If [The Immortal Story] were signed by an unknown name like Orson Baddeleys instead of Orson Welles, I might (though I hope I wouldn't) credit its faults to the director and its virtues to chance and Isak Dinesen….

Welles's adaptation [of Dinesen's story] is in places oddly careless. (p. 44)

[The] discrepancies blur the impact of the story as Dinesen wrote it, and if Welles's intention was simply to translate the story into cinematic terms he did not achieve a brilliant success. But was that his intention?…

[Right] from the beginning of The Immortal Story I found it casting a spell which its weaknesses failed to break.

The clue to the nature of this spell is in the screen figure of Clay. This is not one of the restless, ironic monsters of past Welles films—a Kane, Arkadin, or Quinlan. In every scene except one Clay remains immobile, rooted in his chair, speaking slowly and without a spark of humor. (p. 45)

It's dangerously easy to read nonexistent symbolism into films, but I think it's reasonable to see Clay, the would-be shaper of reality, as a reflection of Welles the film-maker. Reality asserts itself more strongly in films than in any other artistic medium, and it can frustrate even the most skilled of directors who struggle to shape it to their vision…. In fact, reality asserts itself so strongly in films that audiences customarily identify actors with the characters they play. Even people who think carefully about films often refer to the actor instead of the character, if only because the actor's screen presence is so much more memorable than the character's name. Thus to most viewers, with or without symbolism, Welles is Clay.

There is nothing in the film to show that Welles is conscious of this equivalence: he does not openly dramatize the film-maker's predicament as Bergman does, say, in The Magician. But the fact that Clay suggests this predicament no doubt attracted Welles to Dinesen's story in the first place, and it certainly accounts for the film's curious fascination.

Seen in this light, the film is no longer a somewhat clumsily faithful version of the original story. It is telling a subtly different story of its own. In transforming Dinesen's prose into images and sounds, Welles gives resonance to everything that hints at the impermanence of life.

Dinesen begins her story with a series of expository paragraphs; Welles draws on these for his narration but at the same time presents quick-cut scenes of Clay riding through the seaport in his carriage and of other merchants commenting on him as he passes…. Dinesen devotes two pages to describing Virginie's reactions when she enters Clay's house, which had been her father's before Clay drove him to ruin, but Welles is content with one vivid scene: Virginie looking at herself in the mirror and whispering, "The last time I looked in this I was a little girl." Welles's choice of incidental music … also amplifies the film's sense of time passing.

This is a recurring theme in Welles's films, but once again he creates new variations on it. In transferring Dinesen's four main characters to the screen, Welles focuses sharply on the different ways they respond to the impermanence of life. (pp. 45-6)

It is the real-life counterpart of this creative fury in Welles himself that makes the film so arresting. In The Immortal Story Welles does what he wants to do and what he knows how to do—light up a new facet of the theme of life's impermanence and man's struggle against it. The film is neither a flawless gem nor a flawed masterpiece, but it is memorable and alive. (p. 46)