Saturday Night Cinema: Orson Welles’s mighty “Falstaff Chimes at Midnight”

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic Orson Welles greatest masterpiece Falstaff, Chime of Midnight, which is one of the great, great achievements of film-making in the 20th century. Welles mastered the art of making independent films in his improvised way. It’s true and true — profound. It is equal parts Shakespeare and Welles. “Human to the core.”

It is the greatest Shakespearean film ever.

In this brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, the friendship between the rogue Falstaff and the wild Prince Hal is fated to end when the young man gives up his dissolute life and assumes the throne of England after the death of his father, King Henry IV.

By Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal:

Orson Welles was Falstaffian long before he played Falstaff, with a lust for life matched only by his love of the movie medium. If Shakespeare had neglected to give Sir John a play of his own, Welles was ready to rectify the lapse by giving the peerless roisterer a movie of his own, and giving himself a great role in the process. He did so in “Chimes at Midnight,” the 1965 film he directed from his screenplay based on sections of some of Shakespeare’s plays, mainly “Henry IV,” Part I and Part II. Since then the film has been recognized as a masterpiece, albeit a flawed one, and has become almost impossible to find, except on videotapes and DVDs of dismal quality. At long last, though, “Chimes at Midnight” has undergone a brilliant restoration, by Janus Films and the Criterion Collection, and will be playing around the country in the next few months, with a new DVD release in prospect. See it on the big screen if you can; for all of its flaws it’s a glory.

“The best and most touchingly personal of all Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes At Midnight is pervaded by melancholy and loneliness, even though its characters are almost seen never alone.”

Orson Welles’s Mighty “Chimes at Midnight”

By Richard Brody, The New Yorker, January 6, 2016:

t’s early in the year, but it’s already the year of “Chimes at Midnight,” Orson Welles’s mighty adaptation, from 1965, of Shakespeare’s plays featuring the colossal character of Falstaff. Welles did the adaptation, stars as the grandiloquently dissolute nobleman, and directed the film with an imaginative and expressive clarity that propels it to the front rank of his movies—and of the history of cinema. It has long been hard to get, and the new restoration of it, playing at Film Forum and soon to roll out nationally, is a cinematic event of the first order.

The tale of Falstaff is the actor’s tragedy—the story of a great man who is great only for his power of pretense, for his transparent self-aggrandizement, a mask which is modelled closely on an actual grandeur. Falstaff is great—at “nothing,” in Shakespeare’s phrase—but a nothing which, as Falstaff himself knows and says, is “all the world.” He flaunts the open maw of desire, the sumptuous thrill of pleasure. He embodies the brazenly lighthearted and insolent, proud and arrogant hero, the very soul of illicit dreams—the principle of life itself, of a vitality that knows no shadow, that itself casts a dazzling artificial light that overwhelms reason even as it sharpens wit.

If Shakespeare hadn’t created Falstaff, Orson Welles would have had to invent him. Instead, Welles—himself a natural actor, both on and off the stage, who made himself by claiming to be what he wasn’t and then taking on and filling out the role—took Falstaff ready-made and transformed him to fit his own terrifying pathos. (I hear Welles’s voice booming in the background, adding that if Shakespeare himself hadn’t existed, Welles would have invented him, too.) Playing Falstaff in his own film, Welles dramatized his own character, his own genius, his own afflictions, with an agonized self-awareness. The film is the displaced realization of a life both too vast and too petty, too wild and too constrained for the great man condemned to live it.

No one with such a natural endowment of genius as Welles had—and such a fortuitously enriching range of associations from childhood onward—could rightly claim to be self-made, but he was certainly self-invented. I heartily recommend Patrick McGilligan’s richly detailed new biography, “Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path of Citizen Kane,” for its tales of Welles’s precocious theatrical flair and intellectual insight, his intrepid travels to Ireland, at sixteen, where he falsely claimed to be an experienced actor and then, getting hired, proved his talent on the fly. Testing his mettle in New York, in his early twenties, as a theatrical director, actor, and impresario of vast originality (he was on the cover of Time magazine in 1938, at the age of twenty-three, and was profiled in The New Yorker later that year), he then mapped out a production called “Five Kings,” a Shakespearean collage also centered on Falstaff—whom Welles would, at that tender age, play.

In “Chimes at Midnight,” which Welles filmed in 1964 and 1965, he sticks to the period setting. The drama takes place early in the fifteenth century, reaching from jolly Prince Hal, the young Prince of Wales, carousing with Falstaff in defiance of his father, the reigning King Henry IV, through to Hal’s defeat of the rebel Harry Hotspur, at the battle of Shrewsbury, to his coronation as Henry V and his banishment of Falstaff. The story of this banishment—and of the mighty fall of a mighty fool whose mighty arts both inspired and threatened the best of youth—is Welles’s own.

To play Falstaff, he relied on the same variety of body-horror transformation that he submitted himself to in “Mr. Arkadin,” “Touch of Evil,” and even in the self-aging scenes of “Citizen Kane.” His love of play-acting, of makeup and costumes, of put-on voices, grand gestures, and set design of elaborate technical sophistication, conveyed from the start a sense of decline and fall, of an artistic progeria that suggested the deliriously exhausting pace of his inner (and even outer) life. Welles had travelled further, invented more, accomplished more, imagined more, by age twenty-five than is reasonable in several lifetimes. Sleeping little, fuelled by stimulants, dashing from theatre rehearsals to radio broadcasts to trysts to business meetings to the hours alone to write, Welles was overwhelmed by a quantity and intensity of emotion, a passion for passion itself that would have filled each day with years of experience to contemplate and to convert to art. He had seen and done perhaps too much in too short a time, had defied the clock of life to live on his own time and get ahead of his times—and he got so far ahead of himself that he got old young.

Welles’s genius seemed always to precede him, his image provided a mighty template to which he’d have to elevate his deeds—until the time came when, with his genius undiminished, the image itself took over. Though he had definitively changed the art of movies—changed the world—by way of his directing, he was soon much more in demand for his acting than for his directing, and then more for his celebrity than for his acting. The struggle for financing—for money to make movies and for money to live on, for his artistic pursuits and for the sustenance of the outsize way of life to befit his outsize imagination—was constant. Revivals hardly existed, his films were hardly shown, and in order to sustain his career Welles needed to nourish and inflate his public image. He was on television, he did lectures, performed magic, became a raconteur and a guest who seemed like a former great, famous for being famous at a time when he should have been hailed as one of the world’s leading artists who was still moving ahead at a pace that outstripped those who came in his wake.

He had liberated many young princes and future kings of Hollywood from the stifling conventions of their own courts (the studios), but found no favor in their eyes once they ascended to power. When, at his coronation, the former Prince Hal, now Henry V, tells the interloping and beseeching Falstaff, “Presume not that I am the thing I was,” it plays like all of Hollywood, itself transformed through Welles’s own radical and heedless daring, turning its back on him in order to consolidate its new and improved power.
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Yet for all the shock of Falstaff’s—and Welles’s—exclusion from the castle that he filled with life, there’s a moment in the film when Welles seemingly pierces the screen with the anguish of self-recognition, the acknowledgment of his own failings in nourishing his appearance rather than his being, his pleasures rather than his duties. It’s in Welles’s version of the famous play-acting scene from “Henry IV Part 1,” when Prince Hal plays Henry IV and Falstaff plays Hal. The young prince delivers a spew of insults at the aged man that, under the guise of play, strikes Falstaff to the core—and Welles directs the scene with his back turned to the Prince, as if to conceal his feelings, which, however, he reveals to the camera, into which he stares with a confessional vulnerability, an intimate self-recognition that is almost unbearable to witness.