Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Bells ringing in the distance give funereal punctuation to the very first scenes in the film, and motives of rejection and farewell are dominant throughout.
Joseph McBride, Orson Welles, The Viking Press Inc., 1972

Chimes at Midnight has reappeared, after years of distribution limbo, at Turner Classic Movies and Film Forum, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Orson Welles; just as Citizen Kane begins with the death of Welles, Chimes at Midnight ends with his death.  In between there is a significant amount of work, most of it compromised by studio cuts and low budgets and a certain self-destructive streak in Welles himself.  After Chimes at Midnight his films were mostly unfinished  In some ways Welles' portrayal of Falstaff in the film is a self-portrait, of whoring and drinking and questionable companions.  But it is also a powerful portrait of a lovable and melancholy man searching for meaning.  It is mostly based on Shakespeare's Henry IV, with parts from Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II and narration from Holinshed's Chronicles.

The soundtrack is quite compromised:  post-synchronized with a number of characters dubbed by Welles himself.  But Welles has found visual equivalents for Shakespeare's words (relatively familiar to many of us), just as Balanchine did in his marvelous ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and has cast wonderful faces in his film, not only his own but Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud and Keith Baxter as the juvenile Hal.  I am almost always disappointed in theatrical productions of Shakespeare (most recently I saw Derek Jacobi as Lear) because there is too much emphasis on declaiming the words and not enough on the feelings and thought they represent.  Welles uses low and high camera angles, tracking shots and complex cutting, to capture the social and political complexities of the time.  His scenes of the Battle of Shrewsbury capture the rapid descent of war from grand spectacle, as the armored horseman are lowered onto their horses, to futile death and suffering in the mud.

The influence of John Ford on Chimes at Midnight is considerable, from Fort Apache (1948) to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); Welles has said that he studied Ford's Stagecoach (1939) before making his own films and by 1965 he shares Ford's pessimism as an old man.  Of course Welles was only 50 when he made Chimes at Midnight, but he has been hearing the chimes for some time and was an old twenty-five when he made Citizen Kane.  Chimes at Midnight is Welles' elegant testimony to his successes --from radio and theatre, where he first did Shakespeare, to film and television -- as well as his many compromises and failures.