Orson Welles' Masterpiece - 'Chimes at Midnight'

Thursday, 28 July 2016, 5:01 pm
Article: Howard Davis

I wish today could be tomorrow,
The night is dark,
It just brings sorrow anyway.
- 'Days,' The Kinks.

The risk of writing about any film by Orson Welles is that dimensions can easily get out of hand, imitating both the physical size and imaginative reach of the subject itself. Originally planned as two volumes, Simon Callow's exhaustive biography of Welles has already swelled to three ('The Road to Xanadu' appeared in 1996, 'Hello Americans' in 2006, and 'One Man Band' in 2015), and a fourth may follow if Callow lives long enough. Patrick McGilligan has recently taken 820 pages to cover Welles' first twenty-five years and the Kenosha Kid himself lived to be seventy. Callow's warns of the many seductive diversions along the way: "It is acutely enjoyable to watch Welles in the process of working up his version of his own history, trying on variants for size, until he settles on the most colorful one."

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when Welles chose to make his final Shakespeare film, he conflated parts of 'Henry IV' (parts1 & 2) with lines from 'Richard II,' 'Henry V,' and 'The Merry Wives of indoor' to produce his masterpiece, with his performance as Falstaff widely regarded as the apex of his acting career. Never widely distributed in the US, but Welles' own personal favorite and hugely influential on directors as diverse as Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson, a restored 50th anniversary print has now reached the New Zealand Film Festival.

Welles sets the cafardic tone early on by using the title phrase twice - as an epigraph to the whole film, then in its narrative sequence. Falstaff and his old friend Justice Shallow are first seen from a vast distance - minute figures in a snow-covered landscape. Shallow is waxing nostalgic about their past, Falstaff more dismissive, as they arrive at a low-roofed building. Inside, they sit by a fire and continue to reminisce about absent friends, Shallow remarking again "Jesus, the days we have seen." It is then that Falstaff repeats the line "we have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Robert Shallow." The bitter grimness of Welles' delivery totally excludes the tone of jolly conviviality with which the scene is often played and includes a hint that Shallow is inventing his wild youth retrospectively - "every third word a lie." The past is not the past and present laughter is hard work. Falstaff meditates much upon death in this film, making his shenanigans seem heroic, a bawdy and robust defiance of old age, something far more strenuous simple high spirits. His melancholy comment "What is honor? … Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday" comes across not as a rascally refusal of conventional wisdom, but rather as a deeply cynical sense of disillusion.

This dissipated air of melancholia permeating mournful and bittersweet memories, has a long and storied history in British lyricism and suffuses the movie's most dramatic moments. In one of the great set pieces, Falstaff pretends to be Prince Hal's father and rebukes him for his fondness for low life, making only an exception for himself - "There is a virtuous man whom I have often noticed in thy company… Him keep with … the rest banish." The players then exchange roles and the Prince, as his father, says just the opposite - Falstaff is a "villainous abominable misleader of youth" and an "old, white-bearded Satan." Shot from an extreme low angle in which his vast paunch dominates the screen and advancing into close-up, Falstaff suggests in his own defense that Hal should banish all his other cronies, except for -

"sweet John Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish him not thy Harry's company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!"

Prince Hal then moves into the frame with Falstaff still visible, but now physically diminished in the background, and says "I do. I will."

Callow notes there are two Falstaff's here and the Prince is promising to banish both of them - his old friend the "engaging rogue" and the "much bigger figure" whose "titanic energy and majestic self-confidence put him in the realm of myth." England's next king, Henry V, is setting behind him not only his father's usurpation of the throne, but also reclaiming large swathes of France to engender a new sense of nationalism. He can't afford to retain disreputable friends nor recognize the energies and truths of irregularity, of the sprawl of life itself. Falstaff's phrase "all the world" includes both a self-serving plea ('you need me, even if you need no one else') and a prophecy ('how small your world will become when all your thoughts are about power and tactics').

Prince Hal's formal, public renunciation of Falstaff may be painfully harsh ("I know thee not, old man"), but neither Shakespeare nor Welles doubt its necessity. When he hears about the Prince's succession to the throne at the strike of midnight, Falstaff thinks only of power and promises Shallow he can have any job he wants, saying "the laws of England are at my commandment." We can't want this to happen any more than we want Falstaff to be banished, so Welles doesn't linger over the line, but quickly takes us to Falstaff's bathetic refusal to believe what he knows to be true. "This that you have seen is just a colour," he insists, "I shall be sent for soon." The scene's deep emotional resonance is created by another apparently throwaway phrase ("Go with me to dinner") and by the vast stone walls of the Spanish castle that fill the screen, leaving Falstaff again a tiny silhouette passing through a huge arched portal. No one accompanies him on this final journey, not even his page, and the place he is approaching is strikingly reminiscent of the beautiful and unforgiving city Welles created for his previous film 'The Trial.'

Welles' cinematic imagination not only encompassed a stunning sense of how to articulate space within a frame, but also an innovatory exploration of the possibilities of sound. As an actor and director who initially attained his 'prodigy' status in theatre and radio productions, Welles possessed an unmatched ear for pacing and delivery, as well as a finely modulated sense of how to overlap dialogue when Robert Altman was still knee-high to a grasshopper. 'Chimes at Midnight' boasts an extraordinary cast of distinguished Shakespearean actors (including John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Alan Webb, and the voice of Ralph Richardson, all of whom provide inspired line-readings), but it is Welles' use of sound perspective that is perhaps most intriguing.

The microphone placement often seems to be at the point of camera placement, increasing the sense of subjective POV positioning for the viewer. As Shallow and Falstaff walk over to the fireplace with their backs to the camera in wide shot in the opening scene, the mike seems to be placed near the camera position, not with the actors. Normally, a director would use a boom operator to get the mike as close to the subjects as possible and nowadays wireless mikes are placed on actors' bodies to get the best sound quality. Welles, however, wants us to experience the spatial dimensions of the shot not just visually, but also sonically. We hear all the natural reverb of the speakers' voices bouncing off the walls before it gets to the mike., which adds to the impression of flawed sound because clarity is being sacrificed in the name of spacial fidelity. If everything is close-miked, that aural sensation of perspective is missed. When the camera is re-positioned for Shallow's close-up, Welles chooses to use close-miking - also in keeping with spatial fidelity, only now we can hear the speeches quite well even in a dub from a 16mm transfer. This constant repositioning of the microphone makes for a much fuller subjective experience.

There's also a possibly apocryphal story about how where the buzz in the background of Margaret Rutherford's final speech comes from. Apparently there was a generator nearby and Welles was concerned that it would be heard on the soundtrack. The sound technician insisted that it would be inaudible. Welles said "this man is either a genius or an imbecile" and shot the scene. When it turned out the generator was audible, he called Rutherford back to re-dub the scene. However, she was unable to recapture the brilliant performance she achieved on location, and Welles decided to keep the original take - generator sound and all - because her original performance was clearly superior.

Which just goes to show why Welles found the idea of actually finishing a film so problematic. As it became increasingly difficult for him to complete any project (whether through ill-health, poor production planning, or lack of financing), it was the act of creating new films in the cutting room and then choosing among them that constantly delighted him. When Welles told Andre Bazin that "the eloquence of the cinema is constructed in the cutting room," he was not talking about control of the final product (although that too was a luxury for him), but describing the director's dream of constant deferral, constructing an infinitely perfectible movie in which the next cut is always the best cut.

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Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz