“The night between the 4th and 5th of August 1952, in the High Provence town of Lurs, one of the great criminal cases of the century unfolded.
On the shoulder of the road that runs from Marseille to the Alps, the morning of the 5th of August, three corpses of members of an English family were found: the father and renowned nutritionist, Sir Jack Drummond, 61 years of age; his wife, Ann; and their ten year old daughter, Elizabeth. The triple murder, apparently unmotivated, occured near the ‘Grand’Terre’, the farmstead of patriarch Gaston Dominici’s clan. Suspicion fell quickly on the Dominici family, while they concealed themselves behind a veil of contradictions and lies and unlikely statements. The sons had accused their father of murder, and he seems to have confessed and later withdrawn. Perhaps the investigation had not been conducted in a correct way, but after fifteen months of development followed by public interest in France and abroad, Gaston was arrested and tried. He was given a life sentence in November of 1954, then pardoned by General de Gaulle in 1960.
When Orson Welles, in 1955, came to the scene of the crime, judgement had already been passed and the case was entering into another phase: permission for a second investigation had just been granted to commissioner Chenevier, one of the biggest names on the French police force at the time. The film documents Welles’ investigation, which was part of a series of seven documentaries, Around the World with Orson Welles, produced by Louis Dolivet for British television ITV. Welles defined the series as a collection of ‘cinematographic essays on travel’, or as a ‘sort of amateur film, of illustrated vacations’. In the case of this particular investigation he had to tackle a very difficult argument, and of the seven installments only the one dedicated to the Dominici Case would never be shown. In May of 1955 Orson Welles shot footage in and around Lurs over the course of a week with the help of journalist Jaques Chapus. Additional footage was shot in the weeks that followed in Welles’ absence. During the editing of the film, a series of articles attacking Welles’ project was published, to which he responded that nothing would hinder the completion of the film, and that he would smuggle the reels out of France, if necessary. Welles would work, discontinuously, on the editing of the film until 1958, but it was left unfinished. The 35mm working copy with two-track magnetic sound, recently discovered at the CNC Archives du Film at Bois d’Arcy, presents 741 meters of edited material – equivalent to 27 minutes of projection”. (Jacques Mény)