Directed by Orson Welles
USA | 1966 | 119 min
With: Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud, Marina Vlady
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s later film career, Chimes at Midnight returns to the screen after being unavailable for decades. This brilliantly crafted Shakespeare adaptation was the culmination of Welles’s lifelong obsession with the Bard’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff, the loyal, often soused childhood friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son, Prince Hal. Appearing in several plays as a comic supporting figure, Falstaff is here the main event: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero, played by Welles with lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both Henry IV plays as well as Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Welles created an unorthodox Shakespeare film that is also a gritty period piece, one that he called “a lament . . . for the death of Merrie England.” Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic battle sequence centerpiece as impressive as anything else Welles directed—Chimes at Midnight is as monumental as the figure at its center.
Note: The screening will be preceded at 6pm by a special fundraiser screening for A Vermont Romance. There will be a food reception and cash bar between screenings. Optional: Special ticket prices both films combined.
“If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up. I think it’s because it is, to me, the least flawed . . . I succeeded more completely, in my view, with that than with anything else.” —Orson Welles