Time past and past glories: it almost sums up Welles, from the splendour of the Ambersons to the chimes at midnight tolling the death of Merrie England, by way of the touch of evil which once was truth—and it recurs again in The Immortal Story [adapted from a story by Karen Blixen, written under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen]. The original creators, I do not forget, are Franz Kafka, William Shakespeare and Karen Blixen; but the magnificence as film (of the last two, at least) belongs to the mind, the mise en scène, and above all the presence of Welles.

Not that The Immortal Story—for all its air of fairytale and its setting in a Chinese Xanadu—is so much about time past or time regained as about time created….

The beauty of Karen Blixen's original story is that it fuses perfectly at all levels...