Welles Marathon: Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Throughout his career on the stage and behind the camera, Orson Welles returned to Shakespeare numerous times.  It makes sense.  One of the first things he did as a professional was direct a stage adaptation of Macbeth with an all African-American cast.  He directed it at just 20-years-old.  A couple years later, Welles intended to stage The Five Kings, which was taken from several Shakespeare plays.  Welles blew it off, went drinking, and never went to rehearsals so the play was a disaster and scrapped soon.

Elements from that original play formulated into a reworked Chimes at Midnight 20 years later.  He didn't really seem to treat the revamped play any more seriously than he did the Five Kings, ending the play's run prematurely because he was bored with it and always intended it for it to be a rehearsal for the movie.  He scrambled to find funding for this, eventually finding it but only with the promise of making A Treasure Island as well.  He never made it and never intended to make it, lying to the producer to get A Chimes at Midnight made.

Of the three Shakespeare films that Welles made, Chimes at Midnight is easily my favorite.  For one thing, the production value is better than the previous two.  He clearly got more money to make this than Othello and while Hamlet had a good and comparable budget, technology presumably improved a lot from 1948 to 1965.  

But I think the bigger reason that I like it more is that it just feels much more original.  I've seen a few movie adaptations of Hamlet.  I don't believe I've seen any movie adaptations of the Shakespeare works he takes to make this movie.  According to Wikipedia, he takes from five different Shakespeare plays.  

And really, it doesn't matter if I had seen a movie adaptation from any one of those movies.  Because the play is a combination of texts from those plays, but it's not in chronological order and he inserts scenes from one play into another play.  It would have felt original even if I had been intimately familiar with Shakespeare's works.

Despite the fact that taking scenes from one play and combining them into scenes from another play  could make the story incoherent and hard to follow, it has a clear story on its own.  Because every line of dialogue is directly lifted from Shakespeare, you could in fact mistake this movie as an adaptation of the nonexistent "Chimes at Midnight," but of course Shakespeare never wrote such a play.

At its core, Shakespeare stories are effective, because amidst all the plot, the story is simple.  And that's the case here.  This is the relationship between Falstaff, previously a joke in Shakespeare productions, and Prince Hal.  And the story seems engineered to make the climax of the movie the rejection of Falstaff by Hal.

And it's effective!  Welles is very good at Falstaff.  One thing I've learned from the Welles movies I've watched is that Welles is good even when he's not trying.  He's trying here.  He's able to gain you sympathy for him even while you understand that really, Hal is doing the right thing by rejecting him.  Keith Baxter is good, although I admit when I found out that Anthony Perkins wanted to do this role, I couldn't help but think it'd be better with him.  But alas, that's unfair to Baxter.

Apparently, and I say apparently, because I am reading about it, but the lengthy battle sequence was very influential.  And it's well filmed.  But I'll admit that had I not read about it, I would not really have thought twice about the battle scene.  It's sometimes really hard to put your mind in 1965 and understand that nobody was filming battle sequences like that.  

Usually, I think if a film is the first to do something, even if films copy it to death, that shines through in the material.  My best example is It Happened One Night, which despite the fact that every romcom in existence copies this movie, it doesn't really feel cliché because it did it so well, and yes first.  So I confess, I was impressed by the filmmaking but didn't really recognize it as the influential scene it apparently is.

Orson Welles thought Chimes at Midnight was his best work, and along with The Magnificent Ambersons, his most personal film.  I disagree with him on that.  I still think Citizen Kane was the best, however, I will not argue with Vincent Camby of the New York Times that it may very well by the greatest Shakespeare movie ever.  Which, to be completely fair, is not necessarily saying much coming from me, person who has trouble with Shakespeare movies. 

But I will say this: it's the rare Shakespeare movie to feel wholly original to me, because well it's hard to be original when adapting someone else's work.  And Shakespeare has been adapted more than anyone in history.  While Hamlet and Othello certainly have great critical reputations, I have no desire to see them again.  But I will want to watch Chimes at Midnight again.

4/4 stars