Restoring ‘Chimes at Midnight’

A critic begins to feel his age when films he first viewed as a young man now have to be restored. Still, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (also known as Falstaff), released on DVD this year in a restored version, is special. It was made on an extraordinarily low budget and despite a multitude of technical problems was finally released in 1966. We had to wait a further two years before a courageous independent distributor screened the film in Australia.

At the preview I was tactless enough to suggest that restoration was needed immediately. In some scenes lip movements didn’t match the voices, and the sound levels were all over the place. This was unfortunately standard for Welles’s movies then. Neither Othello, released here in 1957, nor Chimes had decent soundtracks; and ironically Welles had been a brilliant radio producer. The problem was the pitifully inadequate budgets.

The work was still extraordinary, but those of us who cared had to make allowances. When I screened Othello for my students I would turn up the sound at places where the track was muted. The 16mm print the National Film Theatre found for me did justice to Welles’s visuals and there were few if any complaints.

Just how well the sound design had been planned originally was revealed when the film was restored in 1995. Welles’s verse speaking was extraordinary and one his most daring effects, the sound of waves crashing that punctuated Othello’s explosions of anger in the “Be sure you prove my love a whore” scene, had never been more effective.

With a small class in the 1970s the sound of Chimes at Midnight was never a real problem. Quality Films had secured a splendid 16mm print and the film was a favourite with our drama students. I explained the fault with the lip movements—a reel had been damaged in the production laboratory and there was no money for repairs—and once our ears adjusted to the vagaries of the dubbing and the location sound there were no problems. This was just as well because Chimes at Midnight is one of Welles’s greatest achievements.

As with so much of his best work the project originated in the 1930s when Welles was in his early twenties and he began to produce Shakespeare on stage in New York. His Mercury Theatre production of a modern-dress Julius Caesar, conceived as a critique of fascism with Brutus (Welles) as a pipe-smoking liberal, Caesar a dictator and Mark Antony (George Coulouris) a demagogue, was enormously successful and prefigured much of what was to follow. Fortunately we know more about Welles’s Julius Caesar than we do about many other stage productions of the period. Together with the usual stills of the cast there are photographs of the rehearsals showing the famous shafts of “Nuremberg” light and the expressionist lighting that later was to be a feature of Welles’s films. At the time the Mercury Theatre was among the first outside Germany to create their scenery with light.

Moreover, there was a radio adaptation with the original cast. It survives in a recording of the rehearsal which has recently been posted on the internet. It is extraordinary radio. The “modernity” of the action is underscored by having the play narrated by one of the most famous political reporters of the day, H.V. Kaltenborn, reading from a script adapted from Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare’s principal source. The recording demonstrates that Welles had to make even a classic play his own before he recreated it.

The next project went still further. Titled Five Kings, it was an attempt to encompass in a single evening a condensation of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays. By then Welles was at the height of his fame as a theatre and radio director, the War of the Worlds broadcast having made him a national celebrity. So there seems to be more than a touch of hubris in his decision to rewrite and rearrange Henry IV Parts One and Two plus much of Henry V.

Welles’s principal collaborator John Houseman’s account of these events, in his autobiography Run Through, dwells on Welles’s erratic conduct of rehearsals, the administrative chaos and the failure of the revolving stage. But Houseman would have been better employed working on the script. Welles had come up with little more than a rearrangement of scenes from the plays linked by a narration that combined excerpts from Holinshed’s Chronicle with the chorus speeches from Henry V.

With some good script editing the concept might just have worked in spite of the technical difficulties. Indeed in the mid-1970s at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney Richard Wherrett and John Bell executed essentially the same concept with Bell as a coldly calculating Prince Hal and Frank Wilson playing a warmly affectionate Falstaff. I saw the production; clearly they had learned from Welles and Houseman’s mistakes and prepared a beautifully structured script that sent the audience home at a reasonable hour.

Welles’s Five Kings was a commercial failure. They never got the length right. Many performances ended at midnight with only half the audience remaining. But there were some fine moments. Even though he was only twenty-three, Welles made a splendid Falstaff while Burgess Meredith was a very effective Hal. The British actor Robert Speight, who had just created the role of Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, somehow made the narration work. And there were times when Welles’s mastery of stagecraft brought the cumbersome production to life.

The Boston Evening Transcript’s review captured something of what was achieved and helps to explain why Welles continued to be fascinated by the second tetralogy:

Welles has placed the turbulent reign of the two Henrys on a revolving stage which realistically swings the action from street to pub, to courtyard to palace, into lonely byways and onto battlefields … The battlefields are typically Welles’s creations of groups of steps over and around which the troops of Henry IV and of the Percys engage in graphic warfare. Perhaps the most gripping of these is the combat between Prince Hal and Hotspur, waged while the stage revolve gives a vivid semblance of action impossible to attain on the static stage.

One can see here the beginnings of the film version twenty-five years later. Welles was to make two Shakespearean films, along with the great achievements of Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, before he returned to Falstaff and the Henry IV plays. In 1960 there was a production in Dublin of yet another condensation of the tetralogy. Once again it was not a success. Welles told his biographer Barbara Leaming that he made some remarks at a party that when reported offended the Dublin public and they stayed away as part of an Irish revenge. Nevertheless the script Welles devised was much better. He now decided to concentrate on the relationship between Falstaff and Hal. In addition he had found in the young Keith Baxter the actor who could play the ideal young prince to his fat knight.

When in 1964 he finally raised the money to shoot Chimes at Midnight in Spain he had a clear idea of the film he was going to make. It did not seem so at the time. According to Keith Baxter, Welles did not have a shooting schedule. He would decide at the beginning of the day what scenes he was going to shoot, then go ahead. Only a few of the cast saw Welles in his Falstaff makeup, because those scenes were played at the end of the shoot. Baxter thought that, for all his experience, Welles might have had stage fright. It certainly doesn’t show in the movie, where he gives one of his great performances.

From the outset Welles saw Falstaff as much more than a clown. In 1939 he said:

I will play him as a tragic figure … he will of course be funny to the audience just as he was funny to those around him. But his humour and wit were aroused … by the fact that he wanted to please the prince.

In an interview recorded when Chimes was released Welles went beyond the character of Falstaff:

The film was not intended as a lament for Falstaff but for the death of Merrie England. Merrie England as a conception, as a myth which has been very real to the English speaking world … It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It’s the old England dying and betrayed.

The whole work, he added, was directed in the light of the Hal’s rejection of Falstaff.

Parts One and Two of Henry IV are very different in mood and atmosphere. The earlier play moves swiftly from court to tavern and on to to the castles of the rebels. The pranks are light-hearted; and if Hal is a worry to his father, Henry IV, obsessed by the memory of his usurpation of the crown from Richard II when he had been “That vile traitor Bolingbroke”, the Prince soon redeems himself in battle. He defeats the principal rebel, Hotspur, in single combat and saves his father’s life. In Part Two, however, it is as if this redemption had never happened. Hal and his father are still estranged. An air of melancholy pervades the work. The play is still witty but its main subjects are age, senility and death, and it is this mood of time and loss that dominates Welles’s adaptation. The structure is based on the first play with the scenes with Doll Tearsheet—a wonderfully bedraggled and sensual Jeanne Moreau—and Justice Shallow (Alan Webb) deftly interwoven.

The key to Welles’s design for Chimes at Midnight can be found in one of the drawings for Five Kings. It shows a street with on one side the palace exterior and on the other the Boar’s Head tavern. For the film Welles creates a distinct cinematic space for each of these worlds of court and tavern that vie for Hal’s allegiance.

We first see John Gielgud’s King Henry on his throne in a cold oppressive audience chamber ostensibly lit by a shaft of light as he argues bitterly with the men who had put him on the throne. A cut takes us to the Boar’s Head with Hal downing a cup of sack. The tavern may be seedy but there is a constant swirl of movement through the corridors and into the communal dining areas. Later there is a panoramic shot of folk-dancing composed like a Breughel painting.

Gielgud’s anguished king and Welles’s rumbling Falstaff are splendidly contrasted. Henry is obsessed by the “indirect crooked ways” he came upon the crown and soon is unable to sleep; all of which is portrayed in some of Shakespeare’s finest verse. Welles evoked an intense stylised performance from his distinguished co-star that is entirely appropriate in the “palace” settings and makes Hal’s “reformation” in the deathbed scenes only too plausible. Welles’s Falstaff is far more naturalistic. The famous asides or soliloquies on honour and sack are delivered in conversation to the prince and Hal’s promise to reform is spoken directly to an unbelieving Falstaff.

Welles saw the fat knight as “the greatest conception of a good man in literature”. Baxter’s Hal clearly loves him and is attracted to all the fun and irresponsible pranks of life in the tavern. The magnificently staged rejection sequence, created with a few shots through spears to give the impression of a coronation, then a series of carefully framed set-ups showing the new king’s anguish and his old friend’s stunned disbelief, is among the great achievements in Shakespearean cinema.

Equally fine is the recreation of the Battle of Worcester, a frightening assault on the spectator’s sensibilities in which Welles employs a montage of galloping knights charging across the screen in opposite directions, blows and counterblows and bodies writhing in mud. It is an extraordinary achievement given that Welles never had more than 180 extras on the field at any time. This of course did not matter. It was a powerful antithesis to the pageantry of a work like Olivier’s Henry V and all those who sentimentalise Shakespeare. The sequence was an important influence on Kenneth Branagh, whose film version of Henry V is a worthy successor to Chimes at Midnight.

The restoration by Mr Bongo Films, however, is a disgrace. Welles and his cinematographer, Edmond Richard, employed shadows, high-contrast stock and some intricately choreographed deep-focus shots to create one of cinema’s last black-and-white masterpieces. The DVD’s visuals are a sea of undistinguished grey. Reportedly there are more than adequate preservation materials available, so there is no excuse for marketing this travesty.