Orson Welles – Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight / Campanadas a medianoche (1965)

The legendary Shakespearean character Sir John Falstaff, the notoriously drunken, obese, and yet charming companion of the young Henry V, steps up from supporting character in several plays to the central focus of Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, considered by many critics the best of the director's acclaimed Shakespeare films. Welles held this film in high regard and considered it along with The Trial his best work. As he remarked in 1982: "If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up." Many critics, including Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, also consider it Welles's finest work.

Note on the Studio Canal edition: Probably due to an endless legal war over the rights of the film, Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight) has been rarely seen and exists today as bootleg or as poor quality DVD transfers. However, the film obviously underwent a complete restoration prior to 2005 and was released in France in a pristine DVD by Studio Canal. Sadly, this edition was quickly taken off the market soon after its release.



In Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff), Welles plays Falstaff, one of William Shakespeare's most interesting and enduring characters. Welles called him "perhaps the only purely good character Shakespeare ever wrote." Falstaff appeared in five different plays; with young Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Richard II, as well as in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Welles very cleverly interwove scenes from these five plays to create the complete story of Falstaff. It may be Welles' greatest performance in a career of many great characters. Even with the limited budget, Welles managed to cast Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet, and Sir Ralph Richardson as the narrator. — Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid



That's right: Welles condenses five of Shakespeare's great plays into less than two hours. The one character uniting all these works is the loquacious, rambunctious, drunken Falstaff, played by Welles himself. Images of quiet melancholy and decay give way to a fiery film, full of the fury of betrayal as Falstaff's influence on young Prince Hal threatens the integrity of the monarchy. Welles fearlessly inverts the Shakespearean emphasis on Henry's rise to power, instead encouraging us to look at the world from the perspective of those he left behind in his climb to the top. The world of Falstaff is wooden, symbolized by his preference for inns, while the world of Hal is stone, focused on images of the castle. The brutal human cost of Henry's drive for power makes him an image of 20th century tyrants; and Welles may also be examining his own treatment at the hands of Hollywood studio executives, whom he felt had just as ruthlessly tossed him aside. As Welles spent almost all of his career operating outside the studio system, he was forced to produce films for a fraction of the cost of the typical studio film. Amazingly, he makes the castle sets and battle scenes look like they belong in a much more expensive epic, and, particularly in the Battle of Shrewsbury, he creates action sequences as good as any ever put on film. — Dan Jardine, AMG



Among film scholars Citizen Kane is often regarded as the greatest film of all time; among Welles scholars, by contrast, Chimes at Midnight is often accorded pride of place as "the fullest, most completely realized expression of everything [Welles] had been working toward since Citizen Kane." Partly such praise can be understood as admiration for the fact that Welles managed to make the film at all, coming, as it did, late in a career long plagued by financial and commercial difficulties. And certainly auteurist film critics are prone to praise films generally discounted by journalistic reviewers and contemporary audiences, as Chimes at Midnight was discounted if not derided at the time of its initial (somewhat haphazard, if not half-hearted) release. The evaluative paradox cannot be readily settled, nor need it be; but the comparison to Citizen Kane can be helpful in highlighting those aspects of Chimes at Midnight which urge attention. — Leland Poague, Film Reference









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