Charles Herold (cherold) This review is from someone who struggles with Shakespeare. I have enjoyed productions of Shakespeare well enough, and usually can follow the story enough to follow it, but I just can't adapt to the language. At times it's like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.For someone like me, a fan of Welles but less so of Shakespeare, Chimes at Midnight is a tough one. The movie is beautifully directed, full of Welle's unique approach to composition and movement. Only Welles would put cross talk into Shakespeare, and much of the film is as visually glorious as Citizen Kane. The battle scene is electrifying and brutal, making most battle scenes feel like bowdlerized lies.I could generally follow the story. Falstaff is a scoundrel who is friends with the disapproving King's sons. There are various escapades and a war.But while I got the shape of many of the conversations, much of the time I had no idea what people were talking about. I have rarely struggled this much to understand Shakespeare, and I'm not sure why. It may be that the film is built out of the later plays, which are a lot tougher than something like Romeo and Juliet. It may be in part an effect of sound issues critics complained about at the time. I do wonder if it has to do with Welles approach to the material. Shakespeare's plays have a rhythm to them, and I wonder if Welles own rhythm is simply harder to follow. Would I follow Henry IV plays better than this revision of them? I just don't know.I don't understand the dialogue well enough to speak intelligently on any flaws there may be in the film's structure. I can only say that your enjoyment of this film will be conditional on your comfort with and familiarity with Shakespeare.

mark.waltz The genius of radio and 1940's cinema is perhaps at his later best in this boisterous compilation of Shakespeare plays which includes the supporting character of Falstaff. While limited knowledge of both the history of the times and the plays themselves might be a good idea, that isn't required. In fact, with limited reading, it only took a short time for me to pick up on Welles' intentions, and I was right on track with the period of time, the mood and the purpose.Sir John Gielgud, the veteran Shakespeare stage legend who became a movie legend as a bitchy butler, plays the aging king Henry IV, father of Keith Baxter's Prince Hal, disappointed by his palling around with the much older Sir John Falstaff (Welles), a fabulous storyteller but rather tipsy adventurer past his prime. There's a ton of Shakespeare soliloquies, but don't fear being bores. I was fascinatedFor good measure, there's perfect black and white cinematography which really adds atmosphere to the middle age setting. Margaret Rutherford is amusing but poignant as Falstaff's landlady and Jeanne Moreau is truly striking as a sexy noblewoman. But it is a battle with Welles and Gielgud as to who gives the definitive reading of Shakespeare's beautiful poetry in the form of theater as adapted for film.

treywillwest It's not exactly daring to declare Citizen Kane to be Orson Welles's most groundbreaking and influential movie. That does not, however, mean that Kane is necessarily Welles's most entertaining and satisfying film. I have long held the latter to be Touch of Evil, but now that I have seen the long unavailable Chimes at Midnight, I might have to reconsider. Welles is indisputably the primary creative force behind Kane and Touch. With Chimes he had some pretty decent source material with which to start. The script is composed of scenes from Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V reconfigured to make Falstaff, Shakespeare's most famous supporting character, into the primary figure of the narrative. But this creates an entirely original story with entirely different themes and politics than those of the original works. This is one of the most contemporary feeling Shakespeare films ever made, even though it in no way departs from the plays' medieval settings. Indeed, the magnificent art direction subtly but powerfully conveys a world of spectacular barbarity where even the most sympathetic characters wander an earth littered with tortured, mutilated, broken bodies displaying not a trace of emotion. There is so much understandable attention paid to Welles the director that we sometimes overlook what a truly gifted actor the man was. And in that regard, this is his masterpiece, the performance of his life . His Falstaff is a soulful hedonist whose gift for gab can make most anyone forgive his rather parasitic nature. This is not the likable, but sometimes violent criminal the character is sometimes imagined to be, but a man who wants his stories to amuse and make one forget or overlook the characters intense vulnerability, and indeed cowardice. Welles always conveys vulnerability, even in his least sympathetic characters, but this is a spectacularly moving performance in which the old Welles uses his physical awkwardness, his jarring girth, to manifest a man who tries to entertain a world he cannot change, or even nimbly navigate. Falstaff is a moving character as written in Shakespeare's three plays that feature Henry V. Yet those plays are ultimately, necessarily, celebrations of feudal power and conquest. The young Henry enjoys the rapscalrony of Falstaff's company, but when the time comes to assume power, he dutifully puts aside childish things and starts a war of conquest for the glory of the nation, which is to say the Crown. Falstaff is, in these plays, that which must be repudiated for the sake of glory. Nothing in this twentieth century work makes feudal power seem glorious. When Henry turns his back on Falstaff it seems the victory of conformity over comradery, of obligation over empathy. It goes without saying that the film is visually sumptuous, characterized by the brilliant deep-focus and chiaroscuro lighting that are Welles's visual hall mark. But one scene stands out as one of the aesthetically greatest of his career as a director. Falstaff, ostensibly a knight, is fitted with a ludicrous, almost tank sized suit of armor to try to contain his rotund form. This machine of awkwardness is plunged into a brutal battle, equipped only for impotence. The image almost had to have been inspired by Max Ernst's near identical 1921 painting, The Elephant Celebes. But where as Ernst's round robot is terrifying, Welles's knight is the clown prince of all that is human.

bkoganbing When I saw the BBC productions of Henry IV both parts it became my favorite work of the Bard. Anthony Quayle was really great as Falstaff in both of those plays. So I was anxious to see how Orson Welles did in the part, especially as in his Chimes At Midnight it was Falstaff who became the centerpiece. I was not disappointed in the slightest.As Welles grew heavier and heavier as he grew older there were many jokes about his corpulence, Robin Williams started his career on them in Mork And Mindy. But the man who played Charles Foster Kane really grew into the role of Falstaff in two decades and a half. Quayle probably needed padding. I'm informed in Citadel Film series book on The Films Of Orson Welles that Welles actually had to diet.Way back in the day when Master Will Shakespeare wrote Henry IV and Falstaff proved so popular that he was brought back for The Merry Wives Of Windsor he did not have the advantage of movie closeups. Welles the director made very good use of his camera in his closeups of the main characters of Falstaff, Henry IV played by John Gielgud and Prince Hal played by Keith Baxter. I think the Bard would have approved, he had to write descriptive words to get his points across.Chimes At Midnight started as an edited play done by Welles condensing Shakespeare's work. The play never found an audience, but Welles believed in it and took a lot of roles in a lot of mediocre work as was his fashion to get his work filmed. The results paid off beautifully.Welles filmed this in Europe and it became an 'international' film in that overused word. Most of his cast was British and that also included Margaret Rutherford. She plays Mistress Quickly and that's a role far different from Miss Jane Marple. The most popular courtesan in Mistress Quickly's bawdy house is Jeanne Moreau from France. The work was mostly shot in Spain which was becoming a favored location for filming and they also contributed Fernando Rey in the role of Worcester, leader of the rebellion against Henry IV.Welles hits all the right emotions in the audience playing Falstaff. He's at once lovable, outrageous, and exasperating. Gielgud is also wonderful as the patient father waiting for his older son to just grow up and stop hanging around with disreputable types like Falstaff. That the father just happens to be King of England and the son the Crown Prince is almost an incidental to a universal story. That the story is universal is proved by the wonderful adaptation Gus Van Sant did with this same material in My Own Private Idaho. A chance to see Orson Welles intoning the Bard's words is never to be passed up.