[On February 7, 2016, Flatwater Shakespeare Company Education Director Stephen Buhler gave a talk prior to a screening of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. Here are his remarks.]
George Orson Welles loved
Shakespeare – on the page, in the ear, in the mouth, on the stage,
and on the screen. It's my belief that Shakespeare loved him back.
Their relationship started in prep school, at the Todd School for
Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, near Chicago, and continued throughout
Welles's life. He never realized his dream of filming King Lear
– after becoming and remaining persona non grata in Hollywood as a
director, he always had to scramble for financial backing – but
there is much of Lear,
Shakespeare's harrowing tragedy of old age, in Welles's understanding of Sir John Falstaff and in his film about the character, Chimes at
Midnight. There is so much
Shakespeare and so much of Welles's life with Shakespeare in Chimes
at Midnight.
So
let's go back to the beginning. At the Todd School, Welles adapted
and directed several Shakespearean plays, with the help of his
teacher and mentor Roger Hill. He combined sections from Henry
VI, Part Three with Richard
III to create a play called The
Winter of Our Discontent – and
he starred as Richard Gloucester. Instead of accepting a scholarship
to Harvard, Welles traveled and wound up in Ireland where he bluffed
his way into the Dublin Gate Theatre company. In their production of
Hamlet, he deftly
portrayed both the old order and the new, as the Ghost of Old Hamlet
and as Fortinbras.
Returning
to the States, he began publishing a series of edited plays with
Roger Hill, first under the general title of Everybody's
Shakespeare and later as The
Mercury Shakespeare, borrowing
the name of the theater company he founded with John Houseman. He
joined Katherine Cornell's stage company, distinguishing himself
first as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet
and then doubling as the Chorus and Tybalt in a revival of Cornell's
production. He returned to Woodstock, Illinois to restage the Dublin
Gate Hamlet and then
directed the Federal Theatre Project's Macbeth,
set in the Caribbean, with an all-black cast, and soon known as the
“Voodoo” Macbeth
because of its distinctive take on Shakespeare's witches. With the
Mercury Theatre, he directed a Fascist-era Caesar,
playing Brutus, and adapted both Julius Caesar
and Hamlet for radio.
He also planned an epic retelling of all of Shakespeare's English
History plays, but succeeded only in staging Part One of Five
Kings before funding was
withdrawn by the Theatre Guild of New York. In Part One he cast
himself as Sir John Falstaff.
By
that time, Hollywood beckoned – quickly leading to the triumph of
Citizen Kane and then
a precipitous fall from grace. Before he could begin adapting
Shakespeare for the screen, he was fighting against his own too, too
sullied reputation among studio heads and also fighting upstream
against the tide of Laurence Olivier, whose Henry V
and Hamlet won wide,
well-earned applause.
Still,
Welles tried with a bold, stylized Macbeth
with himself in the title role – and which he filmed with a B-movie
budget after staging the play at the Utah Centennial Festival. The
film, released in 1948, was roundly and unfairly panned and
financially unsuccessful. It took years for him to get the money to
complete his masterful Othello,
again with himself in the title role. At one point, he staged the
play in Newcastle and London, England, just to earn money for the
project. That film, released in 1952, won admiration internationally.
Shortly
thereafter, he staged King Lear
in New York City and collaborated with the brash, young director
Peter Brook on a condensed version for television. Later that
decade, after again suffering disappointment at the hands of studio
executives with their mismanagement of Touch of Evil,
Welles began to revisit the story of the aging knight, hoping for
advancement, and suffering rejection. He crafted a script for Chimes
at Midnight, staging it in
Belfast and back in Dublin, with himself again as Falstaff and with
Keith Baxter as Hal, who would also play the role in the film
version.
Similar
to Five Kings, Part One,
the film version of Chimes at Midnight
draws upon several of Shakespeare's plays. Five of them, in fact:
Richard II (for some
of Henry IV's complaints about his wayward son); Henry IV,
Part One; Henry IV,
Part Two; The Merry
Wives of Windsor (in which
Falstaff is a character); and Henry V.
Welles also adds some of Shakespeare's primary source, Holinshed's
Chronicles. The title
comes from Falstaff's nostalgic conversation with Justice Shallow:
“We have heard the chimes at midnight,” meaning we have stayed up
late in times past, drinking and carousing and wenching. But to hear
the chimes is also to note time passing, fortunes fading, eras
ending.
In
interviews, Orson Welles described the film as an elegy for Merrie
England, an admittedly idealized view of a joyous, roisterous
medieval age – the vitality of which was gradually extinguished by
the strictures of modernity. Prince Hal is the future, cold and
calculating. Sir John is the past, warm-blooded and celebratory.
Welles went so far as to describe Shakespeare's Falstaff as “the
greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in
all of drama.” That might sound extreme, but it comes very close to
the high opinion of Falstaff presented by Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom in Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human –
although Bloom was influenced by actor Ralph Richardson's performance
as Falstaff, rather than Welles's.
Actor
Simon Callow, in his splendid biography of Welles, points out that
the film's Falstaff is in part an idealization of Welles's own
father, Richard Head Welles. Richard was a successful inventor turned
charming wastrel and drunkard, whom the young and ambitious Orson rejected – and
who died, alone, shortly after that rejection. Keith Baxter, the film's Hal,
sees Welles's Falstaff as the director's self-portrait: Welles, like
Sir John, was always short of cash, willing to mislead or cheat
outright his associates in order to get by and to get a project done. But Welles,
like Sir John, was charismatic, charming, and fun-loving, combining
infectious delight with boundless appetite.
As
evidence of Welles's reserves of charm, consider the cast he was able
to assemble without paying any of these actors their usual fees –
including John Gielgud as Henry IV, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet,
Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, Fernando Rey as Worcester,
and Ralph Richardson as the narrator giving Holinshed's version of events.
As
evidence of Welles's desperate quest for funds, consider the tangle
of production and distribution rights that the director apparently
over-promised to investors and that led to the film's being out of circulation for
decades. Those disputes have been resolved, the film has been
digitally restored, and in moments we will get to see it on the big
screen, as Welles himself envisioned.
So,
here are just a few things to look for. Believe me, there are many others.
In
adapting certain passages from stage to screen, Welles chooses not to
present selected soliloquies purely as soliloquies. In Shakespeare,
Hal confides his plans to reform himself at a future time for maximum
political and public relations payoff only to the audience. In Welles, Falstaff
overhears Hal's resolution to “throw off” “this loose behavior”
and, most likely, his loose companions; in fact, Hal delivers the end
of the speech directly at Falstaff as a warning that good times
inevitably end. Later, before the Battle of Shrewsbury, Shakespeare's
Falstaff ruminates on the emptiness of martial glory in particular
and honor more generally only with us. In Welles, he aims his
questions right at Hal, who looks away.
As the
late, great film reviewer Roger Ebert advised, watch for how
characters react to Falstaff, how he is regarded by his comrades in
the tavern world and acquaintances from the days of his youth. Look
for Moreau's tenderness as Doll, Rutherford's eventual indulgence as
Mistress Quickly, Norman Rodway's admiration of Falstaff as Justice
Shallow. Either their initial wariness or anger melts in the presence of his
compendious charm or they immediately warm at his approach.
And
a lot of this is not just Welles's reading of Shakespeare – it's in
Shakespeare, too. In Henry V,
Mistress Quickly delivers a tragicomic eulogy after Falstaff's death
and even as she talks of feeling his legs “upward and upward and
all was as cold as any stone,” she's echoing Plato's famous account
of the death of Socrates after drinking the hemlock to which he was
sentenced by Athens. Socrates, also accused of being a “misleader
of youth,” is almost unquestionably a “completely good man” of
the type that Welles associated with Falstaff himself.
Watch,
although it's hard to take, for Welles's brutal, shattering depiction
of the Battle of Shrewsbury. How we get from Olivier's version of
the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V
to Kenneth Branagh's version is through Welles, who delivers a
scathing critique of Olivier's almost relentlessly positive view of
war and of the grown-up Hal as king. After Branagh, both Mel Gibson
and Steven Spielberg studied Welles closely in creating battle
scenes for Braveheart
and Saving Private Ryan.
Also, Branagh's bittersweet, elegiac portrayal of Pistol, Bardolph,
and Nym in his Henry V
owes a great deal to the pervasive sensibility of Chimes at
Midnight.
Near the end of the film,
the visual references to Welles's past work become almost dizzying:
the use of perspective, either gazing up to suggest grandeur or
looking from afar to suggest diminution, so brilliantly employed in
Citizen Kane; the pageantry of clerics and armed troops
combined, as seen in the breathtaking first sequence in Othello.
Welles, perhaps worried that this would be his last major film and
definitely intent on establishing that his story is not identical
with Falstaff's, reminds viewers of past achievements and present
mastery.
Finally,
marvel at the fluidity with which Welles moves around and
recontextualizes scenes from his Shakespearean sources. Trevor Nunn,
in adapting Twelfth Night
for the big screen, might never have approached the interweaving of
related passages quite so confidently (given his stated admiration
for Shakespeare's careful construction of plot) without Welles's
example. And Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho
is as much an adaptation of Welles's Chimes at Midnight
as it is of Shakespeare's Henry IV
plays.
Orson
Welles's portrayal of Falstaff has been influential, I think, on
several scholars' views of Shakespeare's career. After Hal's public
rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV, Part Two,
Shakespeare had considered bringing the character back on stage –
at least, that play's epilogue suggests as much. But in Henry
V, we never see Falstaff – we
only hear of his decline from a broken heart and of his pitiable
passing. Scholars have increasingly argued that after wrestling with
such materials, Shakespeare would never again subject any of his
lovable rogues to such stern punishment. Such an argument coincides
with Welles's implicit view of Falstaff as “a man more sinned
against than sinning” – to borrow from Lear's self-description.
Knowing
of Hal's plans of future and self-serving reformation, Welles's
Falstaff has a compelling reason to plead against losing Hal's
friendship and patronage. In Shakespeare's brilliant scene showing
Hal and Sir John taking turns playing the roles of King Henry IV and
Prince Hal, Falstaff – speaking as Hal and as he hopes Hal would
speak – begs the King (present and future) to
“banish
Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff,
kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and
therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry's company; banish not him thy Harry's company. Banish
plump Jack and banish all the world.”
The
Prince, speaking as his father and as his future self, replies “I
do. I will.” In Welles's interpretation, Falstaff's tragic fate is sealed because he cannot,
will not, relinquish his hopes for advancement – and cannot, will
not, relinquish the genuine love he feels for Hal.
At
the time of the film's original release in 1966, Chimes at
Midnight found a few ardent
admirers and defenders but was also received with no little
befuddlement and even irritation. Even as its reputation grew in
later years (which led to Danny Lee Ladely, now Director of the Mary Riepma
Ross Media Arts Center here in Lincoln, screening it in the Sheldon
Auditorium, also on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus), its
legal entanglements eventually kept it from general view. Some copies
did circulate, however, which made its influence on other films
possible. But now Plump Jack – as presented by Orson Welles – has
returned from banishment and the wide world can welcome a cinematic
masterwork. Please enjoy.
