Program notesOrson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1965)“The best Shakespeare movie ever made”—Peter Bogdanovitch

“The Revolution of the Times” (2 Henry IV, 3.1)

From the long horizontal opening shots, where ragged impressed soldiers trudge and thieves and traitors swing from gibbets, through to the final frames, when Falstaff’s massive coffin is hauled out from the gates of the Boar’s Head tavern past the long London city walls, Orson Welles’ re-casting of Shakespeare’s Henriad, Chimes at Midnight, is a masterful example of “history from below,” history told from the point of view of the common people rather than of their leaders and rulers.

When, relatively early in his career, Shakespeare wrote his Richard II (1595), which traces the fall of an anointed king, the religious theatre of the high middle ages had come down into London, the purpose-built commercial amphitheaters had been operating for some twenty years, the altars had been stripped for a generation. A couple of years later, when he resumed the story as a rapid sequence of three plays, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V (1597-99), he showed a “shaken” usurper, Henry IV, and his son, Hal, the future Henry V, able to recreate a Machiavellian monarchy out of a combination of inheritance, force, and fraud—or fictional “good” lies—leavened as “play”: for Hal’s constant tavern play with the parasitic old unlanded knight Falstaff, however merry and sweet, is never unmotivated, never without a sense that “thou here apparent” . . . “art heir apparent.” The final play in the sequence, Henry V, is at once a tribute to the mixed monarchy of Shakespeare’s first ruler, the aging Queen Elizabeth—compounded out of power and charm, out of courtship—and an anticipation of its coming end, for it hopes for the triumphant return of her last favorite Essex from Ireland but also remembers that Henry V’s own victories endured only until his early death and the succession of his weak infant son. 1599, as Jim Shapiro has noted, was the watershed year in Shakespeare’s own career, when his company disastrously lost their lease, but the timbers of The Theatre then opportunely fitted out the first Globe. It also signaled the end of a political era as, amid the rapid revolutions of those times, Queen Elizabeth is reputed to have said of the revival of Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion, “Know you not I am Richard II?”

Where position yourself in the revolution of the times?

In 1944 the English War Office commissioned Laurence Olivier to make Henry V into a film to bolster English morale amid the Blitz and to prepare the Allied armies for their invasion of Normandy. An early trailer for the film shows an aerial view of present-day London before switching to the London of 1600 and sweeping in on an imagined early stage performance, and cannon are dragged ashore in France. The technicolor action of the film is relentlessly cheerful even amid the highly chivalric battles. The Shakespearean war crimes on both sides—the desperate French kill the boys in the baggage wagon, while the English soldiers in revenge cut the throats of their

prisoners—are omitted, and the lower-class sub-plot of the play, which so effectively questions its epic logic, is reduced to mere comic relief. The French courtship scenes are modelled after a lovely medieval Book of Hours. Olivier is handsome and gallant, delivering his battle exhortation from on high.

When Kenneth Branagh, in his on-going challenge to Olivier, remade Henry V in 1989, America had lost Vietnam, Great Britain had lost the Falklands conflict, and post-colonial warfare was often as not conducted not just from the air, but down in the dirt. This film is clear about the political calculation of its dogged young Harry, and it tries to balance carefully his imperialistic gamble and its costs. its lengthy Battle of Agincourt makes clear the tactics and the face of war by emphasizing how badly the English are depleted and outnumbered; by having their King hearten them from atop a supply cart; by dwelling carefully on many of the individual characters whom we have come to know; by showing that that extraordinary victory was more the result of paunching stakes driven in the ground and yeoman arrows than a cavalry charge; and it brings both English and French down into the punishing mud before tracking back and up across the corpse-strewn battlefield for its final “Te Deum.”

In between there was Orson Welles’ 1965 Chimes at Midnight. Welles (1915-1985) had already worked with Shakespeare’s plays on stage in productions like an African-American “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936); Julius Caesar (1937), where he played Brutus; and Five Kings (1939), where he played Falstaff. In 1941 he produced his first feature-length film, Citizen Kane, starring himself as Charles Foster Kane, a figure at once modelled after newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and himself. With its historically significant but also personally compelling focus, its astonishing energy and sweep, its rapid, phantasmagoric, discontinuous action, and its deep shots, it figures near the top of everyone’s lists of

the best films of all time. Unlike his murky film of Macbeth (1948) and his overly-stylized Othello (1952), Chimes at Midnight is cut from the same splendid and variegated cloth as Citizen Kane. But Welles, who always struggled for creative control of his projects, had great difficulties securing the money, the appropriate production conditions, and ultimately the wide distribution for this film. Shot helter-skelter in various sites throughout Spain in 1964-65, it had only a limited film release, and until last year was only around in poorly-mastered and often pirated copies. The fine print that you will see today has only been available since January 2016, and will be released as a DVD later this summer.

Welles’ great theme was authority and betrayal, and Chimes, where he himself plays a huge and appetitive Falstaff, centers on it. At the beginning of the film he uses Holinshed’s Chronicles, in a voice-

over by Sir Ralph Richardson, to sketch the historical conditions of the time, the usurpation of the throne by Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, and the formation of the Percy rebellion. But the film quickly settles into a sharp comparison/contrast between the vertical lines of the court scenes, many of them actually shot in a cathedral, and the playful expansiveness of the tavern and the countryside. Prince Hal, played by Keith Baxter, is torn between his severe father, here acted by a strained and

aged John Gielgud, and the jollity of the tavern, and his skeptical detachment is contrasted with the uncritical enthusiasm of the warrior Hotspur and his teasing wife, Kate. Lively genre pieces abound—the robber scene is shot as a mad scramble through a beech grove; Hotspur drops his bath towel in his eagerness to get to his battle horse; great performances (by an ancient Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, a blowsy Jeanne Moreau as Dol Tearsheet, by Welles’ own adorable youngest daughter Beatrice Welles as Falstaff’s little boy, by Alan Webb as a toothless Justice Shallow) enrich the action at every turn—but the film focuses sharply down to its interim confrontation between Hal and Hotspur on the battle field at Shrewsbury, and then again to Hal’s assumption of his dying father’s power and inevitable rejection of Falstaff at the end.

The battle is revealed to be a kind of absurdist exercise, where ignorant armies clash by day,

coming at each other in the morning fog, kicking up the dust of battle (notoriously, Welles had very few extras for the scene, and so had to blur and finesse their numbers), leaving the heavily-armed foot-soldier Falstaff, who has proved too heavy for a horse, to ricochet around like a minié ball and play dead during the final confrontation between Hal and Hotspur. And the dominant lively merriment of the wonderful orchestral score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino descends to an insistent clash and throb as the soldiers slog in the mud, and then butcher each other and die. Unlike Olivier’s deliberate patriotism, and unrelieved by Branagh’s final battlefield lift, it is a great piece of antiwar film-making.

What sticks with me most from the film is the tavern merriment and the ubiquitous recognition of encroaching old age. For all of Welles’ cuts and compressions of the Shakespearean text, there is no

better version of the central mock-throne scene from 1 Henry IV, where a slightly drunk Hal practices an answer with Falstaff for his father in

court the next day. Shot from all around the tavern, as the whores tumble down from their rooms above to get in on the action—from below Falstaff’s huge belly, from back and forth between Hal and Falstaff’s flushed agonistic faces, from out to the audience where the Hostess, the boy, and the prostitutes react with appreciative delight to the dramatic contest between the Prince and his jester—it conveys vividly the life of the early inn yards (for the Boars’ Head tavern was a real place, a real site of dramatic production) from which the amphitheaters of Shakespeare’s day descended. And when Hal finally sweeps off to court to assume the kingship he cuts diagonally through that merriment one last time, like a knife through a Bruegel painting. He goes to see the dying old King, but he also goes to give an indirect death sentence to his old friend. He takes the crown from his father and assumes the throne in that cathedral-like setting. Then Falstaff hears the news in the womb-like setting of the great country barn where he has been mooching off his old Inns of Court friends, Justices Shallow and Silence, and rides to London thinking that he’ll be taken into the court with Hal. But Hal, of course, in words that echo St. Paul’s Biblical condemnation of the old man of sin and the flesh, rejects him:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!

I have so long dreamt of such a man,

So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane

But being awake, I do despise my dream.

But the film does not end with the rejection of Falstaff amid the sharp diagonals of the coronation and the shadows of that evening. It ends on a morning when old Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly recites the comic Socratic account of Falstaff’s death of a broken heart to that little boy, sending him to Arthur’s forgiving, rather than to Abraham’s severe, bosom, remembering him “babbling a’ green fields.”

Welles lived on until 1985, much in demand on TV talk shows and for his voice, but with a number of projects left incomplete, including The Other Side of the Wind, the story of an aging film director (played by John Huston) looking for funds to complete his final film. Finally, Richard Brody reports “at the time of his death, in 1985, Welles was trying to raise funds for his dream project—a film of “King Lear”—even as he was also recruited by Jean-Luc Godard for an undetermined participation in Godard’s film of the same play” (The New Yorker, 11/22/2013). He never finished that film, either. Instead, we have to settle for Chimes at Midnight, "It's my favorite picture, yes," he told interviewer Leslie Megahey in a 1982 interview for BBC Arena. “If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up.

--Barbara Bono (for more events and information about “Bvffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare,” see https://buffalobard.wordpress.com/)