Orson Welles was born May 6, 1915 and Turner Classic Movies is celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth with many of his films. I recommend them all, but particularly the rarely shown Chimes at Midnight (1965), the best adaptation to the screen of Shakespeare. Welles uses parts of five different plays in which Falstaff, played by Welles himself, appears. It is a sad, beautiful and funny film, made when Welles was an old man at fifty, and the last truly personal film Welles made. It is also an example of how a great film can be made on a relatively low budget, if the filmmaker passionately cares about it. Chimes at Midnight will be on at 8 PM May 15.
Other films I recommend in May:
The two best films Greta Garbo made are showing on May 2: Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) and Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933), the first a tragic comedy and the second a comic tragedy.
May 3 is Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), corrosive film about a bumbling Mike Hammer trying to solve the Cold War single-handedly and just making things worse.
May 4 is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), a fatalistic film noir.
May 6 is Frank Borzage's romantic and tragic version of A Farewell to Arms (1932), as well as three films about crime by masters of the genre: John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Andre DeToth's Crime Wave (1954) and Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957). DeToth's subversive Western, Springfield Rifle, is showing on May 7.
May 9 is Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959), one of the last great classical Westerns and a definitive statement of Hawksian themes.
May 10 has Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), an intense and ironic soap opera, as well as a pessimistic analysis of American life by a German director.
May 12 is Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a film beautifully described and appreciated by, among many others, Karl Ove Knausgaard in My Struggle Book Two.
May 15 has Max Ophuls The Reckless Moment (1949), another complex view of America by a European director.
May 20 is Nicholas Ray's delirious Johnny Guitar (1954), a film that works on many different levels, including as an allegory of McCarthyism.
May 24, for Memorial Day, there are two of the best "anti-war" films ever made: King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937).
May 28 is Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), a short film about time travel (that was later turned into the bloated film 12 Monkeys and the even more bloated TV series of the same name)
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