Repertory: The bad and the beautiful
Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight is the greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare
Orson Welles (1915-1985) is the single most important figure in post-war American cinema. Other directors—John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock—had more substantial and coherent careers, and produced a greater body of work.
His life and art is going to figure prominently in this hybrid newsletter and film culture website.
“Everyone will always owe him everything,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said. As I wrote previously, it is never an inconvenient time to think about, reflect on and ruminate on the man and his art.
Regardless of what point in your life you come to Welles, no other filmmaker makes you so intensely aware of and under the influence of the supreme authority and personality of the director.
The technology, the times, the culture, are finally catching up.
Criterion just issued its first 4K release. Naturally, it was Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), often talked about as the greatest film ever made.
Ever since Janus and Criterion secured the rights to Welles’s magisterial Chimes at Midnight (1965), their dazzling, meticulous and gorgeous restoration corrected a grievous wrong. Unlike several other of Welles' European projects, this film was never lost or taken out of his artistic control.
It often took great pains to find. Technically, it was always a compromised masterpiece, like the early problematic editions of James Joyce's Ulysses or the indifferently translated parts of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Chimes was a work, seemingly, never to be viewed under ideal conditions. I was lucky to catch it in a very sharp and pristine 35mm print in Paris one year. That was one of the great thrills of my life.
This monumental work was no longer a technically compromised masterpiece.
In her celebrated review of the film, published in The New Republic in the early summer of 1967, Pauline Karl warned: “You may want to walk during the first twenty minutes. Although the words on the soundtrack are intelligible, the sound doesn’t match the images.”
Further in, she reports, and the cutting is maddening, designed as it is for camouflage—to keep us from seeing races closely or from registering that mouths which should be open and moving are closed.”
Watching either the Criterion Blu-ray, or its streaming equivalent on the Criterion Channel, Chimes at Midnight has never felt so clean, textured and revolutionary.
“Welles seemed to have been rehearsing all of his life for Falstaff,” Andrew Sarris said, meaning the alternate title for the film.
It was a lifelong ambition dating to his time as a precocious schoolboy mounting elaborate theater productions at the progressive Todd School in northwest suburban Chicago in the late nineteen-twenties.
Welles first called it “Five Kings,” a collage of Shakespeare’s history cycle and the War of the Roses. In 1938, he mounted the first professional production with his Mercury Theater. (It was “fated to be the greasy white whale that Orson chased across miles and years,” his biographer, Patrick McGilligan, said.)
Obsession always brought out the best in Orson Welles.
Shakespeare is central to Welles' formation as an artist, reaching from his landmark New York theater productions of an all-black Macbeth and a modern dress iteration of Julius Caesar to his extraordinary Othello (1948-52), his first independent film production.
In Chimes at Midnight, Welles synthesizes and fuses together the two parts of Henry IV with extracts from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II and Henry V and intertwined the material with Holinshed's Chronicles (read, in beautiful narration, by Ralph Richardson) in dramatically charting the complex friendship of Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) and the insouciant libertine, John Falstaff (Welles).
In C.L. Barber's famous description ("a Lord of Misrule"), Falstaff was Shakespeare's greatest comic invention, a jester and calculated opportunist whose rejection of the political and social mores made him a particularly seductive rake.
In the most limber and anarchic performance of his career, Welles embodies his lustful deviousness with comic aplomb, streaked with a tragic vulnerability.
Welles shot the film outside of Barcelona and Madrid and in the countryside. The Spanish landscapes achieve the surreal and illuminate the key ideas of Welles' European films, a sense of breakdown or disruption.
From Othello to Mr. Arkadin (1955), the instability of the image is his connective thread suggesting exile, loss, or reverie. “The decade of plots gave way to the decade of themes,” Sarris said.
Visually this is one of Welles' greatest works in his use of juxtaposition. The action is set at the beginning of the 15th century.
Dramatically the film oscillates between the cold and imperious castle of the court and the tavern or inn where Hal, having surrendered his "princely privilege," falls under the magnetic sway of the dissolute Falstaff.
The King, Henry Bolingbroke (John Gielgud), having usurped the throne by murder and deceit, maneuvers against his political rivals to repress a rebellion and solidify his power.
The relationship of Falstaff and Hal is complex, moving from a beautiful tenderness, seen in a wonderful early exchange between the two outside the inn, to one of bitter disillusionment.
The first half is buoyant and liberating, marked by some luscious visual passages, like the staging of the Gadshill robbery as the ruffians, dressed in white or black robes, cut through the forest as the camera tracks their movements with breathless energy.
With Shakespeare, Welles’s great achievement is collapsing all boundaries of high and low. The tragic and tender push against each other brilliantly, the ruffians and high comedy of the tavern played against the somber, moral seriousness of the castle.
The movie's celebrated centerpiece is the battle of Shrewsbury, the 1403 clash between the forces aligned with the King and the rebels that marked the conclusion of the first part of Henry IV.
It is quite possibly the single greatest moment of Welles' career. It begins with a moment of dread as men in massive armor are being lowered from the trees atop their horses.
As Welles’s scholar James Naremore points out in his excellent commentary track on the Blu-ray, the sequence shows the dual influence of John Ford and Sergei Eisenstein. Welles shot the whole sequence in a series of long shots, and then brilliantly intercuts.
Arrows cut through flesh, the sky bleak and chilling. Welles plays with time and motion, accelerating the tempo, and then dragging it down, literally in the mud, of bodies, pain and death.
The battle is foreshadowed in the Gadshill robbery sequence. The earlier moment is lyrical, buoyant and playful, the elegant and high contrast black and white cinematography of the great French photographer Edmond Richard.
Welles bends everything to his means—weather, landscapes and movements of the contrasting armies—and the annihilating imagery conjures a profound violation and pain intensified by the horrible sound of clanging armor and arrows tearing into flesh and bone.
The shot of two bodies splayed in mud is one of the most harrowing imaginable. The sequence concludes with the emotionally devastating moment as Hotspur (Norman Rodway), engaged in a duel with Hal, mourns, "Thou has robbed me of my youth."
For all of its greatness as a work of cinema, the movie superbly underscores Welles' great talent for bringing together disparate parts for a magnificent whole. The cinematography is majestically somber, the score by the great Francesco Lavagnino chilling.
The film also shows how open and generous Welles is with his actors. The Gielgud sequences are simply some of the greatest ever spoken in film. The great actor, stony, mesmerizing, as his words cut like blades. His readings of the soliloquies ("Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown") are impeccable and beautiful.
Baxter and Rodway animate the heedlessness and capriciousness of callow youth.
Welles even imports two key figures of the French Wave Wave (Jeanne Moreau and Marina Vlady), each permitted an intoxicating sensuality.
His camera always illuminates character, feeling and behavior, even in the smallest of gestures or most private of moments. Vlady has just a few quick moments as Hotspur’s wife. There is an avidity and hunger in her sexual feelings that deepens and colors the action. As the tavern whore, Moreau is warm and hypnotic.
Even when Kael wrote more sympathetically about Welles, she was wrong. “Yet, because of technical defects due to poverty, Welles’s finest Shakespearean production to date—another near-masterpiece, and this time so very close—cannot reach a large public.”
The movie ends with a chilling rebuke ("I know thee not, old man"). Everything that comes before is almost too great for words.
With this restoration the poetry has been deepened. The greatest Shakespeare adaptation ever is now pretty close to immaculate. Rejoice and get lost in this staggering achievement.
Images courtesy of Janus and Criterion Collection. All rights reserved.