Falstaff

[Kane76]

I enjoyed reading the reviews of Falstaff, especially the NY Times review. I had trouble with the audio from my DVD which I got from some dealer on Amazon.

I wish that this film could be cleaned up and re-released in a nice package. Does anyone know if that's in the works anywhere? Who owns the rights to this film? Oja or Beatrice?

[atcolomb]

I also did buy a dvd copy but from Ebay and that was a copy from a Japanese laserdisc version. Now i have the Spanish region 2 version from Suevia Films and that looks good but not great and for right now maybe the best looking dvd out there. I did read that preservation expert Robert A Harris did look at the negatives and said that they were in great shape so all we need is somebody like Criterion to do a good dvd release.

[K Dobry]

Studio Canal in France has a gorgeous print of the film which they released a few years ago in an Orson Welles DVD box set--which was almost immediately pulled from the market, probably due to rights disputes. The picture quality is wonderful (like the Studio Canal edition of the Trial), and the sound, at least to my ears, is as clean as any other film from that time period. So, like Othello, Falstaff exists in a clean, optimum print, but greedy people make it their point to keep it off the market and away from those who would appreciate a decent copy of the film.
Let's only hope that this original version becomes widely available again, before some lunk-headed technicians destroy the soundtrack as they did with Othello.

[ToddBaesen]

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Here's a report from Time magazine on making films in Spain circa 1965.

Welles was of course making FALSTAFF in Spain at the time, and according to TIME, gorging himself on half a lamb and washing it down with four liters of hot wine! No wonder he never finished making FALSTAFF...

PUMPING OUT ORSON

All this action could be just another reason why Douglas Dillon wants out at the Treasury. The hegira from Hollywood and the hegemony of Spain seem inescapable. Spain's low living costs are equaled nowhere in Europe except Greece and Yugoslavia, and its range of scenery and climate are matched nowhere at all. Orson Welles, making do with a fish-and-flour warehouse as studio, paid rent of a mere $120 a month. And he didn't have to fabricate a medieval cobbled-street market, a walled village, or a 12th century Romanesque castle: all were within kilometers of his set. Which left most of his rigid $1,000,000 budget for casting, and he could hardly have made it pay better, signing on Jeanne Moreau as Dolly Tearsheet, Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV, and even Margaret Rutherford as Mrs. Quickly. One other area where Welles didn't cut down: gluttony, which left him hospitalized after he gobbled up a middle-sized lamb and washed down four liters of hot wine.

[Harvey Chartrand]

I recall the North American ad campaign for FALSTAFF. The movie poster tagline read: "Even Shakespeare Would Have Liked It"... which in hindsight seems like a back-handed compliment. The film was promoted as a comedy... and not a somber one. The theatrical poster showed Fat Jack hoisting a cup of sack, surrounded by slatternly wenches and laughing cronies, during a wild night at the Boar's Head Tavern. FALSTAFF played at an arthouse cinema in Montreal for a week or two during Expo 67.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Arbogast on Film posts a death notice for Spanish actor Fernando Hilbeck, who appeared in a supporting role in Orson Welles' Falstaff.
The death notice appears at http://arbogastonfilm.blogspot.com/ (you'll need to scroll down as the mysterious "Arbogast" is a very prolific blogger who adds new material just about every day to his online "investigation into the mystery of cinema").
Hilbeck also co-starred in two overlooked and underrated horror flicks – Pyro, a proto-Fatal Attraction thriller starring Barry Sullivan and Martha Hyer (1964) and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), in which the gaunt Hilbeck played Zombie Number One (and quite well too).
Does anyone know what part the lugubrious Hilbeck played in Falstaff?