By 1966 Orson Welles was nearing the end of his career as a filmmaker. While he would complete three more films, not one of them was a dramatic feature, with the director instead focusing upon the video essay, a form over which he would have complete and unabashed control.

It’s neat and fitting, then, that CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT should be Welles’ final film as a director of actors and a manipulator of scenario, given that the films principal character, and mainstay of several Shakespearean works, Sir John Falstaff is accused of being that thing that Welles himself was often declared: a liar. It’s also appropriate that the central meditation throughout CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is a refrain questioning the very notion of ‘honour’, which might reasonably be interpreted as a slight towards the filmmaker’s harshest critics. That Welles himself portrays Falstaff cements the debate.

The concept of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was born during his schoolboy days…

The roots of this particular production can be found in Welles’ earliest years. The concept of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was born during his schoolboy days, before the idea was resurrected and honed as the play “Five Kings” in the late 1930s. “Five Kings” combined a number of Shakespeare’s history plays in to one great tale, with the idea further defined in the mid-1960s to create CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is considered in some quarters to be Welles’ greatest achievement, which is quite the claim when one considers that the film sits alongside such impressive works as TOUCH OF EVIL, F FOR FAKE and, of course, CITIZEN KANE. It is notably abstract and unique within Welles’ oeuvre: combining the European sensibilities of the time (see the surreal nature of the horn players in one early moment), with Welles’ own unique eye, and his appreciation of the polar opposites of a wide canvas and an extreme close-up. It’s this magnificent juxtaposition of ideas that gives Welles’ film that most profound of edges, securing its place in the cinematic canon of definitive Shakespeare productions. Indeed, one might note CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT as the most European take on a British source by an American, ever, in filmic memory.

 
FALSTAFF: CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT screens at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 8 pm on Sunday 16th September.