Having written recently about Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1965), it occurred to me that I may not have ever mentioned his powerful 1952 film version of Othello, which is a must-see for every Shakespeare fan. It's also a must-see for movie fans: It's simply amazing visually - in fact, its opening scenes (showing events that occur after the play's action) seem to me an obvious precursor and influence to such acknowledged masterpieces as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and several others. Like the play itself, the film takes many liberties with the order of events and the normal unfolding of time. But it's all done (in both cases) with a purpose: the portrayal of a mind in psychological torment. Welles, like Shakespeare, would never sacrifice the revelation of human truth for the sake of such relatively trivial matters as temporal accuracy.

I have mixed feelings about Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff), Orson Welles' cinematic re-assembling of the story of Sir John from 1965, which uses lines from no less than five Shakespeare plays (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts One and Two, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor), as well as Holinshed's Chronicles to do so. I would certainly recommend it, but with some reservations regarding decisions made in terms of story-telling and interpretation. As you may know from previous posts, I'm not a fan of productions that make cuts in Shakespeare texts, and this movie partakes of that approach in an extreme way. Also Welles' portrayal of Falstaff is odd, in that he looks for pathos rather than humour at every turn. That being said, the movie has many strengths. It is amazing visually, for one thing. The camera work, the lighting and the use of the sets, in particular, are dazzling, despite the fact that the dialogue, recorded separately from the filming, doesn't sync up very well with the actors' speeches. (The same was done in his version of Othello, by the way, which I'll write about on another occasion.)

But what I most admire is the stand that Welles takes in defense of Falstaff (which goes a long way toward explaining his decisions in regard to his own performance). And though the knight does have many defenders (Harold Bloom is a mighty one, for example), I had never seen it put quite the way Welles did when he called Falstaff "the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama". This might seem like a shocking statement at first, considering the common view of Falstaff as a completely amoral character who is only redeemed by his incomparable wit, but what I think Welles was getting at is that before making such a judgement, we must consider the medieval mind-set of gloryfying injustice, brutality and war that Falstaff opposes with any means he can find.