- director:
- Orson Welles
- cast:
- Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s later film career, Chimes at Midnight returns to the screen after being unavailable for decades. This brilliantly crafted Shakespeare adaptation was the culmination of Welles’s lifelong obsession with the Bard’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff, the loyal, often soused childhood friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son, Prince Hal. Appearing in several plays as a comic supporting figure, Falstaff is here the main event: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero, played by Welles with lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both Henry IV plays as well as Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Welles created an unorthodox Shakespeare film that is also a gritty period piece, one that he called “a lament . . . for the death of Merrie England.”
Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic battle sequence centerpiece as impressive as anything else Welles directed—Chimes at Midnight is as monumental as the figure at its center. “If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up.”—Orson Welles
Larry Jackson ’70, producer and former industry exec, worked with Welles on his unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind as well as Filming Othello. Jackson is also a former vice president at Samuel Goldwyn Co., Orion Pictures and Miramax and the producer-director of the Welles-narrated Bugs Bunny Superstar. He will take questions and present a behind-the-scenes slide show following the screening.
website: http://www.janusfilms.com/chimes