nazi for him!”
“Appreciate what you’re doing, but you’re not my type.”
Max and Jane teamed up at the end is a great pairing – a woman laser-focused on her goal and a man incapable of taking anything seriously.
Bob’s Burgers
We got up to season six, episode nineteen, “Secret Admiral-liar”, which is the first episode that skipped over a bunch of the action. It’s amazing how skipping over stuff feels arty. Also, I have long perfected matching Gene in his little bounce in the intro.
Teenage is the best way to describe the emotions here, Hadestown should not work but it’s so sincere (and rooted in American blues and jazz) that it does.
The Left Handed Gun – One of many attempts to (loosely) tell the story of Billy the Kid, based on a teleplay by Gore Vidal, but with some (queer) edges smoothed off by Leslie Stevens and with director Arthur Penn making his first feature. A young Paul Newman – though not young enough to be someone who died at 22 or so – is generally over the top as basically a rootless, parentless sub-literate who latches onto the first man to show him kindness and then runs around the rest of the time seeking revenge when that man is ambushed in the “Lincoln County War.” Much more effective is John Dehner as Pat Garrett, here depicted as the only man with any chance to talk down Billy before he becomes the only man who can track Billy down. Penn shows promise, though the movie’s pacing is quite uneven and takes a while to get going. Look for the first ever slow motion shoot in American mainstream film history when Billy guns down Denver Pyle.
Columbo, “Columbo and the Death of a Rock Star” – More like “the death of a former rock star at the hands of her very successful defense attorney lover Dabney Coleman.” Like many of the ABC era installments, this manages to be fun without being very good. There are definite holes in the plot, and you can tell no one is being very serious when we made an old school PI named Sam Marlowe. (Columbo is also inexplicably wearing a baseball cap with the letter NFI on it. It stands for “no frigging idea” and Peter Falk was so tickled by seeing it on a crew member that he borrowed in even though Columbo really would never wear a baseball cap.) Falk is solid here, and this is an occasion where Columbo’s observational skills are foregrounded and his ability to schmooze suspects is on the shelf, since Coleman is utterly uncooperative. Coleman got an Emmy nom for this.
Frasier, “SeaBee Jeebies” – The last SeaBee Awards episode, with Frasier up twice, but he is jealous of Niles, who for Reasons is suddenly the talk of the town because of Maris’s murder case. I don’t know. Would “my ex-wife killed her lover” be a reason everyone wants to invite Niles for dinner? But this one is filled with dopey ideas to mess with Frasier’s day, most notably that the awards ended up happening at 9 am because Kenny got the booking wrong. Could that really ever happen? Well, at least everyone is on their game.
Elementary, “All in the Family” – Not a crossover with the Bunkers. Bell, now working for “Demographics,” is asked to investigate a tip about someone leaving a barrel at a waste disposal facility. Sure enough, the barrel contains a long missing dead mobster, and it turns out that Bell’s new boss is actually a long ago Mob plant in the NYPD who wants to cause a mob war and get the people who know the truth about him killed. Doesn’t really make a ton of sense, but it works wells to serve the biggest goal of bringing Bell back to the homicide squad, even if he doesn’t trust Holmes. And also allows for Jonny Lee Miller to give a great speech to Bell about not wasting his potential even if the two never get along again. There is also some really great stuff here that shows the writers were very much New Yorkers. Joan apparently knows her stuff because she grew up in Queens and had classmates who claimed to be the sons of Mafiosi, and in the 80s, news about the Mafia was like a soap opera. I can vouch for that (even if I didn’t have any such friends). And then Holmes comments that the Mob having been defanged by the Feds and by time, they are less of a threat to New Yorkers than “20 ounce sodas,” very much a comment in line with Mike Bloomberg’s attempts to ban Giant Gulps. This show is one of the best time capsules of New York as it was, a post-9/11 and pre-COVID descendant of Kojak.
MASH, “Potter’s Horse” – The colonel goes to Tokyo for a week – somehow his wife got a plane ticket there and is meeting him for a second honeymoon – and while he is away, his mare Sophie gets sick. Thankfully, BJ’s father in law (riffing on Mike Farrell’s real life) is from Oklahoma, and one long distance call later, they know what to do. Apparently, Sophie needs an enema! Meanwhile, Margaret is dealing with appendicitis and bans Frank from doing the surgery. Oh, and Klinger is depressed. In some ways a standard issue non-serious episode, but a lot of fun, with the camp pitching in to make sure there is enough warm water ready for Sophine’s colonic.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
I’d rank this over Raiders, personally. Wonderfully goofy, sunny sense of adventure, with multiple fist-pump moments like the invisible bridge or the X marking the spot, and Ford and Connery have the perfect rapport here. Also, in general, few things are worse than a flashback to the lead’s childhood that explains how he became who he is, but this completely works, in part because young Indy is incorporating his one-time antagonist’s style and advice even as continuing to operate against him on a philosophical level, which is cool.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
“To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.”
Perfect movie. A confection that also knows, literally and figuratively, that you can use confections to smuggle in real tools–and that this is all perilously easy to smash. And Fiennes is one of our greatest actors.
The Fabelmans
I love that you can see Burt Fabelman’s influence on his son in his filmmaking: that how-do-they-do-that curiosity may be more narrowly filtered, but it’s blazingly present, and Burt recognizing that in the bit where enthuses with Sam over how Sam did the muzzle flashes in his western has such joy to it.
This may be my favorite Seth Rogen performance. A lot of warm humanity in how this looks at a complicated, adulterous emotional entanglement and has Sam (temporarily) judge it while Spielberg has come to the point of only empathizing with everyone involved, in seeing how besotted Bennie is (and how he genuinely cares about Burt and the kids, as well), how much Mitzi needs play and a companion she doesn’t admire so much, how Burt loves and aches and can feel everything slipping away from him.
Obsession
Very much the Twilight Zone episode “The Chaser” infused with more (interlocked) horror and empathy, and very effectively so on both counts. One of the best customer service calls in movies. This is maybe slightly choppy in places, but not to the point where it’s a problem, and it has a phenomenal lead performance from Inde Navarrette, who deserves to go on to have an incredible career.
I appreciate how this slowly develops and reveals Bear’s character: not someone who chose this situation deliberately, sure, but someone who is too cowardly and too invested in his own bruised feelings to get out of it without apocalyptic damage. When it gets to the point where the real Nikki briefly surfaces to plaintively beg him to kill her and all he can focus on is his hurt that she’d rather die than be “with him” as a puppet whose life and body are no longer her own, it’s both skin-crawlingly horrific and incredibly recognizable as human behavior, which makes it more horrifying still.
Clouds of Sils Maria
For Movie Club. Umpteenth rewatch, as this is a favorite of mine.
Saving Private Ryan
I do not need the frame here at all, especially the part at the beginning, but these combat sequences are among the best things Spielberg ever did, and the D-Day opener is especially strong: bodies being fed into a meat grinder, gunned down four deep before they can even leave the boat; a man picking up his own severed arm; blooms of red blood in blue water. Any sentimentality here gets darkened, to good effect, by how Ryan is obviously damaged by his rescue and by the command to “earn it,” how he’s lived his whole life in the shadow of those words and those deaths.
Night Train to Munich
“Traitor? Hardly, old man. Played for the Gentlemen.”
“Only once.”
Wonderful dialogue in this. A charming film that doesn’t let its charm get in the way of casually producing a terrific action setpiece: you can talk about how obviously unreal the set is in that cable car scene, but it’s beside the point, because it’s a high-stakes sequence in a space that operates by clearly explained and/or intuitive physical rules, and that makes it awesome.
I wish there’d been even more movies about Charters and Caldicott getting peripherally involved in train-related espionage while mostly being concerned with cricket, missing golf clubs, etc.
One of the most beautiful endings in all of Anderson’s filmography (which says something!)
The customer service call in Obsession was great, I didn’t realise until afterwards that it was the voice of the director. I have no familiarity with his sketch comedy work but I’m definitely curious, the humour really elevated the film and added some nice respite from the growing tension of the situation.
I only realized after this that I’d seen one of his horror shorts before (interesting enough on vibes alone, even if there was insufficient storytelling), but I’ve never seen any of his comedy. The timing of all the humor in this was expert enough that I definitely should.
8 Mile – an odd film to watch for the first time in 2026. It has some pretty major failings but I found the general vibe of it quite enjoyable and the rap battles have an excellent energy and plenty of wit (also a ton of casual homophobia). I think Kim Basinger is genuinely quite awful in her role and there are plot points that are set up and waved away in a frustrating way. But the rest of the cast are solid and it does a good job playing to Eminem’s strengths.
Twin Peaks, S2E12, “The Black Widow” – plenty of Bad Plot stuff in this episode but somehow it all feels oddly well-balanced in a way where I’d still call this a Good Episode. I love Coop getting intrigued by the least desirable property in town and then finding it ties into his ongoing suspension, also the scene with Audrey and Denise is great. Nadine and Dick / Andy are deployed just enough for light relief, the James plot is still amusingly overdramatic at this point and even the Catherine / Josie scene isn’t too awful because Pete is there pushing back against it. Garland Briggs returning from his mysterious disappearance is the best bit though, I love that whole family.
Seinfeld, S8, “The Little Kicks” and “The Package” – season 8 is full into its stride, Little Kicks is a top-tier episode – Elaine’s dancing is spectacular and “bad boy” George is hilarious – and Package was a lot of fun too. Loved Wayne Knight getting to parody his own appearance in Basic Instinct.
I Think You Should Leave, S2, E5 and 6 – not sure any of these sketches quite hit the heights that this show can reach, but they’re consistently, bizarrely funny. I liked the two sketches in Episode 6 that put trademark weirdo dialogue into the mouths of children, and the date night at a sci-far in Episode 5 was a lot of fun.
“Elaine danced?!” Incredible physical comedy there from Louis-Dreyfus plus Jerry’s delivery like he’d heard the mob was coming for him.
It can’t be easy to come up with a dance that is genuinely bizarre enough to work in this plot line but they nailed the assignment!
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – Stopped halfway through. Still chewing on how I feel about the Baz Luhrmann maximalist treatment of the material. I largely think it works though – this is a play about big, teenage emotions (speaking of Hadestown) without mocking them too heavily and this suits Luhrmann’s sense of romance and camp. The wordless shot of Danes and DiCaprio gazing at each other through the aquarium is incredibly beautiful, the Marx Brothers mirror gag translated into a love language.
Widows Bay S1E5 – Shocking no one, Matthew Rhys is hilarious tripping balls, especially the device of Tom blacking out and waking up to havoc every time. (He looks up mid-town meeting and evidently he’d written on the easel EVERYONE TURN AROUND AND CLOSE THEIR EYES.) This is the most eldritch and horror-based version of a Trauma Plot I’ve seen too; the reveal only creates more questions, not tidy solutions, and when Tom prays to keep his son safe, SOMETHING answers, and whatever it is, it’s not good.
What did we play?
A bit of Vampire Survivors, for the first time in a while. And I already remember why I lost interest in it: while I get a good rush from becoming massively overpowered, everything else about the gameplay structure here (the half-hour increments with mandatory restarts, the relative passivity of the play style) is a drag for me, and the aesthetics (colorful and inventive but ugly and not pleasant to spend time with) don’t make up for it. Still, I enjoyed equipping myself with frantically circling Bibles, a fug of garlic, circling doves, etc., even if after a while I just looked like a glitchy frame-rate crash.
Also a bit of Railbound, a puzzle game where you connect little bits of railway track. Very cozily pretty children’s cartoon look to this that belies how hard the puzzles get–although to be fair, they’re puzzles based on spatial reasoning, and I picked this up partly to see if I had the faintest chance of improving my sense of spatial reasoning or indeed developing any at all, so this was always going to be tough sledding for me in particular.
Agreed on Vampire Survivors, I played a fair amount of it but the formula grew old pretty quick. Friends have been raving about the new follow-up / sequel game but I’m increasingly wary of games that are going to suck up a lot of my time without really deserving it.
I started Lacuna, which is a kinda cyberpunky retro adventure game with noir-style voiceover. I was quite enjoying it but then I finally started to feel better after having a nasty cough / cold for weeks and now I feel less like ploughing time into it. It’s cool though, I’ll probably go back when I need some more brain-recuperation time.