Alicia I love this movie so much

Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

clanciai Orson Welles was always good at Shakespeare and second only to Laurence Olivier, and in each Shakespeare he made he made it even better. You can see a very interesting line of maturing development through Macbeth and Othello to Falstaff, the final masterpiece - not even Laurence Olivier could make Shakespeare this good. And yet it has its minor flaws.My greatest pleasure and enjoyment, as I saw it now for the third time since the 60s, is above all the marvelous film and picture composition. Every scene could be seen as pictorially a masterpiece of its own. Orson Welles has created his film with an enormous load of experience from experimental cinematography through 30 years, and he seems to have learned everything. Usually in Shakespeare films there are long moments of doldrums but not here - the tempo is exceedingly efficient all the way, even in the calmer scenes. The virtuoso peak is of course the battle scenes in the middle of the film, comparable with Sergei Bondarchuk's overwhelmingness but here made more realistic and convincing in black and white. The mud is really muddy. It's also the point of the film's musical climax - here the music plays an important part of its own.The actors are also perfect every one, but here we come to the one minor detail. The diction is extremely important in Shakespare, the language is all, and if you muddle it all is lost. The best actor here is John Gielgud, who really understands his Shakespeare and makes him right, while the most difficult to understand is actually Orson Welles. His Falstaff is a little too bulky and fat, and his voice is many times lost in the flesh.Another wonderful thing, which gladdened me enormously, is the absolute faithfulness to realism. Welles has really tried to recreate medieval England, especially in the tavern scenes and above all the last one - you can really see how he enjoyed filming it. This faithfulness to style and realism makes the film outstanding in a way almost transcending all other Shakespeare films. Kenneth Branagh wallowed in transforming Shakespeare into any time, age and circumstance including the first world war, many others did even worse, while only Laurence Olivier was equally faithful to realism and style.In brief, it's a perfect film, and its minor flaws you easily forgive for its massive deserts. Only ten points is possible.

treywillwest It's not exactly daring to declare Citizen Kane to be Orson Welles's most groundbreaking and influential movie. That does not, however, mean that Kane is necessarily Welles's most entertaining and satisfying film. I have long held the latter to be Touch of Evil, but now that I have seen the long unavailable Chimes at Midnight, I might have to reconsider. Welles is indisputably the primary creative force behind Kane and Touch. With Chimes he had some pretty decent source material with which to start. The script is composed of scenes from Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V reconfigured to make Falstaff, Shakespeare's most famous supporting character, into the primary figure of the narrative. But this creates an entirely original story with entirely different themes and politics than those of the original works. This is one of the most contemporary feeling Shakespeare films ever made, even though it in no way departs from the plays' medieval settings. Indeed, the magnificent art direction subtly but powerfully conveys a world of spectacular barbarity where even the most sympathetic characters wander an earth littered with tortured, mutilated, broken bodies displaying not a trace of emotion. There is so much understandable attention paid to Welles the director that we sometimes overlook what a truly gifted actor the man was. And in that regard, this is his masterpiece, the performance of his life . His Falstaff is a soulful hedonist whose gift for gab can make most anyone forgive his rather parasitic nature. This is not the likable, but sometimes violent criminal the character is sometimes imagined to be, but a man who wants his stories to amuse and make one forget or overlook the characters intense vulnerability, and indeed cowardice. Welles always conveys vulnerability, even in his least sympathetic characters, but this is a spectacularly moving performance in which the old Welles uses his physical awkwardness, his jarring girth, to manifest a man who tries to entertain a world he cannot change, or even nimbly navigate. Falstaff is a moving character as written in Shakespeare's three plays that feature Henry V. Yet those plays are ultimately, necessarily, celebrations of feudal power and conquest. The young Henry enjoys the rapscalrony of Falstaff's company, but when the time comes to assume power, he dutifully puts aside childish things and starts a war of conquest for the glory of the nation, which is to say the Crown. Falstaff is, in these plays, that which must be repudiated for the sake of glory. Nothing in this twentieth century work makes feudal power seem glorious. When Henry turns his back on Falstaff it seems the victory of conformity over comradery, of obligation over empathy. It goes without saying that the film is visually sumptuous, characterized by the brilliant deep-focus and chiaroscuro lighting that are Welles's visual hall mark. But one scene stands out as one of the aesthetically greatest of his career as a director. Falstaff, ostensibly a knight, is fitted with a ludicrous, almost tank sized suit of armor to try to contain his rotund form. This machine of awkwardness is plunged into a brutal battle, equipped only for impotence. The image almost had to have been inspired by Max Ernst's near identical 1921 painting, The Elephant Celebes. But where as Ernst's round robot is terrifying, Welles's knight is the clown prince of all that is human.

Alex Deleon Locarno 2005 ran a complete Orson Welles retrospective including all of his masterpieces and some lesser known works that are less than masterpieces. The Orson Welles highlight of day seven was his very rarely shown "Falstaff --Chimes at Midnight", 1965, which Welles always claimed as his personal favorite. Loosely adapted from several Shakespeare plays in which the boisterous character of John Falstaff appears. Welles himself plays the ribald central character at a very portly age of fifty and is ably supported by a mainly English cast, notably John Gielgud as the king. French nouvelle Vague actresses Marina Vlady and Jeanne Moreau have cameos. Moreau, it is said, worked for almost nothing just to be directed by a living legend like Welles. The film was shot in Spain and was an international co-production with such complicated distribution rights that they remain unsettled to this day making the film well nigh unseeable under normal conditions. I found it almost unwatchable because Welles is so hammy in it, and it looks like it was just slapped together from whim to whim -- very self indulgent and just plain boring from where I sat. It was an effort to sit it out, which I did as a kind of "critique oblige" type duty. Nevertheless one must offer Kudos to the Munich film archive for getting the unadulterated "Chimes" to Locarno. One of Orson Welles daughters, Chris Welles, is also here to take in the retrospective and said that she is learning things about her own father she never knew before. One thing I never knew is that, in addition to his numerous undeniable masterpieces he made some hammy throwaway junk which, like this film, is nevertheless highly acclaimed by many critics because it would be heresy to find any fault in the works of a certified genius like Welles. Can't complain because it filled in a gap in the filmography of a director whose work I basically venerate just like everyone else, but this one didn't ring any resounding chimes in my personal belfry. Alex, Locarno, August 12. 2005

gavin6942 The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff (Orson Welles) as roistering companion to young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), circa 1400-1413.Who can say bad things about Orson Welles? His work was often neglected in his lifetime, both by audiences and critics. Looking back now, I wonder how they could have missed the genius of "Citizen Kane". But yet, they did for many years.This film is considered to be Welles' favorite of his own (I am unsure of the source for this claim) and has been influential. Yet, it is hard to get a decent copy (the one I have was a Portuguese import). There was no actor with such a presence as Welles, so Shakespeare is natural for him. He has successfully brought the stage to screen.