What a fine few weeks for those who love Orson Welles. Following a notice that his long-incomplete final film is being put in the right hands for completion and a 2015 premiere, Dangerous Minds have dug up a curiosity even this enthusiast had no knowledge of: The Fountain of Youth, Welles’ pilot for a never-commissioned anthology TV series. (Welles Net, which seems like a fair source, calls bad copies of it “a dime a dozen on the web.” My fandom has been tested!) Although it went two years before even airing on a network — NBC, specifically, which placed it on their own anthology program, Colgate Theatre — the 1958 broadcast is considered something of a benchmark to this day, to say nothing of it having nabbed a Peabody Award. In case you thought their was a limit to the genius of its creator.
John Collier’s “Youth From Vienna” serves as the inspiration, with Welles introducing an effects-heavy staging of one heartbroken scientist’s attempts to wrangle together his romantic life. The Fountain of Youth results in what the writer-director would call his only film comedy — here, appropriately, given in bite-sized form.
Watch it below:
What did you think of Welles’ Fountain of Youth?