The two sources of the film’s tragic view—the passage of youth and the necessities of politics—are most apparent in the opening and closing images. At the beginning, before the credits, we see Falstaff and Shallow (the latter played by Alan Webb) moving across a snowy landscape, the whiteness in the air recalling both Kane and Ambersons, where snow is a multivalent symbol of innocence and death. The two aged men resemble pathetic clowns, one huge and swollen, the other tiny and thin; as they amble painfully toward an empty inn and sit before a fire, they discuss old times, Welles’s booming voice contrasting with Webb’s fluty tones:
SHALLOW: Is Jane Nightwork alive?
FALSTAFF: She lives, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW: Doth she hold her own well?
FALSTAFF: Old . . . Old, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW: She must be old. She cannot choose but be old.
A tight close-up of two faces in firelight shows the lines and pocks of age, like the close-up of a dying Major Amberson. “Jesus, the days that we have seen!” Shallow cries, and Falstaff slowly replies, “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.” Stirring music and a montage of military scenes provide backdrop for the ensuing credits, but the basically elegiac tone of the film has been established with force. Clearly this will not be a purely comic, saturnalian version of Falstaff, but rather a story about a charmingly unscrupulous bohemian, a critic of the times, who has outlived his influence and who broods over his old age.
The elegy is combined with the political theme, the old man passing away at virtually the same time as Hal assumes the crown. In the last shot, Falstaff’s giant coffin is hauled slowly off by Peto and Bardolph, the camera rising on a crane as the cart bearing the coffin is pulled through the gates of Mistress Quickly’s inn. The mistress stands in the gateway, while in the distance, across a barren field, we see the castle of the new king. Richardson’s voice reads from the Holinshed commentary on Henry V: “a majesty was he that both lived and died a pattern in princehood, a lodestar in honor, and famous to the world alway.” This judgment of Hal is not entirely untrue to the character we’ve seen, but in any case it is powerfully ironic, the stark visual juxtaposition of the inn and the castle underlining the conflicts of the film as a whole. Hal has forsaken “sport” for politics, comradeship for an isolated rule—and the result is death.
Figure 9.3: Falstaff’s coffin is hauled away amid the visual juxtaposition of the inn and the castle.
Everywhere Welles has contrasted the two worlds of the action—the inn and the court. The Boar’s Head is a vast, oak-beamed bawdy house, lined with narrow corridors and occasionally filled with revelers. The stench of old beer seems to hang in the air, and Welles has done nothing to give the place the artificial charm of “Merrie England.” It is a bare, rough, excremental atmosphere, filled with spontaneous, pansexual displays of affection, where, in the latter parts of the film, imagery of disease and death predominates. Hardly an attractive realm, it is at least preferable to the castle, which resembles nothing so much as the cold vaults of the Thatcher Memorial Library. The film proper opens inside this tomb-like palace, where ceilings are lost in darkness and voices echo down the empty chambers. The king gives audience to the Percys (I, iii of Henry IV, part I) and is photographed from a low angle seated at his throne, a Nuremberg light burning the edges of his crown. Henry, a victim of age and the sins of his past, is a gaunt, sepulchral figure whose very breath emits frosty clouds. The light streaming down to where he sits is at once regal and ethereal, but it is also barred like a prison. From the beginning he is depicted as a dying man, a wraith garbed in ornamental clothes; in contrast to his rival Falstaff he is bodiless, and Falstaff’s stomach mocks him in the same way that comedy always mocks tragedy. Falstaff, on the other hand, has inflated himself to ridiculous proportions, eating and drinking in defiance of any sense of propriety; one of the film’s many paradoxes is that his death will result more from a broken spirit than from bloated flesh.
In Shakespeare’s plays the prince is situated somewhat between the twin excesses of the king and Falstaff, which, as I have suggested, have a relationship rather like the superego and the id. In Welles’s film, however, the prince sublimates the body when he moves to the castle and assumes the crown. He becomes not so much a kingly presence as a priestly presence, his physique melting away and his face assuming the dignity of his father. In figure 9.5, for example, he is shown giving official forgiveness to Falstaff, who has been guilty of interrupting the coronation. The scene is borrowed freely from Henry V, where Falstaff is already dead and the king pardons an anonymous criminal; it is one of Welles’s most daring revisions of Shakespeare, but it functions beautifully within this film, Hal’s order to “enlarge” the prisoner becoming a crucial pun. The new king looks sadly into the distance, recalling lost youth and friendship, his face already showing a certain strain. Near the beginning of the film he promised to “imitate the sun, / who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That, when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wondered at.” Now, having become king, he has followed his dying father’s advice to “busy giddy minds with foreign wars” and has ordered an imperialist expedition to France. His majestic face, however, is distinctly pale, and the sun behind his head struggles with the “base contagious clouds,” diffusing its light ambiguously.
Figure 9.4: Henry IV (John Geilgud) seated at his throne.
Figure 9.5: Hal, now a king, orders Falstaff to be “enlarged” from prison.
Welles foreshadows this conclusion early in the film when he turns the prince’s most important soliloquy (“I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyok’d humor of your idleness”) into a crucial exchange with Falstaff. The two stand in the gateway to the inn, Falstaff in his nightshirt at midday, Hal remarking, “If all the year were playing holidays / To sport would be as tedious as to work.” At the end of the speech, which Hal has delivered partly to himself but within Falstaff’s hearing, there is small banter about the jobs Falstaff will be given once the heir apparent becomes king. The old man becomes visibly uneasy as a result of the prince’s confession. Hal walks away across the field toward the castle, waving good-bye, while Falstaff stands in the gate, feigning gaiety. The prince’s farewell and his physical passage from inn to castle are of course the underlying movements of the story, but his remarkable forthrightness in this scene is also a key to what Welles has called the “beady-eyed” aspects of his character. He is, after all, mainly his father’s son, and it is sometimes difficult to tell where his sense of responsibility ends and where his ambition begins. The ending of the film therefore strikes a balance somewhere between tragedy and melancholy satire.
Critics agree that Chimes at Midnight is Welles’s most satisfying production of Shakespeare, but the reason is not simply the interesting moral and psychological structure I have been trying to describe, nor the fact that the plays are adaptable to his philosophy or temperament. Actually, one reason the film is so good is that the history plays are in some ways more naturally “cinematic” than either Macbeth or Othello, which have a simpler, more unified design. There is something inherently montage-like in the way Shakespeare juxtaposes the various characters and their worlds, moving from the high seriousness of the court to the comedy of the tavern, or setting off Hotspur’s valiant pre-battle promise to “tread on kings” against Falstaff’s commentary on “honor.” As we have seen, Welles recognized this quality very early in his career and had tried in Five Kings to create the effect of cuts, dissolves, and fades, using elaborate lighting and mobile platforms to give the audience the feeling of movies. With film itself, of course, he had the opportunity to move instantaneously across space, matching and contrasting several plot lines with even greater force.
Throughout the film, Welles’s free editing of the plays and his fine instinct for abrupt transition serve to heighten the tension between Shakespeare’s characters. For example, at the end of the openi
ng scene, Hotspur (Norman Rodway) stands glowering in a castle corridor, sneering at “that sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales,” wishing to have him “poisoned with a pot of ale.” Suddenly we are given a close-up of the prince, who drains a cup of sack and wipes his lips. In the previous shots in the castle, the conspiring Percy family has been photographed from radically low angles, the camera cutting sharply from one portentous view to another; inside the inn, however, the images are closer to a democratic eye level and the camera tracks dizzily, moving back from the close-up of the prince as he tosses his cup to a page, then following him as he walks past a row of wine vats and into the arms of four playful whores. Later the film takes us just as abruptly from the Gadshill robbery to the interior of the castle, reversing the order of Shakespeare’s scenes but underlining the conflict between the king and his son: the robbery closes with the prince and Poins skipping down a sunny path, congratulating themselves on the prank they’ve just played on Falstaff (“Were’t not for laughing, I should pity him”). Immediately the screen goes dark and a great iron door swings open, the king entering a murky throne room to ask, “Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?”
During the closing parts of the film, these transitions establish subtle thematic connections between parts of the story, even though the principle of visual contrast remains in force. The king’s soliloquy on sleep is shot with Gielgud standing in a dim corridor before a window, and when it ends Welles fades to a close-up of Hal, seated in daylight beside a lake, remarking, “Before God I am exceeding weary.” This speech, in turn, is followed by Falstaff’s melancholy exchange with Doll Tearsheet, in which he lies down on a dirty bunk and laments his age and fading strength. Still later, when Hal mistakenly thinks his father has died and takes up the crown only to discover that the king has risen from a sickbed, Welles is able to break the scene in half, inserting a counterpointed moment with Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence (a much-revised version of a few lines from III, ii of Henry IV, part two). Hal takes the crown from his dying father’s bed and kneels in a chapel, swearing to guard it against “the world’s whole strength,” while in the background priests sing a dirge. We then cut briefly to the inn, where the three “comic” characters sit before a fire; the camera never moves, simply watching firelight on faces and allowing a profoundly sad yet funny moment to comment on the inevitability of death. Falstaff sits uncomfortably, drinking sack; the stuttering, nearly deaf and dumb Silence is at the left, holding a pig in his lap; and the shrill-voiced Shallow is at the right, bending across Falstaff’s belly to make himself heard:
SHALLOW: And to think how many of my old acquaintances are dead.
SILENCE: We shall all f . . . f . . .
SHALLOW: Certain! Tis Certain! Death, as the psalmist said, is certain to all. All shall die.
(Eight seconds of pure silence, as the three gaze thoughtfully ahead into the fire. Shallow suddenly bursts out with a loud question that startles Falstaff.)
SHALLOW: How a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamford fair?
SILENCE: A good yoke of b . . . b . . .
FALSTAFF: (Somewhat perturbed) Death is certain.
Sometimes even bolder ironies are created by presenting two events simultaneously, as in the sequence leading up to the battle of Shrewsbury, where we see heavily armored knights being loaded ridiculously upon horses with the aid of pulleys, while on the soundtrack Hotspur cries out: “Come, let me taste my horse, / That is to bear me like a thunderbolt / Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales!”
The battle itself, of course, is a privileged moment, in which the director frees himself almost entirely from a theatrical text so that he may present a sustained wordless action that is nevertheless worthy of Shakespeare’s poetry. Staged on a windswept plain that evokes images from both John Ford’s cavalry westerns and Eisenstein’s late epics, the battle is composed out of hundreds of brief shots and becomes the finest example of rhythmic montage in Welles’s career. Interestingly, however, it was photographed as a series of long takes, Welles working on the theory that the combatants wouldn’t have time to “warm up” if they performed in brief intervals. “I filmed the battle scenes,” Welles said, “with a crane that shifted position very quickly at ground level, as quickly as possible, to follow the action.” The mobile crane was important not only because Welles was able to take in broad areas of the field but also because the rapid editing of what were originally shots in motion creates a different rhythm than the standard battle scene, which uses multiple cameras in relatively static setups. In Chimes at Midnight we cut from one dynamic moment to another, the individual images disclosing different levels of action and the camera lending an eerie quality to the blood and gore because of its sudden, almost balletic movements.
Welles also claimed to have edited the battle sequence so that “each shot would show a blow, a counterblow, a blow received, a blow struck, and so on.” Critics have generally taken him at his word, but close analysis shows that he did nothing of the kind—and good thing, because the “blow given, blow received” formula would have resulted in monotony. Like most directors he cuts from an army on the left to an army on the right and frequently shows a mace crashing down on one part of the field only to cut to a man falling in another place. Once in the heat of hand-to-hand combat, however, he simply throws a series of brutal and confused images on the screen; the “center cannot hold,” and the men have lost their identity in a struggle for survival.
This is not to say that the battle has no “plot” or artistic logic. The shots reproduced in figures 9.6–9.15 give some sense of the overall strategy, as well as the visual qualities of the sequence. It begins with a horse charge over a misty, frost-laden field, but when the lines converge, every vestige of separate armies is lost, and images of knights on horseback give way to ranks of ugly foot soldiers, occasionally photographed in fast motion or with confused jerks of the camera, hacking away in the midst of crowds. The battle is initiated with cries of “For Harry and Saint George!” only to degenerate into ignoble savagery, with men beating viciously at prone bodies. As the day of carnage wears on, the field becomes a quagmire of mud and blood, piles of soldiers writhing in slurred motion and falling down atop one another. Occasionally one glimpses a helmeted knight struggling like a dinosaur in quicksand, or a mass of men so caked with mud that, as Pauline Kael has remarked, they seem to have become their own memorial statuary. An extraordinary series of individual images stays in the mind. A dark figure stabbing at a dying man and then, in surrealistically fast motion, moving to another part of the field to thrust his sword into another wounded soldier; groups of men gathered around anonymous shapes on the ground, cutting away like a crowd of jackals surrounding carrion. In one shot (the last of the series), we see the legs of two men writhing in slime, the figure on the bottom jerking spasmodically as if in parody of sexual climax. It is a significant image because it undermines completely Hotspur’s eloquent, poetic love of war. Early in the film Welles has suggested that a passion for military derring-do is a displacement for sex (the dialogue between Hotspur and Kate is intercut with buglers blowing pompous calls to arms), but here the underlying eroticism of the chivalric code (“Yet once ere night / I will embrace him with a soldier’s arm / That he shall shrink under my courtesy”) is exposed in all its cruel perversity.
Figures 9.6–9.11: Battle sequence from Chimes at Midnight.
Figures 9.12–9.15: Battle sequence from Chimes at Midnight.
The success of the battle scenes, however, has less to do with the manifest content of the images than with the soundtrack and the half-hidden, evocative qualities of the photography. Welles hinted at this fact when he said that he did not “stroll about like a collector choosing images and putting them together.” “I am most concerned,” he said, “with rendering a musical impression. . . . The visual aspect is that which is dictated to me by poetic and musical forms.” Hence the battle is nearly as impressive if one simply listens to the sounds. The grunts of the soldiers and the c
lang of metal have been weirdly amplified, like radio sound effects, with the noise of combat set in counterpoint to music and choral voices composed by Francesco Lavagnino. The harsh, sped-up dissonance of battle contrasts with the extreme regularity and slowness of the choral chant, creating a spooky, fatalistic quality, as if all this action were going nowhere but to death. On the screen the horses and men are obscured by fog and dust or are photographed in such rapid motion that one barely has time to absorb the details. Welles has commented, “The danger in cinema is that in using a camera you see everything. What one must do is succeed in . . . making things emerge that are not, in fact, visible.” In other words, the director’s job is to weave a spell, in this case with pure speed and the suggestion of heated violence, none of it fully apparent in the isolated images.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 31