By RAY KELLY
Master Shallow, movie audiences can now hear and see Chimes at Midnight as never before.
The restored Janus Films re-release made its debut on New Year’s Day at the Film Forum in New York and Cinefamily in Los Angeles. (It will move on to a dozen other theaters in the weeks ahead).
Janus Films is distributing Welles’ favorite film in the U.S. with improvements it made to the 2015 Filmoteca Española restoration. Criterion Collection President Peter Becker detailed those upgrades in a recent interview with Wellesnet.
Initial audience reaction has been positive.
The restoration has been given thumbs ups by Film Comment, Uproxx , MSN critic Glenn Kenny for rogerebert.com and The Wall Street Journal.
Kyle Anderson of Nerdist gave an enthusiastic, newbie review to the film. He wrote, “I’d never seen Chimes at Midnight prior to this release, preferring not to watch a Welles film the first time via bad bootleg or YouTube rip. Now having seen it fully restored and looking amazing, I can’t imagine having watched it any other way… There will at some point be a Blu-ray release from Criterion, but if you can see it on the big screen, I’d recommend it. It’s crisp and the monochrome is rich, and the sound, even though a lot of it was done post-synced, is clear and booming. Welles was an often misunderstood and under-appreciated genius in his lifetime but with restorations like this, we’ve been able to give the master his due.”
On our Facebook page, veteran Welles fan Karl Morton IV reported that the restoration “looks glorious.”
The Daily Beast‘s Malcolm Jontes noted that “for any Welles fan, (Chimes) has always been a sort of Holy Grail, not least because it was Welles’s favorite of his films, the one of which he said, ‘If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up.’ … Having seen the newly minted version, I can’t say if you’ll agree with Welles’s verdict, but if you care anything about his movies, or about Shakespeare, I don’t think you will come away disappointed.”
“No one talks much about Welles’s skill as an adaptor, but the seeming ease with which he seamlessly combines and condenses Shakespeare is one of the true miracles of this production,” Jones wrote. “He gives us just enough of the rest of the story to make it all make sense without taking our eyes off the corpulent main attraction. The result is a film as nuanced as any Welles ever made, ultimately a comedy and a tragedy in equal measure, which is no mean feat. It also contains, in my opinion, the best battle scene ever filmed.”
Focusing on themes of friendship and betrayal, Chimes at Midnight examines the shifting relationship between Prince Hal and his debaucherous companion, the corpulent Sir John Falstaff. The script utilizes text from William Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor, as well as narration from Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Chimes at Midnight can trace its lineage back to the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, where a 15-year-old Welles in 1930 first adapted several Shakespearean plays into a single work entitled The Winter of Our Discontent.
With his Mercury Theatre troupe, Welles returned to the concept of re-editing Shakespeare for his 1939 play Five Kings. Burgess Meredith played Hal opposite Welles’s Falstaff with a score composed by Aaron Copland. Welles revisited the story with an even greater emphasis on the relationship between Hal and Falstaff for the 1960 Irish stage production Chimes at Midnight. Welles again played Falstaff, but this time with Keith Baxter as Hal.
The motion picture adaptation of Chimes at Midnight was filmed in Spain between the fall 1964 and spring 1965 with the backing of Spanish film producers Emiliano Piedra and Ángel Escolano and Harry Saltzman, who co-produced the James Bond films. Alessandro Tasca served as executive producer. As he had done a decade earlier with Othello, Welles invested his own money into the project.
Welles and Baxter continued in the roles they had played on stage in Belfast and Dublin. They were joined by John Gielgud (King Henry IV), Margaret Rutherford (Mistress Quickly), and Jeanne Moreau (Doll Tearsheet) with Ralph Richardson providing narration. Beatrice Welles, the director’s youngest daughter, reprised her Irish stage role as Falstaff’s young page. (She will introduce a screening of Chimes at Midnight at the Film Forum on January 8 at 7:30 p.m.)
Upon its original release, Chimes at Midnight was warmly embraced at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. At Cannes, it received two awards including the 20th anniversary prize, but it was largely ignored in the U.S., due to poor distribution following attacks by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times. It is worth noting that his successor, Vincent Canby, believed Welles created what “may be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made, bar none.”
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