Chimes At Midnight (1965)

Chimes At Midnight (UR)

"For whom the bell tolls..."

Cobbled together from several of Shakespeare's plays, Chimes At Midnight is visionary Director Orson Welles' (Touch of Evil) showcase of his favorite character to play, the slovenly, cowardly drunkard Lord Falstaff, and never was a man born more suited to play the part nor organize his story for the screen.

How Orson's films were deplorably mistreated (in perhaps response to his first masterpiece Citizen Kane), how his films were thoroughly and completely ignored by the US public and critics, these are the context we must be put in to fully view Chimes.  Here he is attempting something new and daring, with complete artistic control, without the purse strings being clutched by Studio heads or scissors held in blackmail to his negative.  Here is Orson in his later years, heavy in body and wrinkles and experience, shunned by Hollywood for years, striving to envision one more great role, one more great film in the hillsides of Spain without sturdy financial backing and without the proper technical equipment it could pay for.  And yet he succeeds, he again creates a great piece of cinema with wide ranging appeal and artistic merit and yet, as was his burden at the time, the film is utterly ignored once again and is virtually lost to American audiences for almost 50 years.  Now finally in some moldering vault has been found a pristine copy of Chimes At Midnight, has been projected to audiences, finally appreciated at large by his fans, and disseminated by the Criterion Collection to the masses, and let us all thank god for that!  Long live the King!

The script is pieced together coherently from many of William Shakespear's plays (Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V to name a few), mostly focusing on recurring characters John Flastaff and his princely companion Hal wallowing at the Boars Head Pub.  Flastaff's persona on screen was a life long ambition of Welles' to inhabit and project, and the role fits him like a glove.  The corpulent braggart will never be played better, visualized more successfully, nor brought to screen more successfully than Welle's own Flastaff.  His beard, his cheeks, his petulant gaze and jolly scrabbling wit, it is all perfect and goes to show how well the artist and his role were suited for each other.  Just the thought of the waddling fat man in his beetle-like armored carapace on the battlefield hiding behind a tree from danger shows the joys that Chimes provides.  The look of it, the sounds, the ideas, the humor and the pathos.

And what a battle it is.  It wouldn't be until multiple decades later that medieval combat would be so realistic, harrowing and violent (Excalibur and Braveheart have much to owe to Welles for his visionary scenes of Knightly combat).  Removed from the romanticized Hollywood standard of tin men dueling daintily on horses, the battle becomes a disorderly, mud strewn brawl as King, Prince and Peon struggle to stay alive.  Even today it would be a standout, but in 1966 it should have been revolutionary!  Going quickly from strict order to epic chaos, both being intercut exceedingly well and scored masterfully, the battle scenes of Chimes at Midnight once again prove Orson's genius and just how far ahead of everyone he truly was at film.

With limited budget (he scammed and rused financiers to scrounge up enough cash flow), Welles' is somehow able to provide Castle vistas, epic battlefields of carnage, humanizing emotion of great depths, great acting, fantastic visuals and scenes that stick with you long after.  But it does come at a price.  That cheapness, thank goodness, doesn't impact the visual strengths of the film.  The sets are wonderful in their austerity and still impose a great sense of scale and grandeur despite their obviously non ostentatious (and inexpensive) nature.  The movie looks every bit as good as Touch of Evil or Kane, astonishing for the hardships Orson must have endured to finance it.  The audio, however, does not fare as well and has a few severe flaws.  Some problems with the overdubbing is obvious to even the most lay-viewer, some scenes are off synch or hard to hear (though sometimes this seems intentional for the sake of realism?), But these kind of problems are easily forgivable, standard even of non-stateside releases and doesn't explain the outright hostility in the American press to Welles' newest masterpiece (perhaps the ghost of Hearst was still kicking him around).

Perhaps it was the French cinema influences, the New Wave style of 60s editing, the overlapping dialog, the terse violence of that singular battle or just the pretensions of it's mysterious directory himself that kept art critics and studios and viewers from embracing Chimes at Midnight.  Well now, here is your chance to embrace the burly man in a huge beer stained hug, kiss his cheeks and let him know just how much you appreciate him, warted nose and all.

10 Uneasy heads that wears a crown will never be so relevant out of 10 (OUTSTANDING)