Re: Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 1:15 pm
by Sloper
That’s an interesting point about the simplicity of Falstaff, Drucker. One of the big changes Welles makes to the source texts is to make this character less ambiguous and more sympathetic. For instance, consider the way Falstaff recruits his soldiers. In 1 Henry IV, he tells us in a soliloquy how he has ‘misused the King’s press damnably’, recruiting only those who are prosperous and cowardly enough to buy him off. He thus earns a great deal of money (‘three hundred and odd pounds’) from these bribes, and ends up with a battalion consisting only of ‘pitiful rascals’ who can barely stand up, let alone hold their own in a battle. When Hal and Westmorland rebuke Falstaff for gathering soldiers who are ‘exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly’, he retorts that they are ‘good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder...they’ll fill a pit as well as better’. During the battle, Falstaff tells us, ‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life’. We see this process in action in 2 Henry IV, and although all of these moments are comic, they are darkly comic: they help us to see why it’s so important for Hal to detach himself from Falstaff if he is to complete his transformation into a responsible ruler. Falstaff’s selfishness makes him recognisably human, appealing and funny, but in more serious contexts it also costs lives, and the future king of England cannot afford to be so careless about the lives of his subjects.
These moments also help us to see the grand historical narrative traced in these plays from a worm’s-eye-view, and to understand how different the Battle of Shrewsbury looks depending on whether you’re Hotspur (‘if we live, we live to tread on kings; if die, brave death when princes die with us’) or a common nobody (‘food for powder, food for powder’). When Falstaff declares ‘honour’ to be a meaningless concept after placing it alongside the gruesome reality of death in battle, we know that this is a coward rationalising his own reluctance to fight, but we also know that he is in some sense telling the truth. So although I just said that the future king can’t be careless about human life, Falstaff also exposes the ugly truth that Hal, his father, and the other nobles are careless about human life, enlisting countless ordinary people to die in a cause that claims to be about ‘honour’, but is really just a power struggle between a few aristocrats, one ‘scutcheon’ against another.
That’s the complex juggling act that makes the history plays so rewarding to re-visit. It’s crucial that Hal both recognises Falstaff as embodying something he needs to reject, and also comes to understand these ugly truths about his own position through the commentary of this licensed fool. Another obvious example: Falstaff is a thief, but so is Hal’s father (having stolen the crown from Richard), and so by extension is Hal; Hal participates in the Gadshill robbery, acknowledging his status as a thief (Falstaff says to him, ‘do not, when thou art king, hang a thief [you hypocrite]’), but takes the money back from Falstaff in order to restore it to its rightful owners. It’s a nice illustration of how Falstaff, or what Falstaff represents, will facilitate Hal’s staged ‘reformation’, but Hal is also teaching himself something important in this process, coming to terms with his burdens and responsibilities.
In Henry V, when the king disguises himself and walks among his soldiers the night before Agincourt, all of this stuff haunts the tense encounter he has with his disgruntled subjects. They don’t much like the idea of a glorious death (‘there are few die well who die in battle’), and are inclined to think their sovereign will be morally culpable for the fate of their bodies and souls. Hal defends ‘the king’ from their objections, and the outcome is a glorious victory with very few deaths on the English side; but he sort of knows that this isn’t a completely just war, that he’s waging it on the advice of his dying father (‘be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’), and that he only really needs this victory because of the shame still hanging over his title thanks to his father’s deposition and murder of Richard II (see his Claudius-like soliloquy, ‘not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault my father made in compassing the crown...Though all that I can do is nothing worth, since that my penitence comes after ill, imploring pardon’). Despite Henry V’s triumphs, this inherited problem will be the undoing of his son, Henry VI (‘I know not what to say, my title’s weak’), as the earlier history plays have already shown – and as the Chorus reminds us at the very end of this tetralogy.
Hal needs a complicated best friend like Falstaff, because in order to manage the predicament his father bequeaths to him he needs to be a good, multi-talented performer. Look carefully at Hal across the three plays he appears in, and I don’t think you’ll find any clues as to the real man behind the mask. Hamlet says ‘I know not “seems” – I have that within which passeth show’, but Hal only ever seems; inside, he’s a void. Shakespeare’s plays often suggest that good rulers are good performers or dramatists (well they would, wouldn’t they?), but they’re also interested in the danger of self-annihilation through performance. One extreme example of this would be Iago, who boasts of his own inscrutability and declares, ‘I am not what I am’. In some ways, maybe Hal is an even more chilling character, a machine whose only function is to be politically successful. He can be like his father; he can be like Hotspur; and he can be like Falstaff, depending on what the occasion requires. Each role is a complex one: his father is rigidly authoritarian, but happily bends or breaks every rule in the book when he has to; Hotspur represents a heroic idealism that Hal must practice while also (unlike Hotspur) recognising it as bullshit; and Falstaff (despite technically being a knight) enables him to connect with the common subject’s sensuality and indifference to authority, which can be harmless, useful, necessary, dangerous, or all of the above, at different times. Hal needs to be able to balance each aspect of each role, embracing and/or repudiating these different selves from one moment to the next.
What happens to all this in Chimes at Midnight? Here, when Falstaff does the ‘I have misused the king’s press’ speech, it is not a soliloquy but a response to Westmorland’s rebuke about the beggarly soldiers. So Falstaff’s openness about his own corruption makes him seem less sinister, to begin with. The two nobles listening to Falstaff only seem amused by his roguish performance, and indeed it feels more like he’s trying to entertain them than confessing to a serious crime. This Falstaff’s defining characteristic is his desire to be loved. (All this applies to the performance of the ‘honour’ speech later on as well.) Falstaff doesn’t specify that he has made £300 from his scheme, he just says, ‘I press me none but good householders; they’ve bought out their services, and now my whole charge consists of younger sons to younger brothers...the cankers of a calm world and a long peace’. Rather than saying this contemptuously in the absence of the soldiers (‘I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat’), he says it within their hearing, looking back affectionately at them and speaking the ‘cankers’ part of the speech in a sad, elegiac tone. Just a few minutes later (a whole play later in Shakespeare), after gathering more men with the help of Justice Shallow, Falstaff says ‘give me the spare men and spare me the great ones’, and in the context of this film he sounds like he might actually be sincere, rather than just cynically covering up his corruption. We still get some sense of his ruthlessness, especially when he’s saying ‘prick him’ repeatedly. In the play, his scathing, callous contempt for the soldiers is unmistakable, however funny an actor might make it – Welles’s Falstaff is a fundamentally kindly man of the people. And the horrifying battle scene doesn’t implicate Falstaff at all, since he is only ever seen in flashes, running helplessly about the battlefield. All of these ordinary soldiers, not just the ones recruited by Falstaff, are cannon fodder. Falstaff just seems to be more honest about this than his betters are.
We see him get a few coins from Mouldy and Bullcalf, but nothing like the hundreds of pounds he makes in the plays – indeed, Welles often milks Falstaff’s poverty for pathos. He takes a comic, cynical scene from Merry Wives, in which Falstaff has to turn away his followers, and replays it in a melancholy, even tragic tone. There’s a significant alteration in the subsequent comic action as well. In 2 Henry IV, Hal and Poins eavesdrop on Falstaff as he insults them, in a long speech, in order to impress Doll Tearsheet. When Hal emerges and confronts him about this abuse, Falstaff dishonestly protests, ‘No abuse, Hal’. In Chimes at Midnight, Falstaff hardly gets a chance to say anything about Poins and Hal, and what he says is hardly very insulting (‘a good shallow young fellow’). But this is enough to make Hal pounce on him and launch a series of cruel insults: ‘What a hog’s pudding, a bag of flax…Old, cold, withered and, and of intolerable entrails’. These come from the end of Merry Wives, when Falstaff is being publically shamed for his failed seduction attempts. Coming from Hal’s mouth, virtually un-provoked, at a moment when Falstaff is sad and vulnerable, they are painfully abusive. So when Falstaff then says, ‘No abuse, Hal’, the meaning of the line has changed completely: it’s as if he’s saying, ‘Please don’t abuse me, Hal – I can’t take it just now’.
Welles himself repeatedly said that Falstaff wasn’t truly corrupt, but an engaging rascal, ‘a Christmas tree covered with vices – the tree is all innocence and love’ (can’t remember where I found this), and ‘the most truly good man in all literature’. But to interpret the character like this requires a lot of very clever editing. Falstaff can of course be sympathetic even in more ‘faithful’ performances of the plays, but not quite as idealised and tragic as Welles makes him.
One upshot of this is that we see Hal’s long-term project in a very different light. In this film, he is not really learning anything significant during his time in the Boar’s Head tavern – he’s not studying his subjects so that he can understand, communicate with and manipulate them once he becomes king. Instead, his whole plan is reduced to what he says in his famous soliloquy near the start. Falstaff and the other lowlifes are now just pawns in Hal’s public performance of debauchery-then-reformation. So as well as accentuating Falstaff’s more sympathetic qualities, Welles also makes Hal seem less sensitive to the beauties of this other world he’s been slumming it in, and more callous towards his supposed friends. In a way, he’s just waiting to turn into his father, and that’s sort of what happens in the end. I love Welles’s poignant delivery of the line ‘Dost thou think I’ll fear thee as I fear thy father?’ He seems to sense that Hal will become just such a fearful king sooner or later, and this is an especially pointed moment given that they’ve just done the ‘play extempore’. As at the end of that mini-play, Hal sinks into a half-guilty silence.
By adapting Shakespeare in this way, Welles achieves what others have noted in this thread, the sense of cohesion and concision that makes this film so effective, and stops it from feeling like an awkward condensation of two plays (and bits of three others). But what I also love about the film is that it simplifies without becoming simplistic. Yes, Falstaff and Hal lose some of their shades of grey thanks to this drastic editing job, but they’re by no means one-dimensional. For instance, while I do think that the Hal in this film seems less interested in learning from Falstaff than does the one in the plays, it’s reductive to say (as I did above) that he simply ‘turns into his father’ at the end. For one thing, there’s that wonderful moment in the rejection speech, when he says, ‘Leave gourmandising; know the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men; reply not to me with a fool-born jest.’ There’s an implied stage direction here, as Hal delivers another in a long line of ‘fat jokes’ at Falstaff’s expense, and Falstaff happily prepares a witty response – but Hal cuts him dead. Keith Baxter plays the moment with a sense of genuine amusement, before urgently suppressing it. And then he lowers his voice during the ‘for competence of life we do allow you’ bit, his tearful gaze lingering on Falstaff for much longer than it needs to, as Falstaff’s expression shifts from mortified horror to a kind of sad but admiring acceptance. I think Baxter said once in an interview that it was as if Falstaff was looking up at his surrogate son and thinking, ‘that’s my boy’. So in a subtle and economical way, the film still conveys the idea that Hal has been ‘educated’ by Falstaff as much as by his father; this climactic regal performance draws on Falstaffian wit as well as Henrician rigour.
The transposition of Hal’s foiling of the assassination plot from Henry V is a brilliant touch: now, when Hal forgives the drunken man, and observes that such small faults must be forgiven since larger treasons must sometimes be forgiven too, he is not toying with his treacherous nobles before revealing that he knows about their plot. In part, he’s showing leniency in honour of his friendship with Falstaff, indicating again that he really does think fondly of him on some level. And again, he shows that his time with Falstaff has contributed something to his new identity as a ruler. Now the comment about forgiving great and little faults seems to recall (and contrast with) his father’s towering inflexibility, which we saw right at the start of the film. It’s as if he’s saying that, to be an effective ruler, you need to be able to glance from the lowest to the highest of your subjects, understanding and forgiving both the Falstaffs and the Hotspurs, and thereby controlling both categories of rebels more humanely, and more efficiently, than Henry IV had done. None of this cancels out our sense of Hal as a cold, calculating figure, but it does suggest that he is a bit more complex than the ‘awful shit’ Welles claimed to see him as.
Likewise in the case of Falstaff himself, for all Welles’s editing there is far more to him than ‘pure innocence and love’. For me, Welles’s defining characteristic as an actor is insecurity. To digress a bit, I think there’s a kind of insecurity about his film-making technique as well: he seems terrified of boring the audience, constantly finding new and ingenious ways of framing shots, moving the camera, manipulating the soundtrack, blocking the actors, playing around with the set, props, locations, etc.. Perhaps this is what Randall Maysin is objecting to, and I guess I can understand why it puts some people off, or gives the impression that Welles can’t ‘do’ emotional depth. He can, in my view, but sometimes it takes a few viewings to notice it. Yes, ‘I speak to thee my heart’ is an obviously touching moment in this film, as is Mistress Quickly’s eulogy over the dead Falstaff. The battle scene has more emotional impact than most such sequences in war films.
But anyway... Especially as an actor, Welles never ever looks comfortable in his own skin. It goes beyond his love of elaborate make-up and costuming, right down to the smallest tics and gestures. One of his most common facial expressions is the one where he furrows his brow and smiles quizzically, and it can convey various things: he’s searching for the right phrase; he’s decided on a phrase, but isn’t sure it’s the right one; he’s marvelling at the rightness of the phrase he’s in the middle of speaking, as if he can’t believe he found it; or, in response to someone or something outside himself, he’s trying to make sense of what he’s seeing and hearing, assessing whether someone is benevolent or not, whether he’s just been betrayed or not, whether he’s being laughed at, and whether it’s playful or malicious laughter; and perhaps most importantly, it’s an expression that seems torn between amusement and sadness.
When he made Othello, Welles decided that Iago would be motivated by impotence, as Micheál MacLiammoír recalled in his account of making the film, Put Money In Thy Purse: ‘“Impotent,” [Welles] roared in (surely somewhat forced) rich bass baritone, “that’s why he hates life so much – they always do”… He then gobbled up some sturgeon’. I love the tongue-in-cheek hint that Welles was over-compensating. And indeed the film ends up being as much about Othello’s impotence, caught from Iago, or just catalysed by him. MacLiammoír also said that Welles’s hurried delivery of the lines, ‘with his great bulk and power, gives an extraordinary feeling of loss, of withering, diminishing, crumbling, toppling over’. [By the way, I’m not endorsing Welles’s views on impotence here, just citing them and arguing for their importance to understanding his work.]
It’s a theme that plays some part in other Welles films too. You could see Kane as the story of a man who came of age prematurely, never quite knew how to be anything other than a pre-pubescent child, could never sustain a happy relationship with a woman, ‘hated life’ as Welles puts it, and like Iago took his frustrations out on the world by trying to assert his power over it. And I know it has some hard-core fans on this board, so apologies to them, but I always find F For Fake hard to watch because it and its creator are trying so painfully hard to be charming and engaging. Those scenes where Welles is holding forth at dinner are just agonising to me. I always feel that way about ‘raconteurs’, these charming and charismatic people who always seem to be performing. It’s not so much that I dislike them, they just look as though they’re screaming inside. That film is aggressively and even a bit creepily virile, with all that ‘girl-watching’ business, and when Welles makes up a fake story of his own it’s all about a great artist being sexually tortured by an inaccessible beauty, who awakens his ‘fertility’ and ‘fecundity’ as an artist, animating his ‘virile brush’. And then it turns out none of this ever happened – it was a fantasy of virility, mocking its own emptiness with that Wellesian mixture of amusement and melancholy.
Also, while we’re on the phallic imagery, I’ll just say it: F for Falstaff / False-Staff / Fall-Staff.
Sorry about that. Anyway, to finally get to my point: this is why I find Welles’s performance as Falstaff more complex than his ‘Christmas tree’ comment would suggest. If Hal ends up being a brilliant performer with no real substance to him, this too is a trick he learns from Falstaff, who in this film seems constantly haunted by the fear that, underneath his bluster, he may not be anything ‘truly’. In F For Fake Welles seems tentatively to be arguing that art itself has a kind of truth in it, regardless of whether it lies to us, or whether it was made by a forger: he laments (at least semi-seriously) that a great fiction-writer like Clifford Irving had to become a fraud in order to make his voice heard. So with Falstaff you could say that, even though he does nothing but lie, these lies grant access to some kind of truth. It’s a central idea in much of Shakespeare’s work, most famously illustrated in Hamlet’s plot to expose his uncle’s guilt: the play is a piece of fakery, but it strikes Claudius to the soul and holds a mirror up to him, revealing a truth that could never have been exposed by more direct, earnest methods.
But what kind of truth is there in Falstaff’s performances? As Welles plays him, I think he stands for the sensual and communal joys of life, but also for the ephemerality of these things (and the equal ephemerality of allegedly ‘higher’, nobler endeavours). King Henry says that his whole life has been a scene acting one argument (since he usurped the crown); in a way, Falstaff’s is too. Through his play-acting he seems to say that play-acting is all we really have in life, all anything amounts to: playing is like eating and drinking and having sex; it’s all superficial, it’s all temporary, and it all fades away in time, but the joy it brings is perhaps the most ‘real’ experience available to us. But even that ray of hope is then made to seem doubtful. Thanks to the ambiguity of Welles’s performance, it also feels as though his play-acting is an unsuccessful attempt to cover up a deep sadness – in fact, that sadness may be the most profound truth this playing gives access to. I also remember Baxter talking about how the comedy in the film doesn’t work that well, or at least isn’t that funny, and attributing this to the fact that Welles saw the story as a fundamentally sad one. It was sort of surprising to me when I realised that, although Welles is a very witty, humorous actor and film-maker, he’s never really a very funny one. A bit like Shakespeare’s fools, really.
Welles said he intended the film as a lament for the passing of ‘Merrie England’, but he also (perhaps inevitably) ends up questioning whether such a utopian vision of the past can have any resemblance to reality. The discrepancy noted by Roger Ryan above, between the opening pre-credits sequence and the significantly different repetition of this scene later in the film, is a good example. Are these old men survivors from an idyllic, lyrically beautiful past, framed monumentally against a roaring fire, marking the ‘chimes at midnight’ that herald the imminent, tragic end to their world; or are we actually just looking head-on at three sad old men who don’t like each other that much, sitting around with nothing to say, reminiscing about the late-night debaucheries of their youth, and muttering incoherently about death? It’s a film that seems to show us something wonderful and beautiful, and then sadly tells us that this ‘something’ was never really there.
Re: Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 10:47 am
by Sloper
ando wrote:I've always felt that this film version of Falstaff was a bit too much of a wink and the Henry IV scenes far too grave. It doesn't help that the austere surroundings of Henry are accompanied by clearly visible breath issuing from the monarch in the seemingly ice cold castle (a great motif when it's employed later with Falstaff on his back at Shewsbury; creating a completely different impression!) but the contrasts of the the court and countryside couldn't be more pronounced. It gives a fairytale quality to the narrative
I love seeing the actors' breath, especially in the castle scenes. You're right, there's something very 'fairytale' about it; you literally wonder how anyone can live in a place like that. In this film, Falstaff doesn't have the bit where he says (looking at a dead body on the battlefield), 'I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath; give me life!' But that does seem to sum up the opposition you refer to: the royal castle full of grinning, miserable death-heads vs. the joie de vivre outside.
Speaking of favourite Shakespeare performances, Gielgud’s in this film is one of mine. I can understand why some might find his style of acting a bit outdated and mannered, but I’m a complete sucker for it. My favourite part of the film is, funnily enough, also the most static: Henry’s ‘sleep’ soliloquy beside the window. You can sense Welles’s reverence here in his refusal to do any editing, or move the camera. Apparently the crew gave a spontaneous round of applause after this performance. I used to watch this scene during long nights of insomnia, and can now replay it in my head whenever I want; I remember every inflection Gielgud gives to every syllable, and almost every facial tic and movement of the head.
Among other things, the scene is a great meditation on the Henry/Falstaff dynamic. It’s one of the longest, most ‘static’ shots in the film (along with the one Roger Ryan mentioned above, which as he said emphasises ‘spaciousness’, where this one underlines Henry’s confinement), and shows that Welles didn’t need to leap around hyperactively to hold the viewer’s attention.
To the left is the monk-like Henry; to the right are the large metal bars of a window, through which the light (of dawn, presumably) shines. Gielgud is positioned so that with a minimum of movement he can illuminate or darken his face, or just his eyes. When he looks straight into the light, as he does at the start of the speech (‘How many thousands of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep?’), his eyes squint painfully; as he then retreats into the shadow of the window-bar (‘Oh sleep, oh gentle sleep’), his eyes close, but then open again, and there’s a chilling sense that when Henry closes his eyes – when he turns off the light, so to speak – they still remain open, staring desperately into the darkness that has become his natural element. Inside is the darkness, his castle, his power (now fully consolidated, at this point in the film – in the play it’s soon to be secured, but there are still rebels to be put down), along with loneliness, the guilt that haunts him, a total absence of all those things that sustain life and make it bearable. Outside are his subjects, who despite being ‘in the light’ are sleeping peacefully, who can sleep (according to Henry) even if they’re atop a ship-mast in a storm. Indeed, as well as being kept awake by what is inside the castle, Henry also seems to be attacked by the light from outside, unable to block it out. When he says, ‘Then, happy low, lie down’, he looks into the light again, and we feel his frustration at those low subjects, whose ease he envies, and whose disobedience has caused him so much grief (‘lie down, stop rebelling, don’t you see how happy you are?’). We spend a lot of time in Shakespeare’s history plays being told that it’s lonely at the top, and in this scene Welles and Gielgud (and Lavagnino, who scores this scene and the whole film wonderfully) find a very beautiful way of dramatising that idea.
Mr Sausage wrote:Harold Bloom, who considers Falstaff, along with Hamlet, Shakespeare's most expansive and complete character (and who himself played Falstaff once in a single production of the two plays), says his favourite Falstaff performance was by Ralph Richardson in a production that also had Laurence Olivier as Hotspur. Bloom is ambivalent on Shakespeare productions in general, but he has always praised Richardson's performance highly.
Richardson is one of my favourite actors (mainly because of his performance as my namesake in
The Heiress), and I would kill to have seen him play Falstaff. Keith Baxter said that Welles was a little intimidated by Richardson’s performance in this role, and was afraid he couldn’t measure up. I love that he got this great former Falstaff to do the Holinshed narration, almost as if he’s a sort of good luck charm presiding over the film.
My favourite Falstaff, though, is Anthony Quayle in the 1979 BBC films. The films themselves are watchable but not great – on this basis, you can see why the series got a reputation for being dry and unadventurous. But Quayle, who had played the role on stage decades earlier opposite Richard Burton, is a mesmerising Falstaff. He’s a long way from the Welles conception: here the fat knight often looks diminutive and weak, a small, insecure man blustering away the last dregs of his charisma, his face constantly red and his voice hoarse with the effort. The Lord Chief Justice’s diatribe about Falstaff’s decrepitude seems especially apt here. He’s a genuinely corrupt character, and he knows it. But for all that, Quayle still makes him about as sympathetic as Welles does. During the play-within-the-play in Part 1, David Gwillim’s Hal becomes truly mean-spirited when insulting Falstaff, shocking the other tavern-dwellers into nervous silence. Quayle tries to laugh it off, but in the process descends into a coughing fit. We sense that Falstaff knows he has it coming, that everything Hal says to him is true, but that his young friend’s brutality takes him by surprise. He has to struggle to catch his breath, and then to get back in character and go on with the play. He looks at Hal as if to say, ‘Well of course I am all those things, but do you really hate me that much?’ I suppose what I like most about Quayle’s performance is that it leaves me not quite knowing what to think: he doesn’t let you write off Falstaff one way or the other.