Simon Callow: Orson Welles: One Man Band
The third volume of Simon Callow’s monumental Orson Welles biography, which carries our hero from 1947, when he left the US behind and became a permanent globetrotter, to 1965, when he made Chimes at Midnight, which Callow with some justification, both artistic and biographical, sees as his opus magnum and all things coming full circle. (And of course it was the last movie (minus the mockumentaries like F for Fake) he actually got to finish, while living on another twenty years desperately trying to finish over projects.) The article which alerted me to the publication of One Man Band assumes Callow will present volume IV , covering the last twenty years, but I could understand it if Callow leaves it here; artistically, it’s just so tempting, not to mention that the theatre and film projects description are a great part of the appeal of the biographies, and without these, with “just” the life to describe, part of the motivation must be lost.
(Mind you: if The Other Side of the Wind, aka the nearly finished Welles movie with copies slumbering in archives of money men for decades and then fought over by heirs, actually finally gets released in the next few years, as has been announced there should be a LOT of new material to analyze.)
Anyway: until there’s a fourth volume, this is a trilogy of biographies, and as with any trilogy, the third installment does not stand on its own but builds on what came before. Welles newbies really should not start here. Otoh, old hands at all things Orson are in for a treat, though at times a very painful one. Not just because of film after film flopping (no matter how well regarded they’re now), and theatre production after theatre production being self sabotaged by Welles’ limited patience and discipline, but because of things like Orson managing to screw up and end one of his oldest and most interesting relationships in the later part of the book/life, or rather, two of them, with the men Callow once nicknamed his “fathers-in-art”, Hilton Edwards and Micheal McLiammoir, who hired the sixteen years old Orson to play the second lead at their Gate Theatre in Dublin and went on to have a relationship with him through the next few decades which, as Callow puts, wasn’t quite filial and wasn’t quite sexual but had overtones of both - until Chimes at Midnight, the theatre project (before the movie), finished it off for good. Dammit, Orson.
On the bright side, when Orson Welles was on, he was ON, managing to seduce people of every age and gender to follow him into all kinds of quixotic ventures and create something marvelous with him. These included Charlton Heston, politically and artistically as opposite you could get (you’d think), who nonetheless ended up so bedazzled that he was game for anything Welles wanted in Touch of Evil; Callow quotes not just from the published memoirs but the unpublished diaries, and Heston in a mode where he basically draws hearts around Orson Welles’ name every time he writes it down is indeed something to behold.
Otoh, another Welles & his opposite combination didn’t go nearly as well, though it is very entertaining to read about. This was Laurence Olivier. The first Olivier & Welles collaboration wasn’t really one; Olivier had Welles direct and star in Othello at the Vic, but was himself not part of the production, and so there no clashes. However, the second instant, the English language first production of Ionesco’s Rhinozeros, had Welles directing and Olivier playing the leading role. To fully appreciate what was to follow, bear in mind that in the eyes of the public, the two were rivals in terms of Shakespeare movies, and Olivier had won; Henry V and Richard III were box office successes. And of course, Olivier was temperamentally so very different. Says Callow, after quoting Welles on Chaplin and Olivier, and comparing him to both of them: Welles relied on adrenalin and natural genius; they knew that work - fanatical and often repetitive work - was the way to succeed. Uncertainty was intolerable for them: the terrifying possibility of failure led them to take swift remedial action. Unlike Olivier, Welles could live with constant change; indeed, he could not live without it.
So when Welles as director does the constant changing which is his natural m.o. and drives everyone to distraction, this time “everyone” includes Laurence Olivier on his home turf. Who has never been in doubt that only one head can wear the crown. Which means:
One morning at the beginningof the last week of rehearsal, he sidled up to Welles. “You have to go away, Orson, baby,” Olivier told him. “Not come to rehearsals because you’re upsetting us all.” The shock of this to Welles is impossible to exaggerate - this banishment not just from his natural habitat, but from his kingdom, locked out from the rehearsal room, where for twenty-five years he had been a law unto himself. He had behaved, from an early age, like a classic actor-manager. There can only be one actor-manager in any rehearsal room, and on Rhinoceros that person was Laurence Olivier.
Since neither the producer nor the theatre would have sided with Welles over Olivier, that was that and Welles had to live with being banished from the production he was supposedly directing. But Orson, baby, while shocked, was not yet down and out. By the time he was readmitted to the rehearsal room for the technical rehearsal, he had his revenge ready. Quoth Orson:
Larry came with the last big speech, when the rhinoceroses all come out of this wall, you know. And I said on the loud-speaker, ‘Larry, I’m going to tell you how to play this scene.’ And I knew I had his back up, but I knew what I had for him. ‘As you get to this point in the line, you will suddenly realize that sitting over there in the audience is a rhinoceros. Then you will see another rhinoceros. And then you will realize that the theatre is full of rhinoceroses.’ And I knew it was so good he had to take it, you know.
And Olivier did take the direction; every single review of the play mentioned this as the highlight of his performance.
But of course the heart of any Welles biography covering these particular twenty years are going to be the movies. The ones Welles made, all of them against the odds, and under tremendous difficulties, and the one where he played a few minutes of a supporting part which ended up defining him as an actor for good, i.e. The Third Man. Welles took the part of Harry Lime for the same reason he took any part at that point in his life, because he desperately needed the money (in this case, for the ongoing Othello, which took five years to shoot, all in all), but it’s impossible to disagree with Simon Callow that it would have been marvelous if only he’d have picked more Carol Reed (or other directors of that calibre) headed projects. Carol Reed turned out to be an excellent Welles wrangler, ignoring any attempt by Welles to get special rights while listening when Welles actually did have a good contribution (beyond acting) to make, to wit, the famous cuckoo clock speech, and the result was the amoral charmer to make all pretenders to the title still weep in envy. Or whistle Karas’ musical theme. (It’s also one of the very few times you see Orson Welles playing a part without any additional make-up. The only other time, in his own movies, was as the advocate in The Trial. And yes, he used make-up (fake nose and drawn-back cheeks) as the young Charles Foster Kane.)
Re: Callow’s judgment on the finished movies, I sometimes disagree - not on Mr. Arkadin, that’s one one Welles picture I really, really dislike (though it cracks me up, as it does Callow, that the scorpion & frog fable Orson invented for this one has since passed into folklore and would get quoted all over the cinematic and tv place ever after), but definitely on The Trial, which Callow calls technically perfect and full of good performances (btw, Callow’s description of Anthony Perkins sounds almost as if he had a crush on him), but without anything to say and hence without people loving it. Well, I love it. It’s disturbing as it should be, it speaks to me, and if I catch it accidentally on tv, I just can’t turn it off. (It also makes the later film version starring Kyle McLachlan ever so boring in comparison. Maybe more faithful to the letter of Kafka, but without any cinematic vision.)
Callow’s favourites, unsurprisingly, are Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight. Both, as had The Trial, feature Welles as director at his best, not worst. At his worst (as during the shooting of Mr. Arkadin, for example), he could be terrible , bullying people (not just the actors but the production crew), and Callow is right that you can’t write that behavior of as “lies by enemies” or “necessary excentricity to create a masterpiece”. At his best, on the other side, he could be endlessly encouraging, inspiring, funny, charming, and that was what secured him the fierce loyalty of people (both behind and in front of the camera) who often accepted no or very shoddy payment for their efforts. I already mentioned the improbable Heston-Welles love fest; Janet Leigh (same movie) similarly adored him, Marlene Dietrich who was a long term friend did her whole appearance for free (Callow comments that her role is the same type of role Harry Lime is in The Third Man, i.e. a character who technically is on screen only a short while, just a few minutes, but somehow manages to have an emotional impact on the audience that goes far beyond most others), Anthony Perkins despite the fact he was then, just post-Psycho, hot property and Welles hadn’t directed a commercially successful movie since The Stranger just thought The Trial was going to be the best experience in his life and kept saying yes throughout, Romy Schneider jumped at the chance to do something un-Sissi-like, and the entire Chimes at Midnight gang, from John Gielgud downwards, seems to have known that this was IT. Never mind shooting in Spanish garages.
In addition to diaries (both published and not) from various actors and P.A.s, Callow also quotes from some of the minutes re: cutting and editing Welles wrote, which make it clear what an incredibly precise worker he was - when he wanted to be. (All the more frustrating when he didn’t want to be.) And he takes serious even bit projects like the bible one by Dino De Laurentiis where Welles was originally supposed to direct the Abraham and Isaac sequence (John Huston ended up doing it) and promptly clashed with de Laurentiis because Welles wanted Isaac to be an unwilling victim. He (correctly) pointed out that nowhere in the bible was something about Isaac accepting being nearly sacrificed as a test of faith and wanted an Isaac who protested and had to be dragged to the altar, accusing his father of murder. This, almost needless to say, was not what was supposed to happen in a sandal epic. A child screaming at his father in betrayal and horror would have made what was going on there far too real for the audience, I assume. (And thus Orson was out of one more paying job.) Anyway, it’s a Wellesian reinterpretation I would have wanted to see.
Something else, an ongoing Wellesian idea which somehow I managed to not know despite the previous biographies I’ve read: he wanted to make a film about the three Alexandre Dumas’ , the Revolutionary General, the Three Musketeers writer and the author of La Dame des Camelias, based on Guy Encore’s novel The King of Paris. Starring himself as Alex(andre) the General and Alexandre Pere, the Musketeers author. One of the journalists who heard him talk about this asked why not tackle Alexandre the son as well. I’ll think about it, says Orson jovially. Reader, I weep in frustration this does not exist.
(BTW, in my review to the previous Callow volume, Hello Americans, I was asked how Welles reconciled his work with the NAACP with playing blackface, i.e. Othello. The answer, most likely, is that he didn’t see any contradiction there and wouldn’t have seen one between his anti racism - and one of the genuinely attractive things about Welles is that he really had a live long commitment to that, starting as a young man in the 30s, and not just talking the talk but walking the walk; his relentless pointing out police racism eventually cost him his job at a radio program, for example - and playing the biracial Alex Dumas, Grandpère and his son the most famous Alexandre Dumas. Partly because it was another age, partly because no struggling black actor could have afforded keeping himself available in the 50s and 60s for an Orson Welles picture, and partly because if there ever was an actor who had “let me play the lion, too” syndrome in the most over the top way, it was Orson Welles.)
Now: Chimes at Midnight. This is when Callow gives us a brief summary of the extensive Orson-and-his-multiple-father-figures saga that made for much of the emotional content of the first volume, The Road to Xanadu. There was the biodad, Richard Welles, who got post death romanticized into an inventor and rich gentleman of leisure by his son but died as an alcoholic, drinking himself to death after fourteen years old Orson had rejected him (and became convinced he was guilty of patricide ever after); then there was Dr. Maurice Bernstein, aka Dada, Beatrice Welles’ ex lover and the first to utter the fateful words “boy wonder” about toddler Orson, generally fussy and adoring but also constrictive in his affections; and Roger Hill, aka Skipper, Welles’ teacher and ideal father figure (and crush, for, quoth Wells to Skipper, “I was the boy you could have had”) and probably the sanest of the lot. When Orson Welles tacked the Henriad for the first time, at the age of 21, he as opposed to virtually all other young actors didn’t go for the role of Hal, he wanted to play Falstaff (and being the director, he did play Falstaff). There was no other Shakespearean figure and emotional constellation he was as obsessed with as Falstaff, and Falstaff-Hal (or Falstaff/Hal). By the time he had arrived at Chimes at Midnight, the movie (after Chimes at Midnight, the theatre project in Dublin, had been another flop and managed to bury his friendship with Edwards & McLiammoir, but had managed to give Welles his ideal Hal, Keith Baxter, who joined the club of actors heading the siren call of Welles whenever they heard it, no matter what else they had going on at the time), he was old enough for Falstaff. And heavy enough. (At some point in the early 50s, Welles gave up trying to keep a figure.) And experienced in having to play court jester for his supper, in cajoling money out of peope, in cheating not just the rich but also the poor. And of course, by then he had been on both ends of a father/son, older man/younger man dynamic, as opposed to the young Orson who had only had experience in one variation. Betrayal between two emotionally intimate men is probably the biggest ongoing theme in Orson Welles’ work, Chimes of Midnight is, among so many other things, the apotheosis of said theme. That he started to work on the movie after Dada Bernstein died and he locked himself into a room for two days is the kind of biographical circumstance that makes the “death of the author” approach near impossible no matter how hard you try.
In terms of when the movie was made (early 60s) and what had come before it re: Shakespeare on film in general, it’s also unique because it’s so determinedly unheroic in the conventional sense. I’ve said before, I’ll say it again: the battle sequence that ends in a muddy slaughter (pre dating any Vietnam movies) is still the only historic battle sequence that manages to really be anti war. (And couldn’t be further away from Olivier’s Henry V. Branagh tries to pay homage to Welles while still ending with Olivier’s triumphant feeling. The Hollow Crown version tries to go low key yet noble and ends up losing the point altogether.) And yet the most brutal thing that happens doesn’t contain any physical violence at all. The impact of the “I know thee not, old man” scene in any version depends not just on the audience caring for Falstaff (as opposed to thinking “good riddance”), it also depends on the audience believing that Hal, on some level at least, cares/cared for Falstaff (and does it anyway because it’s necessary, and it’s the inevitable conclusion to the emotional game they’ve been playing throughout), and to me, Chimes at Midnight delivers as few other versions do. Of course, it’s Falstaff’s view of the world: and, as Callow put it, the world most definitely did not want to see it in 1965. At least the American world did not. It was in US cinemas for just a few weeks, and has never been released there again, either in the cinema or on dvd, in the 40 plus years since. (It’s out on dvd in Spain and also shown in cinemas every now and then in my part of the world.)
Callow leaves us with a look at Welles, half Falstaff, half Don Quixote, never stopping trying to tell his cinematic stories even if it seemed people didn’t want to hear/watch them anymore, but, utterly unexpectedly, having after three failed marriages (mostly his fault) at last found a woman with whom he was going to have a committed partnership for the rest of his life, Oja Kodar. If there is one complaint I have, it’s that One Man Band just informs us of Oja’s existence, early meetings, and the impact she was going to have, without really introducing her as a character in her own right; I presume that’s planned for volume IV, if it gets written. Mind you, Callow in general is better and more intense with the relationships Welles had with men than with women, but then so was Orson Welles.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127340.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
(Mind you: if The Other Side of the Wind, aka the nearly finished Welles movie with copies slumbering in archives of money men for decades and then fought over by heirs, actually finally gets released in the next few years, as has been announced there should be a LOT of new material to analyze.)
Anyway: until there’s a fourth volume, this is a trilogy of biographies, and as with any trilogy, the third installment does not stand on its own but builds on what came before. Welles newbies really should not start here. Otoh, old hands at all things Orson are in for a treat, though at times a very painful one. Not just because of film after film flopping (no matter how well regarded they’re now), and theatre production after theatre production being self sabotaged by Welles’ limited patience and discipline, but because of things like Orson managing to screw up and end one of his oldest and most interesting relationships in the later part of the book/life, or rather, two of them, with the men Callow once nicknamed his “fathers-in-art”, Hilton Edwards and Micheal McLiammoir, who hired the sixteen years old Orson to play the second lead at their Gate Theatre in Dublin and went on to have a relationship with him through the next few decades which, as Callow puts, wasn’t quite filial and wasn’t quite sexual but had overtones of both - until Chimes at Midnight, the theatre project (before the movie), finished it off for good. Dammit, Orson.
On the bright side, when Orson Welles was on, he was ON, managing to seduce people of every age and gender to follow him into all kinds of quixotic ventures and create something marvelous with him. These included Charlton Heston, politically and artistically as opposite you could get (you’d think), who nonetheless ended up so bedazzled that he was game for anything Welles wanted in Touch of Evil; Callow quotes not just from the published memoirs but the unpublished diaries, and Heston in a mode where he basically draws hearts around Orson Welles’ name every time he writes it down is indeed something to behold.
Otoh, another Welles & his opposite combination didn’t go nearly as well, though it is very entertaining to read about. This was Laurence Olivier. The first Olivier & Welles collaboration wasn’t really one; Olivier had Welles direct and star in Othello at the Vic, but was himself not part of the production, and so there no clashes. However, the second instant, the English language first production of Ionesco’s Rhinozeros, had Welles directing and Olivier playing the leading role. To fully appreciate what was to follow, bear in mind that in the eyes of the public, the two were rivals in terms of Shakespeare movies, and Olivier had won; Henry V and Richard III were box office successes. And of course, Olivier was temperamentally so very different. Says Callow, after quoting Welles on Chaplin and Olivier, and comparing him to both of them: Welles relied on adrenalin and natural genius; they knew that work - fanatical and often repetitive work - was the way to succeed. Uncertainty was intolerable for them: the terrifying possibility of failure led them to take swift remedial action. Unlike Olivier, Welles could live with constant change; indeed, he could not live without it.
So when Welles as director does the constant changing which is his natural m.o. and drives everyone to distraction, this time “everyone” includes Laurence Olivier on his home turf. Who has never been in doubt that only one head can wear the crown. Which means:
One morning at the beginningof the last week of rehearsal, he sidled up to Welles. “You have to go away, Orson, baby,” Olivier told him. “Not come to rehearsals because you’re upsetting us all.” The shock of this to Welles is impossible to exaggerate - this banishment not just from his natural habitat, but from his kingdom, locked out from the rehearsal room, where for twenty-five years he had been a law unto himself. He had behaved, from an early age, like a classic actor-manager. There can only be one actor-manager in any rehearsal room, and on Rhinoceros that person was Laurence Olivier.
Since neither the producer nor the theatre would have sided with Welles over Olivier, that was that and Welles had to live with being banished from the production he was supposedly directing. But Orson, baby, while shocked, was not yet down and out. By the time he was readmitted to the rehearsal room for the technical rehearsal, he had his revenge ready. Quoth Orson:
Larry came with the last big speech, when the rhinoceroses all come out of this wall, you know. And I said on the loud-speaker, ‘Larry, I’m going to tell you how to play this scene.’ And I knew I had his back up, but I knew what I had for him. ‘As you get to this point in the line, you will suddenly realize that sitting over there in the audience is a rhinoceros. Then you will see another rhinoceros. And then you will realize that the theatre is full of rhinoceroses.’ And I knew it was so good he had to take it, you know.
And Olivier did take the direction; every single review of the play mentioned this as the highlight of his performance.
But of course the heart of any Welles biography covering these particular twenty years are going to be the movies. The ones Welles made, all of them against the odds, and under tremendous difficulties, and the one where he played a few minutes of a supporting part which ended up defining him as an actor for good, i.e. The Third Man. Welles took the part of Harry Lime for the same reason he took any part at that point in his life, because he desperately needed the money (in this case, for the ongoing Othello, which took five years to shoot, all in all), but it’s impossible to disagree with Simon Callow that it would have been marvelous if only he’d have picked more Carol Reed (or other directors of that calibre) headed projects. Carol Reed turned out to be an excellent Welles wrangler, ignoring any attempt by Welles to get special rights while listening when Welles actually did have a good contribution (beyond acting) to make, to wit, the famous cuckoo clock speech, and the result was the amoral charmer to make all pretenders to the title still weep in envy. Or whistle Karas’ musical theme. (It’s also one of the very few times you see Orson Welles playing a part without any additional make-up. The only other time, in his own movies, was as the advocate in The Trial. And yes, he used make-up (fake nose and drawn-back cheeks) as the young Charles Foster Kane.)
Re: Callow’s judgment on the finished movies, I sometimes disagree - not on Mr. Arkadin, that’s one one Welles picture I really, really dislike (though it cracks me up, as it does Callow, that the scorpion & frog fable Orson invented for this one has since passed into folklore and would get quoted all over the cinematic and tv place ever after), but definitely on The Trial, which Callow calls technically perfect and full of good performances (btw, Callow’s description of Anthony Perkins sounds almost as if he had a crush on him), but without anything to say and hence without people loving it. Well, I love it. It’s disturbing as it should be, it speaks to me, and if I catch it accidentally on tv, I just can’t turn it off. (It also makes the later film version starring Kyle McLachlan ever so boring in comparison. Maybe more faithful to the letter of Kafka, but without any cinematic vision.)
Callow’s favourites, unsurprisingly, are Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight. Both, as had The Trial, feature Welles as director at his best, not worst. At his worst (as during the shooting of Mr. Arkadin, for example), he could be terrible , bullying people (not just the actors but the production crew), and Callow is right that you can’t write that behavior of as “lies by enemies” or “necessary excentricity to create a masterpiece”. At his best, on the other side, he could be endlessly encouraging, inspiring, funny, charming, and that was what secured him the fierce loyalty of people (both behind and in front of the camera) who often accepted no or very shoddy payment for their efforts. I already mentioned the improbable Heston-Welles love fest; Janet Leigh (same movie) similarly adored him, Marlene Dietrich who was a long term friend did her whole appearance for free (Callow comments that her role is the same type of role Harry Lime is in The Third Man, i.e. a character who technically is on screen only a short while, just a few minutes, but somehow manages to have an emotional impact on the audience that goes far beyond most others), Anthony Perkins despite the fact he was then, just post-Psycho, hot property and Welles hadn’t directed a commercially successful movie since The Stranger just thought The Trial was going to be the best experience in his life and kept saying yes throughout, Romy Schneider jumped at the chance to do something un-Sissi-like, and the entire Chimes at Midnight gang, from John Gielgud downwards, seems to have known that this was IT. Never mind shooting in Spanish garages.
In addition to diaries (both published and not) from various actors and P.A.s, Callow also quotes from some of the minutes re: cutting and editing Welles wrote, which make it clear what an incredibly precise worker he was - when he wanted to be. (All the more frustrating when he didn’t want to be.) And he takes serious even bit projects like the bible one by Dino De Laurentiis where Welles was originally supposed to direct the Abraham and Isaac sequence (John Huston ended up doing it) and promptly clashed with de Laurentiis because Welles wanted Isaac to be an unwilling victim. He (correctly) pointed out that nowhere in the bible was something about Isaac accepting being nearly sacrificed as a test of faith and wanted an Isaac who protested and had to be dragged to the altar, accusing his father of murder. This, almost needless to say, was not what was supposed to happen in a sandal epic. A child screaming at his father in betrayal and horror would have made what was going on there far too real for the audience, I assume. (And thus Orson was out of one more paying job.) Anyway, it’s a Wellesian reinterpretation I would have wanted to see.
Something else, an ongoing Wellesian idea which somehow I managed to not know despite the previous biographies I’ve read: he wanted to make a film about the three Alexandre Dumas’ , the Revolutionary General, the Three Musketeers writer and the author of La Dame des Camelias, based on Guy Encore’s novel The King of Paris. Starring himself as Alex(andre) the General and Alexandre Pere, the Musketeers author. One of the journalists who heard him talk about this asked why not tackle Alexandre the son as well. I’ll think about it, says Orson jovially. Reader, I weep in frustration this does not exist.
(BTW, in my review to the previous Callow volume, Hello Americans, I was asked how Welles reconciled his work with the NAACP with playing blackface, i.e. Othello. The answer, most likely, is that he didn’t see any contradiction there and wouldn’t have seen one between his anti racism - and one of the genuinely attractive things about Welles is that he really had a live long commitment to that, starting as a young man in the 30s, and not just talking the talk but walking the walk; his relentless pointing out police racism eventually cost him his job at a radio program, for example - and playing the biracial Alex Dumas, Grandpère and his son the most famous Alexandre Dumas. Partly because it was another age, partly because no struggling black actor could have afforded keeping himself available in the 50s and 60s for an Orson Welles picture, and partly because if there ever was an actor who had “let me play the lion, too” syndrome in the most over the top way, it was Orson Welles.)
Now: Chimes at Midnight. This is when Callow gives us a brief summary of the extensive Orson-and-his-multiple-father-figures saga that made for much of the emotional content of the first volume, The Road to Xanadu. There was the biodad, Richard Welles, who got post death romanticized into an inventor and rich gentleman of leisure by his son but died as an alcoholic, drinking himself to death after fourteen years old Orson had rejected him (and became convinced he was guilty of patricide ever after); then there was Dr. Maurice Bernstein, aka Dada, Beatrice Welles’ ex lover and the first to utter the fateful words “boy wonder” about toddler Orson, generally fussy and adoring but also constrictive in his affections; and Roger Hill, aka Skipper, Welles’ teacher and ideal father figure (and crush, for, quoth Wells to Skipper, “I was the boy you could have had”) and probably the sanest of the lot. When Orson Welles tacked the Henriad for the first time, at the age of 21, he as opposed to virtually all other young actors didn’t go for the role of Hal, he wanted to play Falstaff (and being the director, he did play Falstaff). There was no other Shakespearean figure and emotional constellation he was as obsessed with as Falstaff, and Falstaff-Hal (or Falstaff/Hal). By the time he had arrived at Chimes at Midnight, the movie (after Chimes at Midnight, the theatre project in Dublin, had been another flop and managed to bury his friendship with Edwards & McLiammoir, but had managed to give Welles his ideal Hal, Keith Baxter, who joined the club of actors heading the siren call of Welles whenever they heard it, no matter what else they had going on at the time), he was old enough for Falstaff. And heavy enough. (At some point in the early 50s, Welles gave up trying to keep a figure.) And experienced in having to play court jester for his supper, in cajoling money out of peope, in cheating not just the rich but also the poor. And of course, by then he had been on both ends of a father/son, older man/younger man dynamic, as opposed to the young Orson who had only had experience in one variation. Betrayal between two emotionally intimate men is probably the biggest ongoing theme in Orson Welles’ work, Chimes of Midnight is, among so many other things, the apotheosis of said theme. That he started to work on the movie after Dada Bernstein died and he locked himself into a room for two days is the kind of biographical circumstance that makes the “death of the author” approach near impossible no matter how hard you try.
In terms of when the movie was made (early 60s) and what had come before it re: Shakespeare on film in general, it’s also unique because it’s so determinedly unheroic in the conventional sense. I’ve said before, I’ll say it again: the battle sequence that ends in a muddy slaughter (pre dating any Vietnam movies) is still the only historic battle sequence that manages to really be anti war. (And couldn’t be further away from Olivier’s Henry V. Branagh tries to pay homage to Welles while still ending with Olivier’s triumphant feeling. The Hollow Crown version tries to go low key yet noble and ends up losing the point altogether.) And yet the most brutal thing that happens doesn’t contain any physical violence at all. The impact of the “I know thee not, old man” scene in any version depends not just on the audience caring for Falstaff (as opposed to thinking “good riddance”), it also depends on the audience believing that Hal, on some level at least, cares/cared for Falstaff (and does it anyway because it’s necessary, and it’s the inevitable conclusion to the emotional game they’ve been playing throughout), and to me, Chimes at Midnight delivers as few other versions do. Of course, it’s Falstaff’s view of the world: and, as Callow put it, the world most definitely did not want to see it in 1965. At least the American world did not. It was in US cinemas for just a few weeks, and has never been released there again, either in the cinema or on dvd, in the 40 plus years since. (It’s out on dvd in Spain and also shown in cinemas every now and then in my part of the world.)
Callow leaves us with a look at Welles, half Falstaff, half Don Quixote, never stopping trying to tell his cinematic stories even if it seemed people didn’t want to hear/watch them anymore, but, utterly unexpectedly, having after three failed marriages (mostly his fault) at last found a woman with whom he was going to have a committed partnership for the rest of his life, Oja Kodar. If there is one complaint I have, it’s that One Man Band just informs us of Oja’s existence, early meetings, and the impact she was going to have, without really introducing her as a character in her own right; I presume that’s planned for volume IV, if it gets written. Mind you, Callow in general is better and more intense with the relationships Welles had with men than with women, but then so was Orson Welles.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127340.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.