830-831 Chimes at Midnight & The Immortal Story

[knives]

Actually from that same movie Alfred Molina's performance is how I'll always imagine the character. Though that is perhaps not hurt by my introduction to the play comes from a performance wholly dedicated to him right down to that absurd hair. I also think Welles' own Macbeth is fairly definitive with his petty scowl and different accent.

[A man stayed-put]

Since conversation is already lacking, here's a question anyone reading can answer without even having to have seen this film: What for you is the best Shakespeare performance in film? It's a testament to Welles' film and performance that I cannot remember how I pictured Falstaff when working through Shakespeare in college, as after watching this Welles just is Falstaff. Bryce Dallas Howard's Rosalind is the only other Shakespeare performance I can think of where the depiction is so dead-on as to forever alter my perception of the character.

Despite having seen it a few times in the theatre and Olivier looming large on film, Branagh's Henry V is how I always picture Hal.
Paul Scofield in Peter Brook's King Lear is also a personal favourite.

[Roscoe]

I tried for a long time to watch CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, on an old VHS taken from a broadcast on Bravo believe it or not, and then on a couple of downloads and the Mr. Bongo DVD, and I just couldn't get through it, and then it ran at Film Forum in NYC and I went and was just blown away by it. It's my favorite Shakespeare-derived film, along with Olivier's HENRY V.

Some of my favorite Shakespeare performances in film would include Robert Newton's Pistol in Olivier's HENRY V, Olivier's own witty and malign performance as Richard III (the film itself falls apart in a flabby battle scene), Keith Baxter's Prince Hal in CHIMES (which I'd say is the single sexiest Shakespeare performance ever on film), and Emma Thompson's magnificent Beatrice in Branagh's messy film of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which also features the worst performance of Shakespeare on film (and one of the worst performances in any film anytime ever): Michael Keaton's repulsive take on Dogberry.

[Drucker]

Chimes at Midnight has a lot going for it, and perhaps most notably is the things that cursed so many Welles films just didn't happen here. Welles got to make a film from end-to-end as he intended, without interference from financial backers or trouble in the production. Kane, Macbeth, Touch Of Evil, Immortal Story, and Chimes I believe all fall in this category, and their cohesiveness shows. (ToE was mangled after Welles had already delivered a finished cut. From a production standpoint, things went smoothly). In terms of his Shakespeare adaptations, they are surely all works he knew well, and as the Criterion extras show, he had an affinity towards the source material for Chimes from a very young age. That combination of a character he knew and digested his whole life and a relatively smooth production give us the masterpiece we have.

It's also worth pointing out how relatively simple this film is. Even after three of four viewings of some of his more confounding work, questions remain. There's so much to untangle in just why Mr. Arkadin is the way he is. The Trial purposely leaves it's viewer confused for a great deal of time.

In McBride's book, he claims that in The Immortal Story, you have a great filmmaker focusing on the essence of his work, and delivering a simple, cohesive masterpiece. But I think that goes for Chimes as well: a great and grand man (who is indeed full of faults) is "taken down" and betrayed by a smaller and weaker man.

The friendship between Hal and Falstaff is the centerpiece of the film, not a subplot like in Kane and Touch of Evil. There are no elaborate mysteries to unravel in Falstaff. There is no labyrinth to untangle. And Hal's eventual betrayal of Falstaff is something he repeatedly telegraphs, and is wholly unsurprising given his upbringing and father. The entire focus of the film is how one man's inevitable ascent and maturation must be met with a betrayal of his own youth and values. The culmination of this transformation is complete when he banishes his former self in the form of his old friend, a moment so perfect it cannot be written about but only seen.

[Roger Ryan]

...Welles got to make a film from end-to-end as he intended, without interference from financial backers or trouble in the production. Kane, Macbeth, Touch Of Evil, Immortal Story, and Chimes I believe all fall in this category, and their cohesiveness shows. (ToE was mangled after Welles had already delivered a finished cut. From a production standpoint, things went smoothly)...

I'm not sure your hypothesis holds up when one considers the relatively paltry budget Welles was shooting Chimes with. This was another case where money ran out during production and Welles sent his cast and crew on holiday while he searched for another backer (that backer turned out to be Harry Saltzman; the legal battle between his heirs and the heirs of the original backers is what prevented the film from being widely seen for decades).

Importantly, the finished film is Welles' cut, so despite the budgetary limitations, we can evaluate the end result without guess-work as to original intentions. What I find most rewarding about the film is its successful balance between the scenes of frenetic exuberance and the ones of quiet reverie and meditation. Kane is the only other Welles film that achieves this balance as impressively. Even though some of the material cut from Ambersons could be considered upbeat and humorous, I suspect the balance of Welles' initial long cut would have been dominated by the meditative material. The Immortal Story certainly is all meditative whereas the existing cuts we have of The Lady From Shanghai, Othello and Touch of Evil have consistently frenetic pacing and a forward momentum that allow little time for digression. This is not necessarily bad, but Kane and Chimes seem all the richer for the well-executed contrast in pacing.

The best example of how this contrast is executed in Chimes is the approach Welles takes with the Battle of Shrewsbury: all rapid-fire cutting of close-ups and an unrelenting claustrophobic soundtrack; versus the scene where Falstaff learns of Henry IV's death: a single take with limited camera movement where the blocking of the actors and the soundtrack emphasize a surprising spaciousness. The former sequence has an immediacy that draws the viewer into the action whereas the latter scene treats its content almost like a rumination on events past, keeping the viewer at a distance not unlike a spectator of a theatrical play. These two scenes also reverse that standard pattern established in the film where the Falstaff/Tavern scenes are more exuberant and frenetic while the scenes covering the political machinations are treated as lower key and meditative.

What strikes me as being particularly unique is how Welles chooses to open the film. A pre-credit sequence shows us a conversation between Falstaff and Master Shallow (containing the titular line "...we have heard the chimes at midnight...") that appears to be an elegy for the world that the audience will be shown in the body of the film. Traditionally, one expects this prologue to be set after the events of the main narrative so that the body of the film becomes a flashback or a story being recounted. The unexpected happens when this pre-credit sequence is revisited three-quarters of the way through the story...but it has been altered. Some of the dialogue remains the same, but there is now an additional character added (Master Silence) and the tone is more whimsical and less reflective. What's going on here? I can imagine the scene as shown later is the accurate version in regards to the context of the story while the pre-credit version of the scene is the way those moments may have been remembered by Master Shallow. At any rate, the opening scene exists in its own world, divorced from everything else in the film. That the credit sequence that follows is bombastic in comparison sets up the tonal shifts that will play throughout.

[Drucker]

Thank you for the correction and keeping me honest Roger. Though I do maintain the consistency of the main settings on Chimes definitely helps the flow of the film and makes it feel coherent in a way Arkadin, Othello, and The Trial sometimes don't. I've only seen Othello once but the awkward shifts of some of the scenes tonally definitely stuck out to me.

[Randall Maysin]

Since conversation is already lacking, here's a question anyone reading can answer without even having to have seen this film: What for you is the best Shakespeare performance in film? It's a testament to Welles' film and performance that I cannot remember how I pictured Falstaff when working through Shakespeare in college, as after watching this Welles just is Falstaff. Bryce Dallas Howard's Rosalind is the only other Shakespeare performance I can think of where the depiction is so dead-on as to forever alter my perception of the character.

I have seen not too many Shakespeare films or Shakespeare anything else's, though I did see Chimes at Midnight in theatres not too long ago. I thought it was full of good things but did not come together at all, and though it was the only time I've ever found Shakespeare funny, the emotional impact was another matter. I think this just comes from the usual complaint about the film, the roughness of the overall production. There are many shots where you could say to yourself, why yes Randall Maysin, that's a handsome shot, but the overall visual impression is ultimately hectic and sloppy, in a psychologically ineffectual way. And there's the other usual criticism of Welles, that he sucks with simple, basic human emotions, which I also found to be true of this film, and his performance sadly - Welles is great in the non-emotional scenes, the part fits him like a glove, but when Falstaff is supposed to be so heartbroken by Hal's spurning him that he dies, he just looks like a homeless man with a runny nose. To me. He just has the sniffles, and didn't move me at all.

My favorite Shakespeare perf is definitely Brian Cox in Coriolanus. He doesn't do anything too flashy, but it's the only time Shakespeare has ever made complete sense to me, the lines just sing and strike my heart, they actually sound completely natural and felt. Ooh he's exquisite! It's actually the only time I've ever felt much of anything while experiencing Shakespeare. Please don't murder me...

[ando]

I get a kick from the Gielgud in-joke/impersonations as various characters mock the vocal inflections of King Henry. Definitely a Welles gag though I'm sure he valued (and admired) John Gielgud's (Henry IV) contribution immensely. In interviews he critiqued Gielgud's teachy, mannered approach to Shakespeare's language which called attention to itself. It's a valid call, I think, though few actors have come up to the standard that Gielgud established since his time.
(In Welles' defense he was an advocate of period training for Shakespeare as the segment beginning at 28:51 of The Paris Interview will attest.)

[Roger Ryan]

...Welles is great in the non-emotional scenes, the part fits him like a glove, but when Falstaff is supposed to be so heartbroken by Hal's spurning him that he dies, he just looks like a homeless man with a runny nose. To me. He just has the sniffles, and didn't move me at all...

For me, his delivery of the line "My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!" displays an earnestness and vulnerability that I would have imagined Welles the actor was incapable of. Chills me every time.

[Red Screamer]

(or performances)

Why's that?

[Sloper]

That’s an interesting point about the simplicity of Falstaff, Drucker. One of the big changes Welles makes to the source texts is to make this character less ambiguous and more sympathetic. For instance, consider the way Falstaff recruits his soldiers. In 1 Henry IV, he tells us in a soliloquy how he has ‘misused the King’s press damnably’, recruiting only those who are prosperous and cowardly enough to buy him off. He thus earns a great deal of money (‘three hundred and odd pounds’) from these bribes, and ends up with a battalion consisting only of ‘pitiful rascals’ who can barely stand up, let alone hold their own in a battle. When Hal and Westmorland rebuke Falstaff for gathering soldiers who are ‘exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly’, he retorts that they are ‘good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder...they’ll fill a pit as well as better’. During the battle, Falstaff tells us, ‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life’. We see this process in action in 2 Henry IV, and although all of these moments are comic, they are darkly comic: they help us to see why it’s so important for Hal to detach himself from Falstaff if he is to complete his transformation into a responsible ruler. Falstaff’s selfishness makes him recognisably human, appealing and funny, but in more serious contexts it also costs lives, and the future king of England cannot afford to be so careless about the lives of his subjects.

These moments also help us to see the grand historical narrative traced in these plays from a worm’s-eye-view, and to understand how different the Battle of Shrewsbury looks depending on whether you’re Hotspur (‘if we live, we live to tread on kings; if die, brave death when princes die with us’) or a common nobody (‘food for powder, food for powder’). When Falstaff declares ‘honour’ to be a meaningless concept after placing it alongside the gruesome reality of death in battle, we know that this is a coward rationalising his own reluctance to fight, but we also know that he is in some sense telling the truth. So although I just said that the future king can’t be careless about human life, Falstaff also exposes the ugly truth that Hal, his father, and the other nobles are careless about human life, enlisting countless ordinary people to die in a cause that claims to be about ‘honour’, but is really just a power struggle between a few aristocrats, one ‘scutcheon’ against another.

That’s the complex juggling act that makes the history plays so rewarding to re-visit. It’s crucial that Hal both recognises Falstaff as embodying something he needs to reject, and also comes to understand these ugly truths about his own position through the commentary of this licensed fool. Another obvious example: Falstaff is a thief, but so is Hal’s father (having stolen the crown from Richard), and so by extension is Hal; Hal participates in the Gadshill robbery, acknowledging his status as a thief (Falstaff says to him, ‘do not, when thou art king, hang a thief [you hypocrite]’), but takes the money back from Falstaff in order to restore it to its rightful owners. It’s a nice illustration of how Falstaff, or what Falstaff represents, will facilitate Hal’s staged ‘reformation’, but Hal is also teaching himself something important in this process, coming to terms with his burdens and responsibilities.

In Henry V, when the king disguises himself and walks among his soldiers the night before Agincourt, all of this stuff haunts the tense encounter he has with his disgruntled subjects. They don’t much like the idea of a glorious death (‘there are few die well who die in battle’), and are inclined to think their sovereign will be morally culpable for the fate of their bodies and souls. Hal defends ‘the king’ from their objections, and the outcome is a glorious victory with very few deaths on the English side; but he sort of knows that this isn’t a completely just war, that he’s waging it on the advice of his dying father (‘be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’), and that he only really needs this victory because of the shame still hanging over his title thanks to his father’s deposition and murder of Richard II (see his Claudius-like soliloquy, ‘not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault my father made in compassing the crown...Though all that I can do is nothing worth, since that my penitence comes after ill, imploring pardon’). Despite Henry V’s triumphs, this inherited problem will be the undoing of his son, Henry VI (‘I know not what to say, my title’s weak’), as the earlier history plays have already shown – and as the Chorus reminds us at the very end of this tetralogy.

Hal needs a complicated best friend like Falstaff, because in order to manage the predicament his father bequeaths to him he needs to be a good, multi-talented performer. Look carefully at Hal across the three plays he appears in, and I don’t think you’ll find any clues as to the real man behind the mask. Hamlet says ‘I know not “seems” – I have that within which passeth show’, but Hal only ever seems; inside, he’s a void. Shakespeare’s plays often suggest that good rulers are good performers or dramatists (well they would, wouldn’t they?), but they’re also interested in the danger of self-annihilation through performance. One extreme example of this would be Iago, who boasts of his own inscrutability and declares, ‘I am not what I am’. In some ways, maybe Hal is an even more chilling character, a machine whose only function is to be politically successful. He can be like his father; he can be like Hotspur; and he can be like Falstaff, depending on what the occasion requires. Each role is a complex one: his father is rigidly authoritarian, but happily bends or breaks every rule in the book when he has to; Hotspur represents a heroic idealism that Hal must practice while also (unlike Hotspur) recognising it as bullshit; and Falstaff (despite technically being a knight) enables him to connect with the common subject’s sensuality and indifference to authority, which can be harmless, useful, necessary, dangerous, or all of the above, at different times. Hal needs to be able to balance each aspect of each role, embracing and/or repudiating these different selves from one moment to the next.

What happens to all this in Chimes at Midnight? Here, when Falstaff does the ‘I have misused the king’s press’ speech, it is not a soliloquy but a response to Westmorland’s rebuke about the beggarly soldiers. So Falstaff’s openness about his own corruption makes him seem less sinister, to begin with. The two nobles listening to Falstaff only seem amused by his roguish performance, and indeed it feels more like he’s trying to entertain them than confessing to a serious crime. This Falstaff’s defining characteristic is his desire to be loved. (All this applies to the performance of the ‘honour’ speech later on as well.) Falstaff doesn’t specify that he has made £300 from his scheme, he just says, ‘I press me none but good householders; they’ve bought out their services, and now my whole charge consists of younger sons to younger brothers...the cankers of a calm world and a long peace’. Rather than saying this contemptuously in the absence of the soldiers (‘I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat’), he says it within their hearing, looking back affectionately at them and speaking the ‘cankers’ part of the speech in a sad, elegiac tone. Just a few minutes later (a whole play later in Shakespeare), after gathering more men with the help of Justice Shallow, Falstaff says ‘give me the spare men and spare me the great ones’, and in the context of this film he sounds like he might actually be sincere, rather than just cynically covering up his corruption. We still get some sense of his ruthlessness, especially when he’s saying ‘prick him’ repeatedly. In the play, his scathing, callous contempt for the soldiers is unmistakable, however funny an actor might make it – Welles’s Falstaff is a fundamentally kindly man of the people. And the horrifying battle scene doesn’t implicate Falstaff at all, since he is only ever seen in flashes, running helplessly about the battlefield. All of these ordinary soldiers, not just the ones recruited by Falstaff, are cannon fodder. Falstaff just seems to be more honest about this than his betters are.

We see him get a few coins from Mouldy and Bullcalf, but nothing like the hundreds of pounds he makes in the plays – indeed, Welles often milks Falstaff’s poverty for pathos. He takes a comic, cynical scene from Merry Wives, in which Falstaff has to turn away his followers, and replays it in a melancholy, even tragic tone. There’s a significant alteration in the subsequent comic action as well. In 2 Henry IV, Hal and Poins eavesdrop on Falstaff as he insults them, in a long speech, in order to impress Doll Tearsheet. When Hal emerges and confronts him about this abuse, Falstaff dishonestly protests, ‘No abuse, Hal’. In Chimes at Midnight, Falstaff hardly gets a chance to say anything about Poins and Hal, and what he says is hardly very insulting (‘a good shallow young fellow’). But this is enough to make Hal pounce on him and launch a series of cruel insults: ‘What a hog’s pudding, a bag of flax…Old, cold, withered and, and of intolerable entrails’. These come from the end of Merry Wives, when Falstaff is being publically shamed for his failed seduction attempts. Coming from Hal’s mouth, virtually un-provoked, at a moment when Falstaff is sad and vulnerable, they are painfully abusive. So when Falstaff then says, ‘No abuse, Hal’, the meaning of the line has changed completely: it’s as if he’s saying, ‘Please don’t abuse me, Hal – I can’t take it just now’.

Welles himself repeatedly said that Falstaff wasn’t truly corrupt, but an engaging rascal, ‘a Christmas tree covered with vices – the tree is all innocence and love’ (can’t remember where I found this), and ‘the most truly good man in all literature’. But to interpret the character like this requires a lot of very clever editing. Falstaff can of course be sympathetic even in more ‘faithful’ performances of the plays, but not quite as idealised and tragic as Welles makes him.

One upshot of this is that we see Hal’s long-term project in a very different light. In this film, he is not really learning anything significant during his time in the Boar’s Head tavern – he’s not studying his subjects so that he can understand, communicate with and manipulate them once he becomes king. Instead, his whole plan is reduced to what he says in his famous soliloquy near the start. Falstaff and the other lowlifes are now just pawns in Hal’s public performance of debauchery-then-reformation. So as well as accentuating Falstaff’s more sympathetic qualities, Welles also makes Hal seem less sensitive to the beauties of this other world he’s been slumming it in, and more callous towards his supposed friends. In a way, he’s just waiting to turn into his father, and that’s sort of what happens in the end. I love Welles’s poignant delivery of the line ‘Dost thou think I’ll fear thee as I fear thy father?’ He seems to sense that Hal will become just such a fearful king sooner or later, and this is an especially pointed moment given that they’ve just done the ‘play extempore’. As at the end of that mini-play, Hal sinks into a half-guilty silence.

By adapting Shakespeare in this way, Welles achieves what others have noted in this thread, the sense of cohesion and concision that makes this film so effective, and stops it from feeling like an awkward condensation of two plays (and bits of three others). But what I also love about the film is that it simplifies without becoming simplistic. Yes, Falstaff and Hal lose some of their shades of grey thanks to this drastic editing job, but they’re by no means one-dimensional. For instance, while I do think that the Hal in this film seems less interested in learning from Falstaff than does the one in the plays, it’s reductive to say (as I did above) that he simply ‘turns into his father’ at the end. For one thing, there’s that wonderful moment in the rejection speech, when he says, ‘Leave gourmandising; know the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men; reply not to me with a fool-born jest.’ There’s an implied stage direction here, as Hal delivers another in a long line of ‘fat jokes’ at Falstaff’s expense, and Falstaff happily prepares a witty response – but Hal cuts him dead. Keith Baxter plays the moment with a sense of genuine amusement, before urgently suppressing it. And then he lowers his voice during the ‘for competence of life we do allow you’ bit, his tearful gaze lingering on Falstaff for much longer than it needs to, as Falstaff’s expression shifts from mortified horror to a kind of sad but admiring acceptance. I think Baxter said once in an interview that it was as if Falstaff was looking up at his surrogate son and thinking, ‘that’s my boy’. So in a subtle and economical way, the film still conveys the idea that Hal has been ‘educated’ by Falstaff as much as by his father; this climactic regal performance draws on Falstaffian wit as well as Henrician rigour.

The transposition of Hal’s foiling of the assassination plot from Henry V is a brilliant touch: now, when Hal forgives the drunken man, and observes that such small faults must be forgiven since larger treasons must sometimes be forgiven too, he is not toying with his treacherous nobles before revealing that he knows about their plot. In part, he’s showing leniency in honour of his friendship with Falstaff, indicating again that he really does think fondly of him on some level. And again, he shows that his time with Falstaff has contributed something to his new identity as a ruler. Now the comment about forgiving great and little faults seems to recall (and contrast with) his father’s towering inflexibility, which we saw right at the start of the film. It’s as if he’s saying that, to be an effective ruler, you need to be able to glance from the lowest to the highest of your subjects, understanding and forgiving both the Falstaffs and the Hotspurs, and thereby controlling both categories of rebels more humanely, and more efficiently, than Henry IV had done. None of this cancels out our sense of Hal as a cold, calculating figure, but it does suggest that he is a bit more complex than the ‘awful shit’ Welles claimed to see him as.

Likewise in the case of Falstaff himself, for all Welles’s editing there is far more to him than ‘pure innocence and love’. For me, Welles’s defining characteristic as an actor is insecurity. To digress a bit, I think there’s a kind of insecurity about his film-making technique as well: he seems terrified of boring the audience, constantly finding new and ingenious ways of framing shots, moving the camera, manipulating the soundtrack, blocking the actors, playing around with the set, props, locations, etc.. Perhaps this is what Randall Maysin is objecting to, and I guess I can understand why it puts some people off, or gives the impression that Welles can’t ‘do’ emotional depth. He can, in my view, but sometimes it takes a few viewings to notice it. Yes, ‘I speak to thee my heart’ is an obviously touching moment in this film, as is Mistress Quickly’s eulogy over the dead Falstaff. The battle scene has more emotional impact than most such sequences in war films.

But anyway... Especially as an actor, Welles never ever looks comfortable in his own skin. It goes beyond his love of elaborate make-up and costuming, right down to the smallest tics and gestures. One of his most common facial expressions is the one where he furrows his brow and smiles quizzically, and it can convey various things: he’s searching for the right phrase; he’s decided on a phrase, but isn’t sure it’s the right one; he’s marvelling at the rightness of the phrase he’s in the middle of speaking, as if he can’t believe he found it; or, in response to someone or something outside himself, he’s trying to make sense of what he’s seeing and hearing, assessing whether someone is benevolent or not, whether he’s just been betrayed or not, whether he’s being laughed at, and whether it’s playful or malicious laughter; and perhaps most importantly, it’s an expression that seems torn between amusement and sadness.

When he made Othello, Welles decided that Iago would be motivated by impotence, as Micheál MacLiammoír recalled in his account of making the film, Put Money In Thy Purse: ‘“Impotent,” [Welles] roared in (surely somewhat forced) rich bass baritone, “that’s why he hates life so much – they always do”… He then gobbled up some sturgeon’. I love the tongue-in-cheek hint that Welles was over-compensating. And indeed the film ends up being as much about Othello’s impotence, caught from Iago, or just catalysed by him. MacLiammoír also said that Welles’s hurried delivery of the lines, ‘with his great bulk and power, gives an extraordinary feeling of loss, of withering, diminishing, crumbling, toppling over’. [By the way, I’m not endorsing Welles’s views on impotence here, just citing them and arguing for their importance to understanding his work.]

It’s a theme that plays some part in other Welles films too. You could see Kane as the story of a man who came of age prematurely, never quite knew how to be anything other than a pre-pubescent child, could never sustain a happy relationship with a woman, ‘hated life’ as Welles puts it, and like Iago took his frustrations out on the world by trying to assert his power over it. And I know it has some hard-core fans on this board, so apologies to them, but I always find F For Fake hard to watch because it and its creator are trying so painfully hard to be charming and engaging. Those scenes where Welles is holding forth at dinner are just agonising to me. I always feel that way about ‘raconteurs’, these charming and charismatic people who always seem to be performing. It’s not so much that I dislike them, they just look as though they’re screaming inside. That film is aggressively and even a bit creepily virile, with all that ‘girl-watching’ business, and when Welles makes up a fake story of his own it’s all about a great artist being sexually tortured by an inaccessible beauty, who awakens his ‘fertility’ and ‘fecundity’ as an artist, animating his ‘virile brush’. And then it turns out none of this ever happened – it was a fantasy of virility, mocking its own emptiness with that Wellesian mixture of amusement and melancholy.

Also, while we’re on the phallic imagery, I’ll just say it: F for Falstaff / False-Staff / Fall-Staff.

Sorry about that. Anyway, to finally get to my point: this is why I find Welles’s performance as Falstaff more complex than his ‘Christmas tree’ comment would suggest. If Hal ends up being a brilliant performer with no real substance to him, this too is a trick he learns from Falstaff, who in this film seems constantly haunted by the fear that, underneath his bluster, he may not be anything ‘truly’. In F For Fake Welles seems tentatively to be arguing that art itself has a kind of truth in it, regardless of whether it lies to us, or whether it was made by a forger: he laments (at least semi-seriously) that a great fiction-writer like Clifford Irving had to become a fraud in order to make his voice heard. So with Falstaff you could say that, even though he does nothing but lie, these lies grant access to some kind of truth. It’s a central idea in much of Shakespeare’s work, most famously illustrated in Hamlet’s plot to expose his uncle’s guilt: the play is a piece of fakery, but it strikes Claudius to the soul and holds a mirror up to him, revealing a truth that could never have been exposed by more direct, earnest methods.

But what kind of truth is there in Falstaff’s performances? As Welles plays him, I think he stands for the sensual and communal joys of life, but also for the ephemerality of these things (and the equal ephemerality of allegedly ‘higher’, nobler endeavours). King Henry says that his whole life has been a scene acting one argument (since he usurped the crown); in a way, Falstaff’s is too. Through his play-acting he seems to say that play-acting is all we really have in life, all anything amounts to: playing is like eating and drinking and having sex; it’s all superficial, it’s all temporary, and it all fades away in time, but the joy it brings is perhaps the most ‘real’ experience available to us. But even that ray of hope is then made to seem doubtful. Thanks to the ambiguity of Welles’s performance, it also feels as though his play-acting is an unsuccessful attempt to cover up a deep sadness – in fact, that sadness may be the most profound truth this playing gives access to. I also remember Baxter talking about how the comedy in the film doesn’t work that well, or at least isn’t that funny, and attributing this to the fact that Welles saw the story as a fundamentally sad one. It was sort of surprising to me when I realised that, although Welles is a very witty, humorous actor and film-maker, he’s never really a very funny one. A bit like Shakespeare’s fools, really.

Welles said he intended the film as a lament for the passing of ‘Merrie England’, but he also (perhaps inevitably) ends up questioning whether such a utopian vision of the past can have any resemblance to reality. The discrepancy noted by Roger Ryan above, between the opening pre-credits sequence and the significantly different repetition of this scene later in the film, is a good example. Are these old men survivors from an idyllic, lyrically beautiful past, framed monumentally against a roaring fire, marking the ‘chimes at midnight’ that herald the imminent, tragic end to their world; or are we actually just looking head-on at three sad old men who don’t like each other that much, sitting around with nothing to say, reminiscing about the late-night debaucheries of their youth, and muttering incoherently about death? It’s a film that seems to show us something wonderful and beautiful, and then sadly tells us that this ‘something’ was never really there.

[ando]

Great stuff, Sloper.

On Welles' humorous take on Falstaff: I seem to recall Welles saying that his earlier stage portrait of Falstaff was more effective because he played him in a far more serious vein. I've always felt that this film version of Falstaff was a bit too much of a wink and the Henry IV scenes far too grave. It doesn't help that the austere surroundings of Henry are accompanied by clearly visible breath issuing from the monarch in the seemingly ice cold castle (a great motif when it's employed later with Falstaff on his back at Shewsbury; creating a completely different impression!) but the contrasts of the the court and countryside couldn't be more pronounced. It gives a fairytale quality to the narrative that (imo), despite the Merry Old England effect that Welles wanted to convey, jettisons any serious contemplation of the proceedings aside from historical minutiea. And that stacatto Welles cutting! Whenever proceedings get really lively in a typical film directed by Welles you can count on quickfire dialogue (actors practically talking over each other), a barrage of extremely short segment cuts with actors moving in myriad directions at once and the figure of Welles (whether it's Othello, Hank Quinlan or Falstaff) towering over everything. Perhaps the comic nature of the Falstaff scenes makes Welles' distinctive take on himself most effective here.

[ando]

Nice video essay (w/background) on Chimes. The poster raises a suggestion about Kemp (who most likely played Falstaff, initially) I'd not considered.

[Mr Sausage]

Harold Bloom, who considers Falstaff, along with Hamlet, Shakespeare's most expansive and complete character (and who himself played Falstaff once in a single production of the two plays), says his favourite Falstaff performance was by Ralph Richardson in a production that also had Laurence Olivier as Hotspur. Bloom is ambivalent on Shakespeare productions in general, but he has always praised Richardson's performance highly.

[Sloper]

I've always felt that this film version of Falstaff was a bit too much of a wink and the Henry IV scenes far too grave. It doesn't help that the austere surroundings of Henry are accompanied by clearly visible breath issuing from the monarch in the seemingly ice cold castle (a great motif when it's employed later with Falstaff on his back at Shewsbury; creating a completely different impression!) but the contrasts of the the court and countryside couldn't be more pronounced. It gives a fairytale quality to the narrative

I love seeing the actors' breath, especially in the castle scenes. You're right, there's something very 'fairytale' about it; you literally wonder how anyone can live in a place like that. In this film, Falstaff doesn't have the bit where he says (looking at a dead body on the battlefield), 'I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath; give me life!' But that does seem to sum up the opposition you refer to: the royal castle full of grinning, miserable death-heads vs. the joie de vivre outside.

Speaking of favourite Shakespeare performances, Gielgud’s in this film is one of mine. I can understand why some might find his style of acting a bit outdated and mannered, but I’m a complete sucker for it. My favourite part of the film is, funnily enough, also the most static: Henry’s ‘sleep’ soliloquy beside the window. You can sense Welles’s reverence here in his refusal to do any editing, or move the camera. Apparently the crew gave a spontaneous round of applause after this performance. I used to watch this scene during long nights of insomnia, and can now replay it in my head whenever I want; I remember every inflection Gielgud gives to every syllable, and almost every facial tic and movement of the head.

Among other things, the scene is a great meditation on the Henry/Falstaff dynamic. It’s one of the longest, most ‘static’ shots in the film (along with the one Roger Ryan mentioned above, which as he said emphasises ‘spaciousness’, where this one underlines Henry’s confinement), and shows that Welles didn’t need to leap around hyperactively to hold the viewer’s attention.

To the left is the monk-like Henry; to the right are the large metal bars of a window, through which the light (of dawn, presumably) shines. Gielgud is positioned so that with a minimum of movement he can illuminate or darken his face, or just his eyes. When he looks straight into the light, as he does at the start of the speech (‘How many thousands of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep?’), his eyes squint painfully; as he then retreats into the shadow of the window-bar (‘Oh sleep, oh gentle sleep’), his eyes close, but then open again, and there’s a chilling sense that when Henry closes his eyes – when he turns off the light, so to speak – they still remain open, staring desperately into the darkness that has become his natural element. Inside is the darkness, his castle, his power (now fully consolidated, at this point in the film – in the play it’s soon to be secured, but there are still rebels to be put down), along with loneliness, the guilt that haunts him, a total absence of all those things that sustain life and make it bearable. Outside are his subjects, who despite being ‘in the light’ are sleeping peacefully, who can sleep (according to Henry) even if they’re atop a ship-mast in a storm. Indeed, as well as being kept awake by what is inside the castle, Henry also seems to be attacked by the light from outside, unable to block it out. When he says, ‘Then, happy low, lie down’, he looks into the light again, and we feel his frustration at those low subjects, whose ease he envies, and whose disobedience has caused him so much grief (‘lie down, stop rebelling, don’t you see how happy you are?’). We spend a lot of time in Shakespeare’s history plays being told that it’s lonely at the top, and in this scene Welles and Gielgud (and Lavagnino, who scores this scene and the whole film wonderfully) find a very beautiful way of dramatising that idea.

Harold Bloom, who considers Falstaff, along with Hamlet, Shakespeare's most expansive and complete character (and who himself played Falstaff once in a single production of the two plays), says his favourite Falstaff performance was by Ralph Richardson in a production that also had Laurence Olivier as Hotspur. Bloom is ambivalent on Shakespeare productions in general, but he has always praised Richardson's performance highly.

Richardson is one of my favourite actors (mainly because of his performance as my namesake in The Heiress), and I would kill to have seen him play Falstaff. Keith Baxter said that Welles was a little intimidated by Richardson’s performance in this role, and was afraid he couldn’t measure up. I love that he got this great former Falstaff to do the Holinshed narration, almost as if he’s a sort of good luck charm presiding over the film.

My favourite Falstaff, though, is Anthony Quayle in the 1979 BBC films. The films themselves are watchable but not great – on this basis, you can see why the series got a reputation for being dry and unadventurous. But Quayle, who had played the role on stage decades earlier opposite Richard Burton, is a mesmerising Falstaff. He’s a long way from the Welles conception: here the fat knight often looks diminutive and weak, a small, insecure man blustering away the last dregs of his charisma, his face constantly red and his voice hoarse with the effort. The Lord Chief Justice’s diatribe about Falstaff’s decrepitude seems especially apt here. He’s a genuinely corrupt character, and he knows it. But for all that, Quayle still makes him about as sympathetic as Welles does. During the play-within-the-play in Part 1, David Gwillim’s Hal becomes truly mean-spirited when insulting Falstaff, shocking the other tavern-dwellers into nervous silence. Quayle tries to laugh it off, but in the process descends into a coughing fit. We sense that Falstaff knows he has it coming, that everything Hal says to him is true, but that his young friend’s brutality takes him by surprise. He has to struggle to catch his breath, and then to get back in character and go on with the play. He looks at Hal as if to say, ‘Well of course I am all those things, but do you really hate me that much?’ I suppose what I like most about Quayle’s performance is that it leaves me not quite knowing what to think: he doesn’t let you write off Falstaff one way or the other.

[ando]

Speaking of favourite Shakespeare performances, Gielgud’s in this film is one of mine. I can understand why some might find his style of acting a bit outdated and mannered, but I’m a complete sucker for it. My favourite part of the film is, funnily enough, also the most static: Henry’s ‘sleep’ soliloquy beside the window. You can sense Welles’s reverence here in his refusal to do any editing, or move the camera. Apparently the crew gave a spontaneous round of applause after this performance. I used to watch this scene during long nights of insomnia, and can now replay it in my head whenever I want; I remember every inflection Gielgud gives to every syllable, and almost every facial tic and movement of the head.

Absolutely one of my favorites as well. And I'm not sure whether it was a deliberate move on Welles' part or simply an actor's choice to not play to the camera. By not confronting the audience directly you're compelled to really listen to his appeal.

In this sense, Gielgud's aural charms are given a lavish compliment in Peter Hall's adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's Books (1991). In fact, if you remove the visuals altogether you'd get a bravura performance from Gielgud, though his contribution (he reads virtually all the parts!) is (fortunately) only the centerpiece of this sumptuous work. A small chamber orchestra, chorus and soloists (and various sound effects) extend and help to develop the narrative. At times, Gielgud appears more vigorous in this film, made some 25 years after Chimes than at any time in the Welles film, though he, admittedly, had far more to do. And the film was obviously created to involve all the senses (what you can't smell you can surely imagine). Chimes (despite Shrewsbury) is fairly cerebral by comparison.

[ando]

The character among the chief protagonists who suffers the most due to Welles' treatment is Hotspur. Although he leads the Percys in their grievances and eventual rebellion against Henry IV his cause is not given a persuasive or sympathetic appeal through a comparable characterization as Falstaff, Hal or Henry. As depicted here duty ("worthy interest in the state") seems to be the virtue that Henry admires in Henry Percy and finds sorely lacking in Prince Hal. But what we see primarily from Hotspur is temper and spleen. Some of the portrait is Shakespeare but his representation here is entirely Welles. Although, according to Simon Callow in the third installment of his biography on Welles, One Man Band, the scene between Hotspur and his wife was included to elicit compassion for Hal's foil at Shrewsbury, there's not really sufficient development of character to present a successful counterpoint to Hal (much less Henry or Falstaff).

Nevertheless, it's the main problem I have with the film; for, colorful as Falstaff is, he is utimately a spectator to the main event, despite his pathetic attempt to force his hand as a pivotal player in the outcome at Shewsbury and his requested (and denied) favor from the newly crowned Hal. But perhaps it's the crux of Falstaff's dilemma - a kind of everyman/commom man (Falstaff's "knighthood" being a running joke) or universal dilemma - that Welles' wanted to convey. Falstaff doesn't seem to have a story outside of his relationship with Hal and/or the trappings of the crown - at least as far as Welles' story is concerned - but he also clearly hasn't the agency to change the course of events. We can laugh at him (some of us) but I'm not sure there's much compassion here. And if it's the end of the age of chivalry that Falstaff is ultimately meant to "embody" the critique of that era is surely a pointedly ambiguous one.

[knives]

I am in complete surprise of The Immortal Story which seems more out of Raul Ruiz's world than anything I've ever seen from Welles. Even his brilliant go at Kafka doesn't have this film's marvelous humour at the stories one constructs to keep the horrors of reality at bay. There are all of these little touches spread throughout which are simply jaw dropping given how shoe string I understand the production to have been. Half way through when they drag that poor blonde man to have a meal is a great example. We have this highly artificial world with the red stage curtains, the mechanical help that seems to not have been programmed to speak, all the way down to Welles' own gaudy makeup like in an opera performance. So they plop in this man acting as if from the real world that Welles imposes his reality on. Is this Welles freedom or the young man's destruction. But of course it is neither as Welles has just trapped himself in another artificial reality with no satisfaction. If it weren't so funny it would probably be unbearably sad.

I really adore the script though the acting and aesthetic is also marvelous. How true is it to Blixen's original story and is there any particularly good edition of it out in english? Are there any better first steps into reading her?

[Cold Bishop]

Blixen was not a particularly prolific writer, so starting out with Anecdotes of Destiny is as good a place as any. It's usually published with the novella Ehrengard and that's the way it's sitting on my bookshelf.

I was always surprised to hear that she and Robert Graves were Welles' favorite authors. Both peculiar choices.

[knives]

Thanks.

[Drucker]

I've now seen Immortal Story three times and wow this blu-ray is a revelation. I'll admit that that my first two viewing experiences were less than optimal (the first on TCM, the second in 35mm but after a day of work and possibly the second half of a double feature), but the themes and level of detail have never been so clear to me, though I had seen the film and read about it before. Not only did the performances (especially Moreau) show a new life to me, but there is so much detail in the little village that I had never caught before.

I'm still a bit skeptical of the color timing of this release, but except for a few shots it doesn't stand out that much, and the level of detail on this disc more than makes up for it.

[bottled spider]

It's worth mentioning Blixen/Dinesen wrote in English. The collection Anecdotes of Destiny has the additional merit of including the excellent Babette's Feast. Blixen's stories tend toward the gothic or fantastical, tales written in a story-telling mode, opening with such sentences as "Three-quarters of a century ago there lay in Antwerp..." or "In Shiraz lived a young student..." Her style is muscular, and less identifiably feminine than that of, for example, Bowen, Munro, Mansfield, or Wharton. Fascinating writer, but I find some of her stories too elaborate and lengthy. (I don't remember if I felt that way about the Immortal Story specifically).

[Cold Bishop]

It's more complicated than that: she wrote both English and Danish simultaneously, and each "translation" of the same material often has a multitude of differences, some subtle, some marked.

[Stefan Andersson]

Notes on differences between the English and French versions of The Immortal Story:
https://www.wellesnet.com/phpbb2/viewto ... dc0#p27659

[Tom Amolad]

I just read the NYT obitary for Welles and noticed this line:

'Falstaff'' and ''Touch of Evil,'' two of his later films, were also changed by others before their release.

Is that just an error, with regard to Chimes at Midnight? (It's of course true for Touch of Evil.) I've never heard that that one was compromised. I won't be shocked if it's wrong, since the obituary has at least one other howler ("In Italy and Morocco, at intervals from 1949 to 1952, he put together and starred in 'Othello' and 'Macbeth.'") But was there intrigue I'm unwaware of?