AMERICAN: AN ODYSSEY TO 1947 - Mark Reviews Movies

American: An Odyssey to 1947, Gravitas Ventures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 7, 2023

The story of Orson Welles is one of the great American tales. Well, it is up until a point in the filmmaker's life and career.

Here was a creative, scrappy, and determined teenager and young man, born in the Midwest, overcoming the death of his mother at a young age, discovering his passion at school, finding himself an orphan by the age of 16, and struggling to make a living as an actor on the stage. Somehow, through that combination of hard work and extraordinary luck that so many hope to and so few actually achieve, Welles would come to help define the world of American theater during the Great Depression, become a household name by accidentally causing a mass panic over the radio waves, and, by the time he was 26, make one of the greatest films of all time with his directorial debut.

If that story isn't an embodiment of the American Dream, what is? The man would remain famous for the entirety of his life and go on to make many more great film outside of the United States and the mainstream in general, but by 1947, Welles had left the country of his birth, the place that made his fame possible, and the land he did truly love for a long tenure in Europe. Why would he do that?

Director Danny Wu's documentary American: An Odyssey to 1947 answers the question of Welles' self-imposed exile from the United States. In doing so, the filmmaker tells the story, not only of Welles' rise and fall within the culture of the United States, but also of the promise and failings of the country over the course of the period following the Great War until after the end of World War II. It's an ambitious film, to be sure, but the filmmaker's assured hand and thorough understanding of the complexities of this era make the project seem almost effortless.

It isn't, of course, as Wu frames the story of the United States during this period through the lens of Welles' biography. The narrative here isn't limited to the great director, though, although there is always at least some direct or passing connection to Welles, either upfront or later on, in each of these other tangents. They are just as vital, though, because they tell the stories that would lead Welles, a man was almost as dedicated to the founding values of the country as he was to assorted creative endeavors, to become disillusioned enough with the United States to leave it for several decades.

As a biography of Welles' relatively younger years, the film is pretty detailed, calling upon various experts—from biographers, to film historians, to the grandson of the school headmaster who championed a teenaged Welles—to flesh out the history of a boy from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who found his life's goal and refused to give up on it—no matter what and how much the world threw at him. Everyone with any interest in the art and/or history of cinema probably knows the broad strokes, but to ignore them, just because an audience might be aware of those details, would be to sacrifice a significant point of the film's dichotomous perspective.

Yes, we hear how Welles was discovered by the actor John Houseman, how that relationship led to him directing a government-funded and highly successful production of Macbeth with an all-Black cast, how that led to Welles creating the Mercury Theatre, and how the company's expansion from the stage to the radio resulted in an alien-invasion drama that terrified listeners. All of this, obviously, would result in an unprecedented Hollywood contract, with the end result being Citizen Kane.

What's compelling about Wu's approach, though, isn't in those details, the stuff of Hollywood lore for decades. It's in the way the director weaves other threads of history, politics, and mass media through and within Welles' own story.

Take the Macbeth production that really started Welles on his way to becoming more than a stage actor. It was part of the Works Progress Administration, one of the multiple projects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives to ease the economic burden for people during the Great Depression. In the filmmaker's mind, the story of Welles' rise, then, cannot be told without also examining Roosevelt's own rise to power, especially when part of that would be helped by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon whose own story, personality, and ruthless exploitation of the media he owned would become infamously tied to Welles' groundbreaking first film.

If this documentary is also Roosevelt's story in some way, it must illuminate the darker chapters of his multiple-term administration, just as it highlights the successes. For that, Wu interviews Howard Kakita, the middle son of second-generation immigrants from Japan. While he and his brother were brought to Japan to stay with extended family about a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that event would lead to his parents and younger brother being sent to an internment camp. A few years later in Japan, Kakita would become a witness to and survivor of another, far more deadly violation of humanity.

If this is the story of such prejudice, the film cannot stop with the experiences of Kakita's family, either. The final main thread of the film revolves around Isaac Woodard, who served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and, upon returning home, would become a victim of brutal, racially motivated violence. Welles would come to play a part in the man and the NAACP's search for justice in a way that would put an even more significant political target on his back, following the petty retribution of Hearst.

The film feels dynamic—especially in the way Wu combines archival footage and photographs to create vignettes in motion—and alive—particularly in just how many sections of history, ideas, and inherent contradictions the filmmaker presents over the course of the narrative—and intimate. American: An Odyssey to 1947 is an impressive piece of documentary filmmaking, at once intrinsically personal and political, about American lives undermined by the very systems and society that should raise them up.

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