The Immortal Story

In nineteenth-century Macao, an ageing and wealthy merchant named Charles Clay becomes fixated on a tale that circulates among sailors: a rich man who paid a poor seaman to spend a night with his young wife so that she would bear him an heir. Puzzled by whether such a thing ever happened, Clay resolves to stage the story himself, recruiting his servant and a local woman to act out the roles and searching the docks for a sailor to play the young man.

The film is Orson Welles's eleventh feature as director, made between Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake. Welles wrote the screenplay with Louise de Vilmorin, adapting a short story by Karen Blixen, and he also plays Clay; Jeanne Moreau appears as Virginie Ducrot, with Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley and Fernando Rey in supporting parts. The production was a Spanish-French television film running under an hour, produced by Micheline Rozan, Jacques-Bernard Dupont and Albina du Boisrouvray. It has found a durable audience on IMDb, where it holds a 7 out of 10 rating from around 3,800 votes; on TMDB it stands at 7.1 from a much smaller base of about 98 votes.