“Ladies and Gentleman. By way of introduction, this is a film about trickery. Fraud. About... lies.”

I came to Orson Welles’ amusingly urbane and life-affirming docudrama, F For Fake (1973), almost by accident. Call it serendipity, if you will. It’s categorised as a ‘docudrama’ — whatever that means — but in reality, F for Fake defies description, although, I suppose, one might also describe it as a film essay. But don’t let that put you off: you’re in for one-and-a-half hours of rollicking, stimulating, thought-provoking, philosophical entertainment — all set to the music of Michel Legrand. An exercise in experimental super-fast editing. Orson takes us on a journey of duplicity, double-dealing and deception, a meandering voyage through the nature of fakery and the meaning of trickery, and along the way we encounter a coterie of entertaining — if dubious characters — Elmyr de Hory, ‘the greatest art forger of the 20th century’, and smoothie Clifford Irving, the writer, who as it happened turned out to be faking Howard Hughes’ biography. Nice bit of luck, that. For Orson and co-director and producer François Reichenbach.

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Reichenbach had originally hired Welles to edit a BBC documentary on the extraordinary life of Elmyr de Hory, then living a raffish jet-set existence on Ibiza, described by Life magazine as ‘an island in the sun where restless souls find each other.’ Other amusing island residents then entered the picture — notably de Hory’s friend and biographer, Clifford Irving, the author of Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of our Time (1970), and owner of a pet squirrel monkey — I mean, you couldn’t make this up — and sometime after the filming of Reichenbach’s documentary, it was revealed that Clifford Irving himself was the perpetrator of his own elaborate hoax, “we never dreamed that while acting in our picture he was secretly committing forgery himself”, the fabrication of the authorised biography of the reclusive and eccentric tycoon, Howard Hughes, which included forged letters in Hughes’ hand (an emulation of Hughes’ handwriting which had appeared in Newsweek), fuelling a media frenzy. On top of Irving’s $100,000 advance, Irving’s publishers, McGraw-Hill, paid out $765,000 to one ‘H. R. Hughes’, paid in sums deposited to a Swiss Bank Account, where Irving’s artist wife, Edith (who appears in the film) had opened an account under the name of ‘Helga R. Hughes’, wearing dark sunglasses, a black wig and sporting a guttural German accent. In 1972, Clifford and Edith Irving were both sent to prison, Clifford for seventeen months and Edith for sixteen, a time served in both American and Swiss jails.