Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

[ellipsis7]

The battle scenes are classic... Splunging round in the mire, hacking at each other, crudely, butcherly... OW as Falstaff stumbling round like an overweight can of baked beans, trying to avoid trouble... A clatter and a charge wipes the screen - the battle is over, and the casualties lie in the swill, their blood merging with the mud... No heroic victory, no redemption in battle, only survival...

[exte]

Thanks everyone! So its the Spanish dvd I should pursue then?

[jsteffe]

We have the Spanish DVD at my library, and I was frusted by the poor MPEG encoding--there are vertical lines running throughout the picture due to the way the image is sampled. No, I'm not confusing this with print damage--I mean MPEG compression specifically.

[atcolomb]

My friend has the French Canal version and it has a better image than the Spanish version. I think Miramax films has the rights to release it in the USA but for some resaon there is a hold up on it. It would have been nice to see Criterion release it as a special edition.

[Magic Hate Ball]

The battle scenes were pretty good. I prefer the sequences in Kubrick's Paths Of Glory, actually. Welles' cinematography was interesting; certainly solid, and defenitely "plain", as he put it himself. Unfortunately, it's not particularly amazing to look at if you can't understand a word they're saying.

[Person]

I find the deep focus cinematography in Chimes to be bold, striking. It's easy to get carried away when filming Shakespeare and create a overly-detailed aesthetic (Branagh's filming of Hamlet) but the visual approach on Chimes was highly appropriate.

[Peacock]

According to an MoC twitter thingy, Beatrice Welles has sold the rights to Chimes at Midnight to the Dax foundation. So there may be some hope for a future Criterion release.

Does anyone have any confirmation that she actually sold the rights beyond the one screening?

[stereo]

Just a personal view, but I believe Chimes is Welles' best film, period.

[ellipsis7]

I think that could be true - prior to the film he did a stage version of CHIMES here in Dublin (& Belfast), to mixed reaction, and of course it evolved out of his previous FIVE KINGS project, dating back to his school days...

[Yojimbo]

The battle scenes were pretty good. I prefer the sequences in Kubrick's Paths Of Glory, actually. Welles' cinematography was interesting; certainly solid, and defenitely "plain", as he put it himself. Unfortunately, it's not particularly amazing to look at if you can't understand a word they're saying.

Speaking of those battle scenes, I was strongly reminded of Ford's 'Fort Apache': Welles, of course, famously studied 'Stagecoach' in the process of making 'Kane', so I'm just wondering

[Sloper]

I do think Kane is his best film, but Chimes is probably my personal favourite (followed not too far behind by Othello). I've never been at all bothered by the sound issues, either. As in Eisenstein's silents, that rough-and-ready quality is an essential part of the film's personality, and the experience just wouldn't be as exhilerating with a cleaned-up soundtrack.

One of the things that makes this the best Shakespeare film ever made is the freedom with which it treats the text(s). If you read the plays, or the Rutgers Critical Edition of the screenplay - a transcript, but very useful in that it indicates the provenance of each line of dialogue - you really get a sense of what a scarily intelligent adaptation this is. It's far more radical a re-appropriation of Shakespeare than Macbeth or Othello. Welles cherry-picks so wantonly, the whole thing ought to come off as a confused collage, but it doesn't. I saw it before having read the plays, and I thought the story made perfect sense; or rather, even if I didn't follow the story in every detail, the film certainly achieved its overall effect, and came across as a working, organic whole.

But at the same time, the artificiality (the un-naturalness) of the soundtrack really helps to foreground how constructed and deliberate, but also how freewheeling Welles' approach is. He's totally preoccupied with getting his narrative right and pushing all the right buttons at the right time. Being able to see the joins only throws into relief the exuberant creative joy of the enterprise, and this sounds presumptuous but I'm sure that was how Welles wanted it. He used (if memory serves) to be quite apologetic about the soundtracks to this and Othello, saying things like 'well it was fine when we'd finished with it, so I don't know what happened after that'. But I like to think he just knew better than to care about such things. Some of the greatest artists are surprisingly unconcerned about certain aspects of what they're doing (check out those boom-mic shots in Dreyer...) and this is part of what makes them so great.

[J Wilson]

According to an MoC twitter thingy, Beatrice Welles has sold the rights to Chimes at Midnight to the Dax foundation. So there may be some hope for a future Criterion release.

Does anyone have any confirmation that she actually sold the rights beyond the one screening?

Unless something drastic changed behind the scenes, Beatrice Welles has never owned any rights to Chimes at Midnight. The hold-up with the release of the film has been the long-running battle between the widow of producer Harry Saltzman and the other producers, Emilio Piedra and Angel Escolano. You can even see their dual copyright claims on the US copyright web site. Both parties apparently believe this film is an untapped goldmine of profit, I guess, and no one has consequently been able to release it outside of France and Spain. The only Welles film Beatrice Welles owns is Othello.

[HarryLong]

Both parties apparently believe this film is an untapped goldmine of profit, I guess

Wow, are they delusional.
Now I love this film & I'm sure there are a goodly number of cinephiles who want to see it ... but an "untapped goldmine?"
Please ...

[Tommaso]

I did a search on Chimes at Midnight yesterday and it came up on Turner Classic Movies website for purchase. Does anyone know anything about this DVD? I don't want to get my hopes up in case it's too good to be true. Anyways, good to be here and I look forward to much discussion.

The disc is also listed at amazon, and there are quite a few customer reviews. It is a dvd-r and should certainly be considered as some sort of bootleg. I am surprised that TCM are selling it, but then, I'm equally surprised that amazon did.... According to the reviews there, it seems to be quite decent, but certainly not 'the real thing'.

[atcolomb]

Lets hope that someday a decent dvd version will come out and i cross my fingers that Criterion can stang the rights to do it!!

[Jarpie]

I ordered Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff from HMV which they are selling exclusively, unfortunately it uses the same master as the spanish DVD so the picture quality pretty horrible.

[HarryLong]

I did a search on Chimes at Midnight yesterday and it came up on Turner Classic Movies website for purchase. Does anyone know anything about this DVD? I don't want to get my hopes up in case it's too good to be true. Anyways, good to be here and I look forward to much discussion.

The disc is also listed at amazon, and there are quite a few customer reviews. It is a dvd-r and should certainly be considered as some sort of bootleg. I am surprised that TCM are selling it, but then, I'm equally surprised that amazon did.... According to the reviews there, it seems to be quite decent, but certainly not 'the real thing'.

And that link now brings forth the message: "Sorry, this item is either discontinued or does not exist."
Amazon still shows several versions. I think the one I got hold of (bought by a friend... I think from a vendor in Argentina) is the fifth one down.

[hamsterburger]

It appears that a UK release is on the way

[Jonathan S]

As the distributor as Palladium, I think it's a safe bet this will be the same as the "pretty horrible" HMV exclusive mentioned three posts above.

[atcolomb]

What a shame....They can release a blu-ray version of Showgirls but trying to release a well made dvd version of Chimes...Orson must be laughing right now.....

[muflibird]

The dvd released by Studio Canal a few years ago was a stunning transfer with full, crisp sound. Not only was the print almost immaculate, dialogue in the first reel had even been synced up nicely with the picture. Unfortunately, even this superb version is marred by minor sync problems that crop up from time to time later in the film. After spending a few evenings lining up spoken words with moving mouths on a timeline, it seems clear that the actors did an incredible job of post-recording their lines. Unfortunately, the mundane chore of editing the dialogue tracks was done haphazardly. A shame, because watching a pristine print of "Chimes" with properly synced audio is a revelation.

[John Edmond]

Are you sure that the audio sync problems are a dvd problem, and not inherent to the film? It's not unheard of for independently shot Welles films to feature dubious ADR. Sorry, it's just that none of previous thread pages confirmed how the audio had been restored - whether it was just de-muffled or also synced.

[muflibird]

I didn't mean to suggest that Studio Canal synced up the audio, though they may have. You're correct - audio problems originated with the film. I saw it in a theater in 1969, and the first reel was notoriously out of whack because of sloppy lab work (According to Barbara Leaming's biography of Welles). As critic Pauline Kael had promised, I sometimes struggled to figure out which character was supposed to be speaking. I've sampled three dvd releases in the past few years, and in each one, the huge problem with the first reel has been addressed, though the Studio Canal version is the only one that actually nails it. Oddly enough, the cheap disc from Nostalgia Films has slightly better overall sync in the second reel than the Studio Canal release.

Even within the reels, there are differences. Lines, sometimes single words, that were obviously out of place, have been dragged where they should be. Are dvd manufacturers responsible for the changes? Not necessarily. The source prints themselves could represent various stages of tinkering with the soundtrack that may have taken place in the late 60's, after the horrible American release. My original point was that the actors' dialogue replacement was amazingly well done. The sound editing and laboratory work were not. It is a more enjoyable film when audio and video match, and, these days, making them match is not that hard.

[Peacock]

Surely if you move the dialogue around for sync now your also moving the background sounds and score too?