by Simon Callow
The most striking aspect of the review is the absolute contempt that underlies it. Welles had committed an unforgivable crime in American eyes: he had failed, but refused to give up. He was just irritatingly there, a constant reminder of the disappointment he had caused. Crowther’s reaction to Welles, and that of many of his colleagues, was an urgent underlying desire to put him out of his misery – and them out of theirs. These reviews brought Welles close to despair. His perennial dream of going home, of working in the American film industry, were scuppered yet again.
The British reviews of the same year, 1967, were rather more nuanced, but it scarcely mattered to Welles. It couldn’t influence his career. Robert Robinson in the Sunday Telegraph, in a generally hostile review, made an important point about Welles’s approach, which Robinson felt was too detailed – ‘a pocky nose, a spastic eye’ – to do justice to the grandeur, the scale of Falstaff. ‘What came out of the consciousness of everybody will not be found in merely natural surroundings.’10 But Welles had spent a lifetime in film creating figures that were larger than life: for once, and for very personal reasons, he chose to discover the human dimension. It may not be exactly what Shakespeare had in mind, but it is richly and authentically true to life. In her piece in the Spectator, Penelope Houston homed in on exactly what Welles was trying to do:
Welles’s Falstaff becomes a man play-acting on borrowed time, until the prince chooses to bring down the curtain. Falstaff stumbling about the battlefield, a mammoth sardine in his armour, or beaming under a saucepan-lid crown, or enlisting his amateur retinue, is the happy, doomed innocent-at-large . . . underlying every intimation of mortality, leaving him vulnerable as a foolish fond old man.
Welles, she says, presents Falstaff less as a great comic presence than as a concept – ‘the old England, dying and betrayed’. Welles’s Maytime England comes through, she continues, ‘as a sad, lost dream, a memory for garrulous old women and quavering old men who once heard the chimes at midnight’.11
But it is this doomed yearning for the non-existent past, the saudades for an imaginary yesteryear, that gives the film its great originality. It purveys not an active longing for something joyous, but an Edenic, a prelapsarian hankering, as of something snatched away from one, an innocence defiled, banishment from paradise. This is a quintessentially Wellesian experience, the thing that gives the film its strange emotional power, creating a world that is exactly and expertly poised, as Crowther said, between the farcical and the sentimental – a Chekhovian world, in fact, awash with tears of laughter and sudden pangs of heartache. Another English critic, John Coleman, acutely pinpointed the absurdist quality of Welles’s Falstaff, ‘in dark, swollen armour – the spitting image of Jarry’s Ubu . . . I suspect’, added Coleman, ‘that this is a film we shall return to with increasing admiration and affection. The Welles Falstaff has more subtlety than may meet the purist’s eye.’12
Even in America, despite the body-blow of the New York Times’s outright dismissal of the film, there was a groundswell of enthusiasm, nowhere more eloquently expressed than by Pauline Kael during her brief and rebellious tenure at the New Republic. By the time she wrote the piece, the film had closed: ‘Falstaff [the film’s title everywhere but in England] came and went so fast,’ she wrote, ‘there was hardly time to tell people about it, but it should be back (it should be around forever) and it should be seen.’ She chose the occasion to offer a revisionist view of Welles’s career, dismissing the idea that he suffered from lack of discipline; on the contrary, she says, he was scuppered because of the size of his imagination. She describes the ‘atmosphere of anxiety’ surrounding him, comparing him, in an appraisal that would have delighted Welles, with his friend, the great French director so decisively rejected by Hollywood, Jean Renoir. Welles’s removal to Europe, said Kael, had deprived him of his greatest asset as a director: ‘his sound’. To compensate, she says, he developed great visual virtuosity, as a result of which his work ‘is often spoken of as flashy and spectacular as if this also meant cheap and counterfeit . . . but there’s life in that kind of display: it’s part of an earlier theatrical tradition that Welles carries over into film, it’s what the theatre has lost, and it’s what brought people to the movies’. Describing him as ‘the one great creative force in American film in our time, the man who might have redeemed our movies from the general contempt in which they are (for the most part, rightly) held’, Kael laments that, as ‘an expatriate director’, his work only reaches the art-house audience. ‘And he has been so crippled by the problems of working as he does, he’s lucky to reach that. The distributors of Falstaff tested it out of town before risking Bosley Crowther’s displeasure.’
She is frank about the poor technical quality of the first twenty minutes of the film, the problems of sound and synch – ‘you may want to walk out’ – but then, Kael says, ‘the movie begins to be great’. And she has something very original to say about Welles as an actor, finding that he has always been betrayed by – of all things – his voice:
It was too much and too inexpressive; there was no warmth in it, no sense of a life lived. It was just an instrument to be played, and it seemed to be the key to something shallow and unfelt in even his best performances, and most fraudulent when he tried to make it tender.
But in Chimes at Midnight, she says, he seems ‘to have grown into his voice. He’s not too young for it anymore, and he’s certainly big enough. And his emotions don’t seem fake anymore; he’s grown into them, too. He has the eyes for the role. Though his Falstaff is short on comedy, it’s very rich, very full.’ The battle sequence, she says, is totally unlike anything Welles has ever done, ‘indeed unlike any battle ever done on screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa – that is, with the best ever done.’ It’s so good, she says, because of course there is no dialogue; Welles is unhampered by sound. ‘It’s the most brutally sombre battle ever filmed.’ But because of ‘technical defects due to poverty, Welles’s finest Shakespearean production to date – another near masterpiece, and this time so very close – cannot reach a large public’.13
This is perhaps the best, the frankest, the most sympathetic account of Chimes at Midnight – and of Welles’s entire career – to have appeared during his lifetime. That it came from the pen of a woman whom he had cause at the end of his life to regard as his nemesis is an irony lost on no one. The film has had no commercial run in an American cinema since Kael wrote the review, forty-five years ago, which of course has done nothing to transform its fortunes.
In Europe – in France, particularly – it was accorded the acclaim due to a self-evident masterpiece. Jean-Louis Comolli, in Cahiers du Cinéma, instantly homed in on the film’s essential theatricality:
That tavern, with its long tables and its benches, its common room, the gallery that runs along the upper floor, where from time to time curious women come scantily dressed, to lean over, is a kind of theatre in the round, in which the actors are not far from spectators when they are not both at once.14
Even the throne room is theatrical, ‘cleverly tiered, lighted from the side by beams of light that could be those of spotlights. On the one hand, the tragedy of power, on the other, its comedy.’ Falstaff and the King are doubles and reversed images: Hal ‘rehearses with one what he then plays with the other, all the more proud in the tavern because he is ashamed in the palace . . . Falstaff, the King and Hal are all equally histrionic.’ It is this aspect of the film that makes it seem like a summum of Welles’s work, a culmination of his life’s professional obsessions: Shakespeare, film, theatre. Roger Planchon, the great French theatre director, remarked that critics would understand Welles better if they were more familiar with the works of William Shakespeare. But Chimes at Midnight is not filmed theatre: it is the sort of film Shakespeare might have made, had he had the medium at his disposal. And Welles’s great themes resound more richly and fully in it than anywhere else in his work:
the exaltation of innocence, the corruption of power, the inevitability of betrayal. Comolli, in his Cahiers review, drew attention to something very striking: the obsession with humiliation, as he puts it, which is in every Welles film, but especially in Chimes at Midnight. ‘Falstaff is the film of masochism . . . the son humiliates the father whether the latter is absent or present, whether he speaks to him or acts a performance of him, as the father humiliates himself in the son. Only one person is duped, Falstaff. But that is precisely’, says Comolli, ‘where one finds Welles’s imperious obstinacy at carrying his cross.’
It was a cross. By this stage of his life, aged fifty, Welles had assumed a symbolic role in American life: ‘In his deeply melancholy Chimes at Midnight Orson Welles plays the old gormandizer and carouser with all the empathy of an exiled, outcast, abused and unappreciated entertainer,’ wrote Georgia Brown in the Village Voice. ‘If the Falstaff story is a cautionary tale, warning us about banishing play and carnival at one’s peril, Welles treats his own ritual sacrifice as foregone fact.’15 The glib, churlish reception (with few exceptions) of his best film had only confirmed that Welles had become the portly embodiment of failure, the American dream gone horribly wrong; it is striking how many of his films are about one American dream or another, all turned sour. The dream Welles had embodied, the dream of the young genius, the dashing conquistador of every medium, was now utterly expunged. At the very moment at which he delivered his most mature, most complex, most human film, when he was at his absolute prime as a film-maker and at his zenith as an actor, he was deemed by the pundits to be on creative Skid Row. The story he was telling – ‘the world from Falstaff’s point of view’, in Gore Vidal’s inspired phrase – was not one America wanted to hear.16
He never again completed a film in America; he never again completed a full-length film anywhere. But he never, ever stopped, not for one waking moment, trying to tell stories he believed mattered, in the way in which he wanted to tell them, always striving to progress a medium that he felt had hardly begun to fulfil its potential. Twenty years lay ahead of him in which, till he drew his dying breath, Welles served his restless daemon, experimenting, exploring, pointing a way forward. His life underwent a huge transformation. He returned to America, though he would always go back to Europe, where he was treated as a titan, though not a titan in whom many people wished to invest. In his native land he continued to be regarded as a Cautionary Tale, the Man Who Stuck his Tongue Out at Hollywood. In pursuit of the sort of celebrity that he mistakenly thought would encourage backers, Welles became an over-familiar figure on television, occupying rather too much of the guests’ couch, rather too often; he dismayed his admirers by making risible commercials for inferior products. As Shakespeare’s Henry IV says of Richard II, he was ‘lavish of his presence, common-hackney’d in the eyes of men, became stale and cheap to vulgar company’. His physical shape was mocked; sometimes he even descended to making fat jokes against himself. He became, as he put it, a dancing bear.
But underneath it all, and sustained by a relationship with a woman unlike any other relationship with any other woman he had known in his long lifetime of womanising, he was thrusting out towards unknown regions, dreaming celluloid visions, unceasingly toiling over the chance to extend the ribbon of dreams, as he had so memorably described film-making. It was an epic journey to match the epic of his first fifty years, and the fact that there was so little to show for it is at once tragic and oddly inspiring: there is a nobility, a selflessness to the quest. Chimes at Midnight proved not to be a harbinger of anything; Welles sailed off in other directions. But not before he had secured his place in heaven.
Welles in Paris, 1950, with his Othello semi-beard (Photograph Robert Doisneau).
The secretaries: Michael Washinsky, Welles (descending stairs) and Rita Ribolla filming Othello, Venice 1950.
Welles and Mrs Rogers, London, 1955.
Welles as Faustus and Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy: The Blessed and the Damned, 1950.
Welles being listened to by Carol Reed during filming for The Third Man, 1950.
Harry Lime, cornered.
Othello, as seen in London, 1951.
Welles (Othello) and Peter Finch (Iago) drawn by Ronald Searle for Punch.
Othello, original version: with Gudrun Ure (Desdemona) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
St James’s Theatre, embellished by Welles, just before the end of the run, December 1951.
Man, Beast and Virtue: Welles as the beast, 1953.
‘The Final Problem’: Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes, Welles as Moriarty, Ralph Richardson as Dr Watson, London, 1955.
Welles and Paola Mori at their wedding, Caxton Hall, London, 1955.
Welles with Paola Mori and Beatrice Welles, London, 1960.
Welles with his daughter Rebecca, Vienna, 1955.
Moby-Dick press conference, Dress Circle bar, Duke of York’s Theatre, June 1955.
Sketch by Welles for his make-up as the Guv’nor/Captain Ahab.
Welles in costume and as the Guv’nor/Ahab.
Moby-Dick: Welles as the Guv’nor/Ahab with Joan Plowright as Miss Jenkins/Pip, London, 1955.
Welles directing Moby-Dick, Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1955.
Wheelchair-bound King Lear New York, 1956: left to right: Geraldine Fitzgerald, Welles, Roy Dean, John Colicos, Viveca Lindfors.
Welles as Mr Arkadin, 1956.
Welles as Father Mapple in John Huston’s Moby-Dick, 1956.
Welles as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, 1958.
Welles, Charlton and Lydia Heston, Hollywood, 1957.
Welles telling tales in An Arabian Night, Associated Television, 1960.
Welles carrying the motion at the Oxford Union, Oxford University, 1960.
Chimes at Midnight on stage, Belfast Grand Opera House, 1960: Keith Marsh (Justice Shallow), Welles (Falstaff), Aubrey Morris (Justice Silence).
Keith Baxter (King Henry V), Welles (Falstaff), Terence Greenidge (Archbishop of Canterbury).
Rhinoceros, Royal Court Theatre, 1960: Duncan Macrae (John), Laurence Olivier (Berenger).
Strand Theatre, London, 1960: Laurence Olivier (Berenger), Maggie Smith (Daisy) (Photographs John Timbers).
The Trial 1963: Anthony Perkins.
Chimes at Midnight film, location photographs, 1964: Keith Baxter (King Henry V), Welles.
Keith Baxter (Henry V), Welles, Jeremy Roe (John of Lancaster).
Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud.
Welles, Norman Rodway (Hotspur) (Photographs Nicholas Tikhomiroff).
Chimes at Midnight film, location photograph, Welles padding up in the forest, 1964 (Photograph Nicholas Tikhomiroff).
ORSON WELLES’S PERFORMANCES AS AN ACTOR, 1948–1965
Year
Film
Role
1949
Black Magic
Cagliostro
The Third Man
Harry Lime
Prince of Foxes
Cesare Borgia
1950
The Black Rose
Bayan
1951
Return to Glennascaul
Narrator/Himself
Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo
Narrator
1952
Trent’s Last Case
Sigsbee Manderson
1953
L’Uomo, la bestia e la virtù
