Hell is Other Movies: Chimes at Midnight

This week we're playing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, his last studio film.  Welles, of course had a legendarily messy filmmaking career, one that can be fairly divided between his studio films and his independent productions.  The studio films are the most famous, featuring also the consensus all-time #1 Citizen Kane, the butchered masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons and the too-twisted-for-Hollywood noirs The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil.  His independent films include this week's giveaway, the dishonest documentary F for Fake, the schizophrenic and multiform funhouse Kane Mr. Arkadin, an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial (which Welles rightly notes is a comedy) and three Shakespeare films: Macbeth, Othello and the greatest of them all, 1965's Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles combines parts of the two Henry IV plays with Henry V to tell one story about the fat, blustery rogue Sir John Falstaff.

His independent films are more famous for their technical shortcomings than anything else, made as they were with shoestring budgets (when there was any money at all) with post-recorded sound (occasionally in sync and often with Welles himself dubbing several parts), thrown together sets (Welles famously set a scene in Othello in a Turkish bath because the costumes for the scene weren't ready) and shooting schedules spanning years (Welles would take whatever acting jobs he could get to raise money for his films).  And unlike his studio films, due to complex rights issues his independent films are difficult to find in anything like their intended form.  The good people at the Criterion Collection have put out deluxe editions of both F for Fake and Mr. Arkadin, but the Shakespeare films have yet to reach DVD in this country in the shape Welles wanted.

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Welles was the greatest interpreter of Shakespeare in the 20th Century.  While Laurence Olivier was filming Shakespeare like it was a museum, pinning it to the wall with perfect bloodless enunciation, Welles dragged the Bard down to his level, and made the plays come alive as the black, guttural and popular entertainments they really are, which brings their great heights and depths alive for an audience in a way Olivier could never manage.  The part of Falstaff was perfect for Welles, one of Shakespeare's greatest creations: a gluttonous, dishonest, ribald raconteur who befriends Prince Hal, soon to be King Henry V.  Welles had already played a reflection of Falstaff in Touch of Evil:  Hank Quinlan in that film is similarly larger than life, twisted by tragedy into evil, but tragic nonetheless.  Falstaff is never evil: cowardly, thieving and whoring perhaps, but never a villain.  He's the tragic hero of Chimes at Midnight, playing the bombastic fool with a real love for and pride in Hal, whose heart is broken when the young king turns him away after the coronation.  Welles captures all of Falstaff's complexity, the humanity that, to agree with Harold Bloom (a bit of a Falstaff himself, I think) makes him, along with Hamlet, one of the most original and important characters in all of literature.

The film is every bit a match for Welles's performance, hampered as it is by poor sound recording.  The centerpiece of the film is the Battle of Shrewsbury, where Henry IV and Hal put down a rebellion by Hal's rival Henry Percy (nicknamed Hotspur).  Falstaff is the comic figure in the battle, a heavily-armored balloon with little stick legs, running to and fro always a little behind the action.  The battle itself stands with the greatest scenes of medieval action ever filmed.  As viscerally immersive and violent as anything in Braveheart or Ran, but shot through with small moments of beauty colored by the bloody consequences of the chaotic violence.  The rest of the film is of a piece with the rest of Welles's career: dramatic shadows and beams of light, compositions in depth and canted angles conveying real meaning (expansion and diminishment, the twin poles  pulling the narrative and the characters apart) rather than purposeless showiness that infects so many of his imitators.

Chimes at Midnight was part of the first batch of VHS tapes I rented from Scarecrow Video when I moved to Seattle almost 13 years ago, but I hadn't been able to see it since then.  But freshly arrived in my mailbox today was a DVD version from the UK.  It's a poor transfer (might actually just be that old VHS version on disc), the image is often blurry in motion, the sound is at times inaudible (though that may be unfixable) and it isn't formatted for 16x9 televisions.  But for all its faults, the greatness of the film shines through.  Touch of Evil is still my favorite Welles, but Chimes at Midnight is #2.