MUBI

My thoughts on the film

Preview:

What to say about this film? I first saw it on a pirated VHS tape I’d rented in New York back in 1991 (the tape startled me; I had no idea pirated tapes still existed in the USA), and despite the video snow, unstable vertical, wretched sound (not that the actual soundtrack was a model of clarity), thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Haunted Theater 80 at St. Marks for the longest time, because I’d been told they have screened it before and might again, but it never showed up. Finally had a chance to see it on the big screen in Detroit, of all places, at an arthouse theater that served coffee and sandwiches on tables while you watched the screen. There were two screenings, and I went to both; had no reason to change my opinion.

This film has possibly the most flawless cinematography I’ve ever seen. Not to mention the fantastic acting, and the battle scene is just superbly articulated, on par with that of Eisenstein Alexander Nevsky. FALSTAFF is a masterpiece supreme, a film I waited so long to see, completely blew me away with its seemingly effortless craft and astonishingly creative use of Shakespeare’s minor character canon. Welles does it again, ever proving him to be one of the greatest visionaries cinema has ever seen.

To many this is Welles’ best film and not that big movie he made at RKO in the early 40s. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is an adaptation of the Henriad, Four History plays beginning from Richard II extending to Henry IV -Parts I and II and finishing with Henry V which deal with the rise to power of the House of Tudor, the lineage of Queen Elizabeth and in effect the family that presided over England’s Golden Age when Shakespeare first started writing. Orson Welles, without altering a word of Shakespeare’s text, pivots this family saga on the “supporting” character of Sir John Falstaff. I place “supporting” in inverted commas because he along with Hamlet have the most lines of dialogue than any other character in Shakespeare.

Welles is of course Jack Falstaff. Rolypoly scalywag that he is, we love him as completely as we love Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. His relationship with the ostensible “Hero” Prince Hal is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking in literature and in cinema. The first section deals with Henry IV trying to crush a rebellion and thereby maintain his footing in England. His son is a wastrel who hangs out with whores and criminals much to his father’s displeasure and to Falstaff’s delight. It ends in an epic battle at Shrewsberry that is justly celebrated and highly influential. The second section is quieter and more elegiac as both Henry IV and Falstaff, the biological and spiritual fathers of Prince Hal, the future Henry V realize their mortality and hope to pass something important to Prince Hal before they pass this life.

This is needless to say a profoundly personal and a deeply political film. It looks at the conflcit between personal relations and state responsibility and also the way power corrupts and destroys people and above all of growing old. Welles dealt with this in his earlier films, but this is his most profound examination of these themes.