Tony's article
The Stranger circulated on VHS and DVD in poor public domain versions so that the lost visual richness of the original corresponded to the film title of Tennessee Williams play “Orpheus Descending” as The Fugitive Kind to be only seen in the Library of Congress.
With Othello viewers can now gain access to earlier versions rather than become limited to the controversial 1999 restoration whose flaws have been amply documented by Michael Anderegg and Jonathan Rosenbaum. (1)
Wood also notes relatively brief appearances of the single long take in several sequences recognizing the ruthless role of editor Ernest Nims in ruining other attempts such as the beginning of Senora Martinez’s pursuit of Meinike outside the ship.
It was a film that reflected his contemporary political fears about the resurgence of Fascism – and contemporary events seventy one years later prove that he was correct in hindsight.
Wood sees the “born again” Meinike as very much of a Greene character and his seedy demeanor would make him a recognizable addition to “Greeneland.” Noir elements within The Stranger are noted by Wood who also sees the film as a modern Gothic with its naïve heroine resembling those in Rebecca (1940) and Jane Eyre (1943).
The Stranger can also be viewed as a version of the Gothic horror in the immediate post-war era with Mary not only being the equivalent of the heroine in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958),
edited sections meant to spare contemporary American audiences from confronting the full implications of the Holocaust in a Hollywood film and asking why their Government never bombed railway lines leading to concentration camps or sent commandos in to free their inhabitants long before their eventual liberation mostly by the Red Army.
Four complete Welles wartime radio broadcasts follow. They illustrating his serious concerns over the contemporary struggle against Fascism, …resembling Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1965 drama-documentary It Happened Here. The drama documentary also existed in the silent era with propaganda World War One films but like Shakespeare’s appropriation of Holinshead and other sources, Welles reworked precedents in his own artistic type of authorship.
“Brazil” is an episode of the 1942 series Hello Americans Welles is clearly “having fun” in the Howard Hawks sense enjoying the nature of Latin American music and promoting its cultural resonances to American audiences. If only RKO executives viewing footage of the Brazil carnival sequence from Welles’s aborted It’s All True (1943) project had been less prejudiced!
“War Workers” (1942) begins by adopting a War of the Worlds deception scenario with a Nazi agent infiltrating an aircraft factory and reporting his findings before he is apprehended.
Welles interviews various Rosie the Riveters who range from young to old
” – telling the Fascist powers that the “little people are the future,” something the Cold War home front would soon destroy.
Welles’s June 30, 1946 broadcast on the “Bikini Atom Test” is much more multilayered and hesitant. Welles notes its darker implications – “The living in all times have turned their backs on the necessity of death.” …possession of the Bomb involves the “uneasiness of our moral agenda.” He critiques the commodification of products such as “Atom Lipsticks” and articulates the necessity of a “mutual plan” to deal with this first appearance of a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Welles’s lack of patriotic euphoria would soon lead to unwelcome attention by the House of Un-American Activities and his decision to work abroad in the late 1940s.
Cloutier mentions that the project almost ruined his health seeing the drastic change from the 33-year-old, relatively slim young man of the project’s beginning into an old man at the end who had ate and drank too much. “He paid dearly for that ultimate effort.”
Cloutier mentions that she was responsible for finding money from Iran to continue The Other Side of the Wind and was on the plane with set designer Alexander Trauner with the Don Quixote negative footage Welles wished to edit in California when they heard of his death. Cloutier poignantly adds, “He was just trying to share with us, his world, his immense world.”
1992 restoration that Jonathan Rosenbaum has correctly condemned due to its ignoring the richness and superiority of Lavagnino’s original score.
In an earlier review, Tim Lucas notes that “the short contains many signature moments that betray Welles’s involvement behind the camera.” (4) The narrative structure of this short strongly suggests this possibility since it acutely resembles many of the experimental radio programs of The Mercury Theatre in the late 1930s.
It begins with a prominent shot of a studio light reminiscent of that microphone used by Welles to illustrate his spoken final credit as director of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Welles is recording one of the lines from Othello before deciding to take a break. When he emerges from the sound booth we do not see the actor but only his gigantic shadow.
Simon Callow describes the film as “quintessentially Wellesian” anticipating later works such as The Fountain of Youth (1958) and F for Fake (1974) seeing them all as “filmic transpositions of Welles’s radio work of the 1930s.” (5)
Joseph McBride contributes his usual informative and learned critical expertise on the film. Although critical of Welles’s performance, he provides some interesting insights concerning the betrayal motif in the film suggesting that John Houseman may have been Welles’s Iago.
I must direct readers to continuing discussions on http://www.wellesnet.com. It is the major internet site on this talent that continues its undisputed expertise in this area with contributions by so many informed people who are not celebrities hunted for DVD audio-commentary marquee value.
production circumstances prompting Welles “toward a style of rapid and disjunctive editing whose rhythms define the film’s essential mood.” His vision coheres, but it is precisely a vision of a world already falling to pieces.
a recent book on certain stylistically radical post-war German rubble films has noted parallels to similar techniques employed in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth. (6)
justified critical recognition of a figure ascending into greater prominence than ever. another human who took risks in the realm of cinematic artistry complementing those heroic aviators who sometimes succeed against great odds. Not “only angels have wings.”
John Oldcastle, the real Falstaff?
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Black Irish
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Re: John Oldcastle, the real Falstaff?
Chimes
Welles expressed his investment in the inter-medial aspect of Chimes at Midnight in an interview about the film. When asked by Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio how he conceives scenes, Welles responds, “Music. Music and poetry. It’s that rather than simply visual”. He goes on to suggest that the visual comes out of these media, saying, “With me, the visual is a solution to what the poetical and musical form dictates”; a solution, as I will conceive it here, to the competing demands of the poetical and musical forms or, as I will call them, the written and aural modes of the film.
The visual, I will argue, is a “solution” to all of them, indeed the filmic solution of all of them, produced by their admixture, and so contains them all. In other words, the moving image in Chimes at Midnight, as the quintessentially cinematic, is framed as an encompassing medium greater than the sum of its constituent media.
Chimes at Midnight opens with a well-known, retrospective sequence that frames its narrative as a shared memory. The first line of dialogue, Master Shallow’s familiar “Jesus, the days that we have seen”, initiates a mode of remembrance that is reciprocated by Falstaff,
The opening sequence “creates the impression of a flashback. Its effect is to allow us to see that this is Falstaff’s story. We are to witness the glory of his days and to partake in the sorrow of their passing”
The film’s narrative is thus introduced as a memorial narrative, but the memorial mode is immediately depicted as a cinematic mode. For when Falstaff and Shallow first sit down in front of the fire, the fireplace and the wall in which it is set look curiously like an illuminated screen. Falstaff’s recall in particular is screened as a scene of seeing suggestive of cinematic viewing: stoically looking into the screen-like fire, he seems to see in it (or on it) “the days that they have seen.”
By reflexively presenting the performance of remembrance as a mode of filmic spectatorship, Chimes at Midnight suggests that memory itself is a kind of cinematic adaptation. The film’s memorial reflexivity insinuates, that is, that remembering, in its imaginary visual and acoustic dimensions, is like watching a film. When Falstaff and Shallow sit by the same screen-like fire and repeat some of their conversation verbatim later in the film, the flashback seeming to have come full circle, the remembering men, now with the addition of Silence, are visually framed by and contained within the luminescent, cinematic wall. The filmic mode thus images its containment of the memorial mode in which the film commences.
It is as if Chimes at Midnight begins again with a different narrative in a different narrative mode, setting Falstaff and Shallow’s memories in contest with Holinshed’s history, which imposes its own narrative authority. For the history is presented as if it would set the record straight, displacing the subjective memories of Falstaff and Shallow with an “official” account while also containing their personal stories within its broader sweep of events.
Unlike the memories of the two old men, which remain vague and are effectively mystified by Falstaff’s deep, silent gaze into the fire, the historical narration begins with a clear statement of undeniable fact: “King Richard II was murdered.”
Moreover the voiceover, without a visible speaking body to locate and materialize it, is abstract, godlike in its nowhere-yet-everywhere quality and therefore authoritative in its utterance.
The screenplay of Chimes at Midnight, as an evolution of a stage-play titled Five Kings that Welles first wrote—not composed but compiled and arranged— in high school, inscribes an additional level of memory and history, and reflects the adaptive logic of the film.
So the film is not only an adaptation of at least five Shakespearean source-plays of various genres, but also the intricate adaptation—the writing and rewriting, staging and re-staging— of an “original” dramatic compilation by Welles that underwent changes and additions over the course of many years, reflecting multiple historical and cultural moments, and several different periods in the director’s own life.
So, as the latest version of a revisionary project that spanned many years, Chimes at Midnight comprises its theatrical antecedents, but as the best version thereof it excels them in and as film.
The “official” English history in question performs a similar adaptation as inclusion-supersession. By narrating Holinshed’s Chronicles, Welles interpolates Shakespeare’s own source material into his cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare, revealing the Shakespearean “original” to be an adaptation as well.
And the Chronicles, the source of the source, despite the apparently singular possessive of “Holinshed’s,” is not only multiply authored, but compiled and adapted from the work of literally hundreds of authors. The further back we trace the film’s history, the more multitudinous it becomes, introducing a plethora of historical narratives doubtless selected from myriad others, themselves likely adapted from still other, older narratives and/ or from memories, personal and collective. Yet the narratives selected and revised for publication in and as Holinshed’s Chronicles survive as a once and still in many ways authoritative document of English history, a document that simultaneously contains and displaces its abundant constituents, editing and combining them into a newer, arguably more substantial, in almost all cases more popular, and undeniably monumental narrative of England’s past.
The eerie closing shot of the title sequence depicts several soldiers standing in strange formation, almost motionless beneath a dismally cloudy sky, many of their fellows hanging dead in the background. Ana only one credit is superimposed on this image: “Narration based on Holinshed’s Chronicles spoken by Ralph Richardson”.
Likewise Richardson’s spoken narrative, more recent than Holinshed’s Chronicles, contains the words of Holinshed’s Chronicles even as it takes their place and prominence. And likewise Holinshed’s history, coming after the remembrances of Falstaff and Shallow, displaces their memorial narrative while also containing them in its more comprehensive historical account. This ordering principle, I contend, constitutes the logic of the film as a confluence of narrative modes and media. The logic might best be described as adaptive progression: what comes last and contains that which came before presents itself as the dominant medium of communication and the historical authority.
This also explains why Welles presents the Chronicles in the film, rather than Shakespeare’s plays alone. Shakespeare’s plays, the film affirms, contain yet alter, add to, and supersede the Chronicles in the same way that Welles’s film contains and supersedes Shakespeare and the Chronicles with Welles’s own excisions, alterations, and additions.
As we near Richardson begin to read pieces of Holinshed’s Chronicles, we see nothing but light on a screen and are consequently pulled out of the picture, made suddenly and acutely aware that we are merely looking at a screen onto which light is being projected. By briefly waking us from the dreamlike effects of cinematic technique, Chimes at Midnight foregrounds the technics of cinema. So, with the voiceover credit lingering in our minds, and along with it the impression of writing evoked by Holinshed, we perceive the voiceover not just as story, and not just as historical narrative, but also as a cinematic mode of inscription, as if the words spoken were thereby written onto the empty screen as they might otherwise be onto a blank page.
The technical emphases on pure image as projected light, on pure voice without a bodily referent, and on voiceover as written narration precipitate a sudden intermingling of technical components of the cinema: the acoustic presence of writing pours into the visual vacuity of the screen as so much ink, reminding us of the cinema’s origination as the cinemato-graph.
The subsequent images therefore register as a dynamic pictorial form of writing, a kind of luminous transcription of Shakespeare and Holinshed. The dramatic history of and in Chimes at Midnight, in other words, successively appears in so many screened images as a multiplex rewriting in the language of cinema. So, as with memory, Chimes at Midnight reworks writing and history in its own cinematic image, simultaneously, again, containing and displacing them.
The film treats the theatrical mode—perhaps its most prominent medial antecedent as a Shakespearean film—in lake fashion. When Falstaff and Hal decide to put on a play extempore in the tavern in Eastcheap, Chimes at Midnight stages theater cinematically.
A chair set atop a table becomes a makeshift throne. Above the chair is a softly lit window that, like the fireplace in the opening sequence, looks like an illuminated screen… the screen-like window appears most prominently in the numerous shots over-the-shoulder of Hal playing himself—or Falstaff playing Hal—looking up at the acting king from an extreme low angle, literally pointing up the mock authority of the make-believe king. In line with and above the king, lambent in the top of the frame, is the screen-like window, expressing the highest authority of cinema—an authority in line with, though even higher than, that of the king himself. Even as it thus encompasses and rules over this theater like its court, it is as if the film— visualized by an image of a cinematic screen—were saying that theater, like this little play, is but a little imitation of its dominant medium.
The film thematizes the troubled, indeed antagonistic relationship between its sounds and images, or between what I will call the aural and visual media of the film. Chimes at Midnight weaves its sound-image clashes through the power dynamics at stake in the film’s monarchical narrative.
Chimes at Midnight presents a relationship between the aural and the visual at its outset. It presents two modes of memory as two different modes of sensory recall: Shallow suggests their apparently shared memories are visual—“the days that we have seen”—while Falstaff invokes them as aural—“We have heard the chimes at midnight”.
Both modes of remembrance, tuned to image and sound, respectively, constitute the film as film, a composition of sight and sound, yet they vie for cinematic prominence throughout…And yet the visual medium, I will argue, prevails in Chimes nevertheless. Through a series of such technical and referential mini-contests between the aural ana the visual, Chimes at Midnight will repeatedly crown the latter champion, the quintessential, indispensable cinematic mode.
(Note: Macluhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, where the written word triumphs over the spoken word. Interestingly, Gutenberg’s printing press was invented in 1450, shortly after the historical events depicted in Chimes at Midnight)
In the scene introduced by the first Holinshed narration, Henry IV’s court and castle at Windsor are marked by high windows through which sunlight beams down in narrow shafts. (like the Nuremberg lights used in Kane and Caesar, or like lights from a projector) A visual marker, arguably, of ultimate authority, it also marks the authority of the visual, for its projecting beams look, too, like those of a cinematic projector.
Welles has long been known as a cinematic artist especially interested in the self-reflexivity of his medium. As Kerry Brougher asserts: For Welles, who had studied magic, the entire film apparatus—theater, projection, light, camera, sound—was something that could be “experienced” within the film’s frame; part of the pleasure of the cinema was the excitement derived by the audience as self-aware observers of filmic pyrotechnics, the highlighting of what had before been primarily invisible.
Brougher, not surprisingly, cites Citizen Kane in particular, analyzing the projection room sequence as self-reflexive cinema par excellence. James Naremore makes the same observation, stating that “the conversation among reporters [in the projection room] is one of the most self-reflexive moments in the film”. The most striking and most self-reflexive aspect of the scene, of course, is the lighting, supplied only, it seems, by that which pours down out of the projection booth in vivid filmic beams—much like the light that pours down from upper windows in Henry IV’s court in Chimes at Midnight. (Wellesian cinema is a cross between essay and magic show)
“Henceforth, let me not hear you speak of Mortimer, or you shall hear in such a kind from me as will displease you”. Northumberland immediately tries again, saying, “My good lord, hear me”
In the receding shot of Hotspur ranting, he is framed to look smaller, his head appearing to come up only to the hip of his uncle as though he were a child among reproving adults. The image of Worcester and Northumberland effectively looking down on him with the force of the downwardly beaming light bolsters the association between projected light, cinema, and authority even as it endues the elder Percys with that authority. But significantly, Worcester and Northumberland do not stand in the light as the King sits in it. Rather, they stand between and beneath the two prominent rays, reflecting the fact that they are not themselves vying for kingship, but trying to control the power of the king.
As soon as Worcester introduces his treasonous designs on the Archbishop, chimes begin sounding in the background, reestablishing the aural sway of the Percys and enlarging it to threaten the throne. At Hotspur's castle, trumpeters appear on several different turrets, suggesting that they surround the castle. Thus the aural medium of sound surrounds and indeed contains and directs Hotspur’s military power as he prepares, in this scene, for war.
It is when Hotspur exclaims of his horse, readied to leave for battle, “That roan shall be my throne", anticipating military victory against Bolingbroke and his own consequent kingship if that occurs, that the bell-holes of trumpets suddenly fill the screen, threatening to consume the cinematic image as black holes would consume light itself. The Percys’ rebellion is thus galvanized by the aural force of instruments that would highjack and dominate the visual medium of film just as their insurrection would conquer the King and take the throne.
Anticipating dramatic self-reform, a renunciation of the bawdy tavern world and an embrasure of the court, Hal says, squinting up at the sky,
“Yet herein will I 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 wond’red at”.
The Prince thus links himself to the sun, the primary means of light and sight in medieval England, but his description also and primarily renders him a “beautifully” lit image, recalling the King centered on his throne in and figuratively as the beaming sunlight.
Later in the film King Henry, chastising Hal, depicts kingship in similar terms of visual craft. Comparing Hal to his corrupt, now usurped and murdered, predecessor Richard II, the King says:
The skipping King [Richard II], he ambled up and down / With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits, / / Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools, / / Grew a companion to the common streets. / / So, when he had occasion to be seen, / He was but as the cuckoo is in June, / Heard, not regarded—seen, but with such eyes / As, sick and blunted with community, / Afford no extraordinary gaze, / Such as is bent on sunlike majesty.
Henry IV explicitly renders the authority of extraordinary kings a visual authority associated with sunlight, effectively theorizing his own repeatedly sunlit depiction in the film. At the same time he highlights the inferiority of the aural, with which he associates the king he deposed: Richard, he says, was “Heard, not regarded.”
Moreover, when he begins talking of “the skipping king,” we hear bells chiming in the background again, underscoring his criticism of aurality with the film’s titular, aurally symbolic sound. Insofar as Prince Henry and King Henry both characterize strong and right kingship as the calculated production of a captivating series of kingly images “affording extraordinary gaze,” they characterize it as a sort of monarchical cinema—a singular cinema fundamentally opposed to aural commonness and foolishness.
As the King reprehends Hal, they meet in the beaming sunlight before the King passes on, stepping down from the throne as Hal remains in the light. The coordinated movement is key, for it not only presents Hal’s self-assertion as he bravely steps up and intercepts his father’s position, but it also visually depicts the imminent exchange of what both men conceive of as crucially visual, monarchical power. The moment they stand together, face-to-face in the authoritative light of kingship, marks a monarchical transaction figured as a transfer of filmic projection.
After Hal kills Hotspur, trumpets sound, seemingly to signal victory, but a Lancaster soldier shouts, “The trumpet sounds retreat. The day is ours!”. So the trumpets, predominantly associated with the Percys and their aurally charged rebellion, stand in for them once again, but no longer as a threat to the King’s optical dominance. Rather, the sound is one of defeat that indicates the routing of their revolt. The aural medium is thus reduced to the representation of its own defeat. The Lancaster victory, by contrast, is signaled visually with flags: after the retreat is announced, numerous soldiers hold them proudly behind the victorious King as he says, “Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke”
As the visually dominant King, that is, he contains and controls the aurally resistant rebels, thereby enacting the medial logic of the film. For the film’s visual accent does not do away with or wipe out its aural dimension or its other media—it rather conquers, contains, and controls them, effectively maintaining the optical prominence of cinema.
As the King speaks in close-up, darkness, rather than light, marks the place of vision itself: a thick line of shadow from one of the window’s bars overlays the King’s eyes through much of his monologue, almost like a blindfold. Indeed, the dark covers the King’s eyes as he asks why sleep will “seal up the ship-boy’s eyes” amid “rude imperious surge,”. The aural and the absence or opposite of light and sight—darkness and blindness—thus coalesce to forecast the King’s decease and, along with it, the inexorable resignation of his power.
When Hal thinks his father dead and takes his crown out of the royal bedroom, he then kneels, holding it for his own, doubtless about to don it. And the image suddenly dissolves to one depicting Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence before the screen-like fire. Hal’s fraught advancement to the throne is thus linked to the framing cinematic, memorial story—“the days that [they] have seen,” which, sitting by the fire, Falstaff and Shallow reference again.
So Hal’s rule is relinked to cinematic viewing and visuality as we watch his movement into monarchical authority. When the King does die, he is sitting on the throne as Hal kneels before him, both of them awash in the light of an upper window. Hal stands and, in the center of that projecting light, addresses the court, announcing that his blood shall “flow henceforth in formal majesty”. Then he turns, takes up the crown for the first time officially, and declares, “Now call we our High Parliament,” not facing the court, but facing the beaming light of the upper window.
However, if that sovereignty is in Chimes at Midnight established as and predicated upon the inter-medial and intra-cinematic dominance of the luminous filmic image, that image of light is not without its own intra-visual contest with darkness, which is most manifest, as I will demonstrate in the following conclusion, in the character of Falstaff. Falstaff is associated in Chimes at Midnight, like the Percys, with the aural dimension of the film. He, after all, invokes the “chimes at midnight” of its title in the film’s opening scene; he is the very embodiment of the musically festive and noisy tavern world (the Lancaster court, by contrast, is for the most part quiet—often silent—and solem).
The King no doubt has Falstaff in mind in referencing the Prince’s “rude society,” as he does when he alludes directly to the rotund knight, so known for his obesity, later in the film, asserting, “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them”
The conspicuous darkness visually attending the King’s direct and indirect mentions of Falstaff intimate the latter’s primary symbolic dimension in the film. More than he is with the aural, Falstaff is affiliated with shadow, blackness, and darkness, and as such he threatens the symbolic light of the throne (“Indeed you come near me now, Hal; for we that take purses go by the moon”… “Hal, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal”).
Falstaff is indeed Hal’s shadow, and he is imaged as such: Falstaff and Hal are framed through much of this scene as doubles, foreground and background—Hal in the fore, Falstaff in the back—as if Falstaff’s figure were the shadow of Hal’s, mimicking his outline along the fence behind him as the Prince presents himself in and as the lustrous sun.
Falstaff affirms his self- and cinematic representation as a creature of night and shade in his final scene. The courtly street is pervaded by characters’ shadows looming vivid and large along the walls behind them. And at the end of the scene Falstaff, abandoned by all but a child, his Page, makes to leave and utters his final words in the film: “I shall be sent for soon ... (Pauses) ... at night” And as he hobbles slowly away, his shadow drifts, gargantuan, across a stone wall.
Falstaff’s obscure foiling of the Prince renders him the symbolic opposite of cinematic light, which, especially in the monochromatic, beautifully black-and-white Chimes at Midnight, is darkness: the negative of photographic light, or light itself in the photographic negative, an essential constituent of the picture. So Falstaff, though subordinated as darkness, is as integral to the cinematic image as is the light of the King. For that image, as a series of photographic images, depends upon darkness as much as it does upon light. Likewise Hal’s right, bright reign as the sun-like King depends upon Falstaff, the embodiment of cinematic darkness, even as his sunlit cinematic image is threatened by Falstaff s potentially consuming shadow.
The Holinshed narration effectively concludes the film’s narrative plot, and again represents the film’s cinematic reworking of Holinshed’s Chronicles. The voiceover narration, here voiced over an upwardly craning shot of Falstaff’s large and heavy coffin being heaved along, proudly asserts the new King’s right good rule.
The written, aural narrative has thus been fully assimilated to the luminous project—or projection—of the Lancaster reign even as the film visually depicts its link to darkness through the coffined body of Hal’s unrewarded yet harshly punished friend.
After a final fade-out, the director’s credit appears, mid-screen and still, over a looped sequence of soldiers and court officials. Then it moves. Upward. Slowly. Taking on the slow movement of the men pushing Falstaff’s coffin up the hill as the film continues to assimilate different media to its own cinematic motion, ever inspirited by the spectral Falstaffian negative.
Visual vs. Aural
Light vs. Darkness
The Sun vs. the Moon.
Catholic vs. Protestant
Oral tradition vs. Printed word
Church over King vs. King over Church
The imaginary world of the mind vs the real sensory world.
Instrimental music vs. music in the service of the visual.
Welles expressed his investment in the inter-medial aspect of Chimes at Midnight in an interview about the film. When asked by Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio how he conceives scenes, Welles responds, “Music. Music and poetry. It’s that rather than simply visual”. He goes on to suggest that the visual comes out of these media, saying, “With me, the visual is a solution to what the poetical and musical form dictates”; a solution, as I will conceive it here, to the competing demands of the poetical and musical forms or, as I will call them, the written and aural modes of the film.
The visual, I will argue, is a “solution” to all of them, indeed the filmic solution of all of them, produced by their admixture, and so contains them all. In other words, the moving image in Chimes at Midnight, as the quintessentially cinematic, is framed as an encompassing medium greater than the sum of its constituent media.
Chimes at Midnight opens with a well-known, retrospective sequence that frames its narrative as a shared memory. The first line of dialogue, Master Shallow’s familiar “Jesus, the days that we have seen”, initiates a mode of remembrance that is reciprocated by Falstaff,
The opening sequence “creates the impression of a flashback. Its effect is to allow us to see that this is Falstaff’s story. We are to witness the glory of his days and to partake in the sorrow of their passing”
The film’s narrative is thus introduced as a memorial narrative, but the memorial mode is immediately depicted as a cinematic mode. For when Falstaff and Shallow first sit down in front of the fire, the fireplace and the wall in which it is set look curiously like an illuminated screen. Falstaff’s recall in particular is screened as a scene of seeing suggestive of cinematic viewing: stoically looking into the screen-like fire, he seems to see in it (or on it) “the days that they have seen.”
By reflexively presenting the performance of remembrance as a mode of filmic spectatorship, Chimes at Midnight suggests that memory itself is a kind of cinematic adaptation. The film’s memorial reflexivity insinuates, that is, that remembering, in its imaginary visual and acoustic dimensions, is like watching a film. When Falstaff and Shallow sit by the same screen-like fire and repeat some of their conversation verbatim later in the film, the flashback seeming to have come full circle, the remembering men, now with the addition of Silence, are visually framed by and contained within the luminescent, cinematic wall. The filmic mode thus images its containment of the memorial mode in which the film commences.
It is as if Chimes at Midnight begins again with a different narrative in a different narrative mode, setting Falstaff and Shallow’s memories in contest with Holinshed’s history, which imposes its own narrative authority. For the history is presented as if it would set the record straight, displacing the subjective memories of Falstaff and Shallow with an “official” account while also containing their personal stories within its broader sweep of events.
Unlike the memories of the two old men, which remain vague and are effectively mystified by Falstaff’s deep, silent gaze into the fire, the historical narration begins with a clear statement of undeniable fact: “King Richard II was murdered.”
Moreover the voiceover, without a visible speaking body to locate and materialize it, is abstract, godlike in its nowhere-yet-everywhere quality and therefore authoritative in its utterance.
The screenplay of Chimes at Midnight, as an evolution of a stage-play titled Five Kings that Welles first wrote—not composed but compiled and arranged— in high school, inscribes an additional level of memory and history, and reflects the adaptive logic of the film.
So the film is not only an adaptation of at least five Shakespearean source-plays of various genres, but also the intricate adaptation—the writing and rewriting, staging and re-staging— of an “original” dramatic compilation by Welles that underwent changes and additions over the course of many years, reflecting multiple historical and cultural moments, and several different periods in the director’s own life.
So, as the latest version of a revisionary project that spanned many years, Chimes at Midnight comprises its theatrical antecedents, but as the best version thereof it excels them in and as film.
The “official” English history in question performs a similar adaptation as inclusion-supersession. By narrating Holinshed’s Chronicles, Welles interpolates Shakespeare’s own source material into his cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare, revealing the Shakespearean “original” to be an adaptation as well.
And the Chronicles, the source of the source, despite the apparently singular possessive of “Holinshed’s,” is not only multiply authored, but compiled and adapted from the work of literally hundreds of authors. The further back we trace the film’s history, the more multitudinous it becomes, introducing a plethora of historical narratives doubtless selected from myriad others, themselves likely adapted from still other, older narratives and/ or from memories, personal and collective. Yet the narratives selected and revised for publication in and as Holinshed’s Chronicles survive as a once and still in many ways authoritative document of English history, a document that simultaneously contains and displaces its abundant constituents, editing and combining them into a newer, arguably more substantial, in almost all cases more popular, and undeniably monumental narrative of England’s past.
The eerie closing shot of the title sequence depicts several soldiers standing in strange formation, almost motionless beneath a dismally cloudy sky, many of their fellows hanging dead in the background. Ana only one credit is superimposed on this image: “Narration based on Holinshed’s Chronicles spoken by Ralph Richardson”.
Likewise Richardson’s spoken narrative, more recent than Holinshed’s Chronicles, contains the words of Holinshed’s Chronicles even as it takes their place and prominence. And likewise Holinshed’s history, coming after the remembrances of Falstaff and Shallow, displaces their memorial narrative while also containing them in its more comprehensive historical account. This ordering principle, I contend, constitutes the logic of the film as a confluence of narrative modes and media. The logic might best be described as adaptive progression: what comes last and contains that which came before presents itself as the dominant medium of communication and the historical authority.
This also explains why Welles presents the Chronicles in the film, rather than Shakespeare’s plays alone. Shakespeare’s plays, the film affirms, contain yet alter, add to, and supersede the Chronicles in the same way that Welles’s film contains and supersedes Shakespeare and the Chronicles with Welles’s own excisions, alterations, and additions.
As we near Richardson begin to read pieces of Holinshed’s Chronicles, we see nothing but light on a screen and are consequently pulled out of the picture, made suddenly and acutely aware that we are merely looking at a screen onto which light is being projected. By briefly waking us from the dreamlike effects of cinematic technique, Chimes at Midnight foregrounds the technics of cinema. So, with the voiceover credit lingering in our minds, and along with it the impression of writing evoked by Holinshed, we perceive the voiceover not just as story, and not just as historical narrative, but also as a cinematic mode of inscription, as if the words spoken were thereby written onto the empty screen as they might otherwise be onto a blank page.
The technical emphases on pure image as projected light, on pure voice without a bodily referent, and on voiceover as written narration precipitate a sudden intermingling of technical components of the cinema: the acoustic presence of writing pours into the visual vacuity of the screen as so much ink, reminding us of the cinema’s origination as the cinemato-graph.
The subsequent images therefore register as a dynamic pictorial form of writing, a kind of luminous transcription of Shakespeare and Holinshed. The dramatic history of and in Chimes at Midnight, in other words, successively appears in so many screened images as a multiplex rewriting in the language of cinema. So, as with memory, Chimes at Midnight reworks writing and history in its own cinematic image, simultaneously, again, containing and displacing them.
The film treats the theatrical mode—perhaps its most prominent medial antecedent as a Shakespearean film—in lake fashion. When Falstaff and Hal decide to put on a play extempore in the tavern in Eastcheap, Chimes at Midnight stages theater cinematically.
A chair set atop a table becomes a makeshift throne. Above the chair is a softly lit window that, like the fireplace in the opening sequence, looks like an illuminated screen… the screen-like window appears most prominently in the numerous shots over-the-shoulder of Hal playing himself—or Falstaff playing Hal—looking up at the acting king from an extreme low angle, literally pointing up the mock authority of the make-believe king. In line with and above the king, lambent in the top of the frame, is the screen-like window, expressing the highest authority of cinema—an authority in line with, though even higher than, that of the king himself. Even as it thus encompasses and rules over this theater like its court, it is as if the film— visualized by an image of a cinematic screen—were saying that theater, like this little play, is but a little imitation of its dominant medium.
The film thematizes the troubled, indeed antagonistic relationship between its sounds and images, or between what I will call the aural and visual media of the film. Chimes at Midnight weaves its sound-image clashes through the power dynamics at stake in the film’s monarchical narrative.
Chimes at Midnight presents a relationship between the aural and the visual at its outset. It presents two modes of memory as two different modes of sensory recall: Shallow suggests their apparently shared memories are visual—“the days that we have seen”—while Falstaff invokes them as aural—“We have heard the chimes at midnight”.
Both modes of remembrance, tuned to image and sound, respectively, constitute the film as film, a composition of sight and sound, yet they vie for cinematic prominence throughout…And yet the visual medium, I will argue, prevails in Chimes nevertheless. Through a series of such technical and referential mini-contests between the aural ana the visual, Chimes at Midnight will repeatedly crown the latter champion, the quintessential, indispensable cinematic mode.
(Note: Macluhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, where the written word triumphs over the spoken word. Interestingly, Gutenberg’s printing press was invented in 1450, shortly after the historical events depicted in Chimes at Midnight)
In the scene introduced by the first Holinshed narration, Henry IV’s court and castle at Windsor are marked by high windows through which sunlight beams down in narrow shafts. (like the Nuremberg lights used in Kane and Caesar, or like lights from a projector) A visual marker, arguably, of ultimate authority, it also marks the authority of the visual, for its projecting beams look, too, like those of a cinematic projector.
Welles has long been known as a cinematic artist especially interested in the self-reflexivity of his medium. As Kerry Brougher asserts: For Welles, who had studied magic, the entire film apparatus—theater, projection, light, camera, sound—was something that could be “experienced” within the film’s frame; part of the pleasure of the cinema was the excitement derived by the audience as self-aware observers of filmic pyrotechnics, the highlighting of what had before been primarily invisible.
Brougher, not surprisingly, cites Citizen Kane in particular, analyzing the projection room sequence as self-reflexive cinema par excellence. James Naremore makes the same observation, stating that “the conversation among reporters [in the projection room] is one of the most self-reflexive moments in the film”. The most striking and most self-reflexive aspect of the scene, of course, is the lighting, supplied only, it seems, by that which pours down out of the projection booth in vivid filmic beams—much like the light that pours down from upper windows in Henry IV’s court in Chimes at Midnight. (Wellesian cinema is a cross between essay and magic show)
“Henceforth, let me not hear you speak of Mortimer, or you shall hear in such a kind from me as will displease you”. Northumberland immediately tries again, saying, “My good lord, hear me”
In the receding shot of Hotspur ranting, he is framed to look smaller, his head appearing to come up only to the hip of his uncle as though he were a child among reproving adults. The image of Worcester and Northumberland effectively looking down on him with the force of the downwardly beaming light bolsters the association between projected light, cinema, and authority even as it endues the elder Percys with that authority. But significantly, Worcester and Northumberland do not stand in the light as the King sits in it. Rather, they stand between and beneath the two prominent rays, reflecting the fact that they are not themselves vying for kingship, but trying to control the power of the king.
As soon as Worcester introduces his treasonous designs on the Archbishop, chimes begin sounding in the background, reestablishing the aural sway of the Percys and enlarging it to threaten the throne. At Hotspur's castle, trumpeters appear on several different turrets, suggesting that they surround the castle. Thus the aural medium of sound surrounds and indeed contains and directs Hotspur’s military power as he prepares, in this scene, for war.
It is when Hotspur exclaims of his horse, readied to leave for battle, “That roan shall be my throne", anticipating military victory against Bolingbroke and his own consequent kingship if that occurs, that the bell-holes of trumpets suddenly fill the screen, threatening to consume the cinematic image as black holes would consume light itself. The Percys’ rebellion is thus galvanized by the aural force of instruments that would highjack and dominate the visual medium of film just as their insurrection would conquer the King and take the throne.
Anticipating dramatic self-reform, a renunciation of the bawdy tavern world and an embrasure of the court, Hal says, squinting up at the sky,
“Yet herein will I 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 wond’red at”.
The Prince thus links himself to the sun, the primary means of light and sight in medieval England, but his description also and primarily renders him a “beautifully” lit image, recalling the King centered on his throne in and figuratively as the beaming sunlight.
Later in the film King Henry, chastising Hal, depicts kingship in similar terms of visual craft. Comparing Hal to his corrupt, now usurped and murdered, predecessor Richard II, the King says:
The skipping King [Richard II], he ambled up and down / With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits, / / Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools, / / Grew a companion to the common streets. / / So, when he had occasion to be seen, / He was but as the cuckoo is in June, / Heard, not regarded—seen, but with such eyes / As, sick and blunted with community, / Afford no extraordinary gaze, / Such as is bent on sunlike majesty.
Henry IV explicitly renders the authority of extraordinary kings a visual authority associated with sunlight, effectively theorizing his own repeatedly sunlit depiction in the film. At the same time he highlights the inferiority of the aural, with which he associates the king he deposed: Richard, he says, was “Heard, not regarded.”
Moreover, when he begins talking of “the skipping king,” we hear bells chiming in the background again, underscoring his criticism of aurality with the film’s titular, aurally symbolic sound. Insofar as Prince Henry and King Henry both characterize strong and right kingship as the calculated production of a captivating series of kingly images “affording extraordinary gaze,” they characterize it as a sort of monarchical cinema—a singular cinema fundamentally opposed to aural commonness and foolishness.
As the King reprehends Hal, they meet in the beaming sunlight before the King passes on, stepping down from the throne as Hal remains in the light. The coordinated movement is key, for it not only presents Hal’s self-assertion as he bravely steps up and intercepts his father’s position, but it also visually depicts the imminent exchange of what both men conceive of as crucially visual, monarchical power. The moment they stand together, face-to-face in the authoritative light of kingship, marks a monarchical transaction figured as a transfer of filmic projection.
After Hal kills Hotspur, trumpets sound, seemingly to signal victory, but a Lancaster soldier shouts, “The trumpet sounds retreat. The day is ours!”. So the trumpets, predominantly associated with the Percys and their aurally charged rebellion, stand in for them once again, but no longer as a threat to the King’s optical dominance. Rather, the sound is one of defeat that indicates the routing of their revolt. The aural medium is thus reduced to the representation of its own defeat. The Lancaster victory, by contrast, is signaled visually with flags: after the retreat is announced, numerous soldiers hold them proudly behind the victorious King as he says, “Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke”
As the visually dominant King, that is, he contains and controls the aurally resistant rebels, thereby enacting the medial logic of the film. For the film’s visual accent does not do away with or wipe out its aural dimension or its other media—it rather conquers, contains, and controls them, effectively maintaining the optical prominence of cinema.
As the King speaks in close-up, darkness, rather than light, marks the place of vision itself: a thick line of shadow from one of the window’s bars overlays the King’s eyes through much of his monologue, almost like a blindfold. Indeed, the dark covers the King’s eyes as he asks why sleep will “seal up the ship-boy’s eyes” amid “rude imperious surge,”. The aural and the absence or opposite of light and sight—darkness and blindness—thus coalesce to forecast the King’s decease and, along with it, the inexorable resignation of his power.
When Hal thinks his father dead and takes his crown out of the royal bedroom, he then kneels, holding it for his own, doubtless about to don it. And the image suddenly dissolves to one depicting Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence before the screen-like fire. Hal’s fraught advancement to the throne is thus linked to the framing cinematic, memorial story—“the days that [they] have seen,” which, sitting by the fire, Falstaff and Shallow reference again.
So Hal’s rule is relinked to cinematic viewing and visuality as we watch his movement into monarchical authority. When the King does die, he is sitting on the throne as Hal kneels before him, both of them awash in the light of an upper window. Hal stands and, in the center of that projecting light, addresses the court, announcing that his blood shall “flow henceforth in formal majesty”. Then he turns, takes up the crown for the first time officially, and declares, “Now call we our High Parliament,” not facing the court, but facing the beaming light of the upper window.
However, if that sovereignty is in Chimes at Midnight established as and predicated upon the inter-medial and intra-cinematic dominance of the luminous filmic image, that image of light is not without its own intra-visual contest with darkness, which is most manifest, as I will demonstrate in the following conclusion, in the character of Falstaff. Falstaff is associated in Chimes at Midnight, like the Percys, with the aural dimension of the film. He, after all, invokes the “chimes at midnight” of its title in the film’s opening scene; he is the very embodiment of the musically festive and noisy tavern world (the Lancaster court, by contrast, is for the most part quiet—often silent—and solem).
The King no doubt has Falstaff in mind in referencing the Prince’s “rude society,” as he does when he alludes directly to the rotund knight, so known for his obesity, later in the film, asserting, “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them”
The conspicuous darkness visually attending the King’s direct and indirect mentions of Falstaff intimate the latter’s primary symbolic dimension in the film. More than he is with the aural, Falstaff is affiliated with shadow, blackness, and darkness, and as such he threatens the symbolic light of the throne (“Indeed you come near me now, Hal; for we that take purses go by the moon”… “Hal, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal”).
Falstaff is indeed Hal’s shadow, and he is imaged as such: Falstaff and Hal are framed through much of this scene as doubles, foreground and background—Hal in the fore, Falstaff in the back—as if Falstaff’s figure were the shadow of Hal’s, mimicking his outline along the fence behind him as the Prince presents himself in and as the lustrous sun.
Falstaff affirms his self- and cinematic representation as a creature of night and shade in his final scene. The courtly street is pervaded by characters’ shadows looming vivid and large along the walls behind them. And at the end of the scene Falstaff, abandoned by all but a child, his Page, makes to leave and utters his final words in the film: “I shall be sent for soon ... (Pauses) ... at night” And as he hobbles slowly away, his shadow drifts, gargantuan, across a stone wall.
Falstaff’s obscure foiling of the Prince renders him the symbolic opposite of cinematic light, which, especially in the monochromatic, beautifully black-and-white Chimes at Midnight, is darkness: the negative of photographic light, or light itself in the photographic negative, an essential constituent of the picture. So Falstaff, though subordinated as darkness, is as integral to the cinematic image as is the light of the King. For that image, as a series of photographic images, depends upon darkness as much as it does upon light. Likewise Hal’s right, bright reign as the sun-like King depends upon Falstaff, the embodiment of cinematic darkness, even as his sunlit cinematic image is threatened by Falstaff s potentially consuming shadow.
The Holinshed narration effectively concludes the film’s narrative plot, and again represents the film’s cinematic reworking of Holinshed’s Chronicles. The voiceover narration, here voiced over an upwardly craning shot of Falstaff’s large and heavy coffin being heaved along, proudly asserts the new King’s right good rule.
The written, aural narrative has thus been fully assimilated to the luminous project—or projection—of the Lancaster reign even as the film visually depicts its link to darkness through the coffined body of Hal’s unrewarded yet harshly punished friend.
After a final fade-out, the director’s credit appears, mid-screen and still, over a looped sequence of soldiers and court officials. Then it moves. Upward. Slowly. Taking on the slow movement of the men pushing Falstaff’s coffin up the hill as the film continues to assimilate different media to its own cinematic motion, ever inspirited by the spectral Falstaffian negative.
Visual vs. Aural
Light vs. Darkness
The Sun vs. the Moon.
Catholic vs. Protestant
Oral tradition vs. Printed word
Church over King vs. King over Church
The imaginary world of the mind vs the real sensory world.
Instrimental music vs. music in the service of the visual.
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Black Irish
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 317
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:07 pm
Re: John Oldcastle, the real Falstaff?
R: If Beatrice gets her way, there will be 20 different versions in 5 years
She wants to 4k scans donated to film school so students can make their own edits. She says her father would have loved that.
BTW, I was asked not to write about it or tell people I had seen it, so keep it between us.
M: Will do. Beatrice's idea sounds great.
R: Frank Marshall looked at her like she was nuts -- of course, she tried pitching that INSTEAD of completing WIND. She likes the documentary idea.
I don't know if I told you this, but a few months ago she called me and told me how she was having second (too late) thoughts about WIND. She feels it will be a disaster and ruin her father's reputation. I told her she was wrong. I told her it was a win-win. If the movie is a success, Orson will get all of the credit. If the movie is a disaster, people will blame Peter Frank and Filip. She laughed and said, "You know just the right thing to say."
She thinks the final script and notes are not enough. She said she spent time with her father in the editing room. He always came up with new ideas while cutting.
And everything comes back to the Jess Franco Don Quixote.
. Edward Noris sent another friendly email. Notice he has not mentioned having the work print? I was told that will come shortly. He is going to try to get me involved. My position is that if Peter has Orson's 105-minute previously unknown workprint, then dont worrry I am sure he has shown it to his best friend Frank Marshall.
M: Right.
Good thinking with Beatrice.
I don't blame her for being concerned. But if anyone can make something of it, it's Netflix.
R: What bothers me about Norris is how strong Lomento was that he is bad news. He really harassed Filip & Frank with calls and letters. How bad do you have to be to get a cease and desist order? The word unhinged was not used, but all I could think of was Larry French threatening me at work.
M: Maybe he is Larry.
R: No, he is in IMDB. And he did assist Peter on Cat's Meow and assisted on the One Man Band re-edit.
M: BTW, did you see Larry's complaint that Chris Welles Feder was not interviewed for the Macbeth Bluray? He calls her his "good friend". All I could think of was his letter to Jeff Wilson saying what a bitch she was.
R: I know. Joe told me when it came out that she had become reclusive. I assume she turned them down.
She has been quiet lately, altho she did host the LFS screening this month.
I asked her about WIND and she commented, partly because Joe asked her to. Her health is not great.
M: Sorry to hear that. I've never met her. She seems very nice, and contributed quite a lot to Wellesnet back in the day.
R: I think she is close to 80.
M: Regarding Norris, sounds like he wants to be part of the Wind project, just like Dawson tried to get on the Criterion Chimes project.
R: That's the vibe I got. I should have pressed Lomento about the crackpots I have to deal with. He has a great life. He has an apartment in NYC and home at Cape Cod, which he seems to use as home base, His husband is a moive art director
M: Husband? Gay?
R: Yes. And he does not fit any stereotype.
M: Crackpots reminds me of Welles to lLeaming: "I seem to attract such types."
R: Early on, Josh told me not to text Lomento because I would lose the pleasure of just chatting with him. He is a great guy.. and blunt.
M: He's given you a lot of great info.
R: I have an OW crack pot story. Three years ago, Beatrice's assistant Mindy told me that a man kept calling and insisting he was the reincarnation of Orson Welles. Mindy pointed out to him that he was born YEARS before Orson died. He got angry and insisted Orson's spirt was in him and he needed to be with Beatrice.
M: Woah.
That's not good.
R: On the flipside, a man fromJapan wrote Beatrice a beautiful letter. He is disabled from a young age he became a fan of Orson Welles movies and it kept him going and helped him to be strong and overcome adversity.
She answers some letters like that.
M: Yes, that's good.
R: Last year , the driver of the car that collided with her mother contacted her. The woman has been haunted by the tragedy. Beatrice assured her it was not her fault and she should let it go
M: Nice of her. Who's fault was it? Paola's friend?
R: Totally the fault of the family friend who was driving the car.
M: Whatever happened to him, I wonder?
R: Someone, not Beatrice, told me has a drinking problem and got help. He does counseling.
Imagine she died taking her dogs to the groomer so they would like nice for a TV shoot. What a waste.
M; Definitely. Imagine how shattered Beatrice was. I met her about four years after that.
R: She lost her maternal grandmother between the death of Orson and Paol and her boyfriend dumped her. She had become cordial in early 1986 with Oja and something really ugly went down. She has not told me, except to say it was vicious and cruel. She got married soon after her mom's death, which was a mistake. She showed me the wedding photos and she looks sad and miserable.
When she does her book, I hope she loads it with photos of her during Chimes. I have seen her on stage from the 1960 play and being carried on baxter's shoulders. There are nice shots of her on the set with Margaret Rutherford and her dad. I have seen these cute, kinda sexy shots of her mother cuddling and goofing with Baxter
Baxter adored her mother. Joe says he went off on a tangent in Spain about how she scouted lcoations, shopped for materials for the costumes and cooked meals for the cast.
Joe and I separately urged Morgan to interview him about Sacred Beasts. Imagine him, Moreau and Perkins!
She wants to 4k scans donated to film school so students can make their own edits. She says her father would have loved that.
BTW, I was asked not to write about it or tell people I had seen it, so keep it between us.
M: Will do. Beatrice's idea sounds great.
R: Frank Marshall looked at her like she was nuts -- of course, she tried pitching that INSTEAD of completing WIND. She likes the documentary idea.
I don't know if I told you this, but a few months ago she called me and told me how she was having second (too late) thoughts about WIND. She feels it will be a disaster and ruin her father's reputation. I told her she was wrong. I told her it was a win-win. If the movie is a success, Orson will get all of the credit. If the movie is a disaster, people will blame Peter Frank and Filip. She laughed and said, "You know just the right thing to say."
She thinks the final script and notes are not enough. She said she spent time with her father in the editing room. He always came up with new ideas while cutting.
And everything comes back to the Jess Franco Don Quixote.
. Edward Noris sent another friendly email. Notice he has not mentioned having the work print? I was told that will come shortly. He is going to try to get me involved. My position is that if Peter has Orson's 105-minute previously unknown workprint, then dont worrry I am sure he has shown it to his best friend Frank Marshall.
M: Right.
Good thinking with Beatrice.
I don't blame her for being concerned. But if anyone can make something of it, it's Netflix.
R: What bothers me about Norris is how strong Lomento was that he is bad news. He really harassed Filip & Frank with calls and letters. How bad do you have to be to get a cease and desist order? The word unhinged was not used, but all I could think of was Larry French threatening me at work.
M: Maybe he is Larry.
R: No, he is in IMDB. And he did assist Peter on Cat's Meow and assisted on the One Man Band re-edit.
M: BTW, did you see Larry's complaint that Chris Welles Feder was not interviewed for the Macbeth Bluray? He calls her his "good friend". All I could think of was his letter to Jeff Wilson saying what a bitch she was.
R: I know. Joe told me when it came out that she had become reclusive. I assume she turned them down.
She has been quiet lately, altho she did host the LFS screening this month.
I asked her about WIND and she commented, partly because Joe asked her to. Her health is not great.
M: Sorry to hear that. I've never met her. She seems very nice, and contributed quite a lot to Wellesnet back in the day.
R: I think she is close to 80.
M: Regarding Norris, sounds like he wants to be part of the Wind project, just like Dawson tried to get on the Criterion Chimes project.
R: That's the vibe I got. I should have pressed Lomento about the crackpots I have to deal with. He has a great life. He has an apartment in NYC and home at Cape Cod, which he seems to use as home base, His husband is a moive art director
M: Husband? Gay?
R: Yes. And he does not fit any stereotype.
M: Crackpots reminds me of Welles to lLeaming: "I seem to attract such types."
R: Early on, Josh told me not to text Lomento because I would lose the pleasure of just chatting with him. He is a great guy.. and blunt.
M: He's given you a lot of great info.
R: I have an OW crack pot story. Three years ago, Beatrice's assistant Mindy told me that a man kept calling and insisting he was the reincarnation of Orson Welles. Mindy pointed out to him that he was born YEARS before Orson died. He got angry and insisted Orson's spirt was in him and he needed to be with Beatrice.
M: Woah.
That's not good.
R: On the flipside, a man fromJapan wrote Beatrice a beautiful letter. He is disabled from a young age he became a fan of Orson Welles movies and it kept him going and helped him to be strong and overcome adversity.
She answers some letters like that.
M: Yes, that's good.
R: Last year , the driver of the car that collided with her mother contacted her. The woman has been haunted by the tragedy. Beatrice assured her it was not her fault and she should let it go
M: Nice of her. Who's fault was it? Paola's friend?
R: Totally the fault of the family friend who was driving the car.
M: Whatever happened to him, I wonder?
R: Someone, not Beatrice, told me has a drinking problem and got help. He does counseling.
Imagine she died taking her dogs to the groomer so they would like nice for a TV shoot. What a waste.
M; Definitely. Imagine how shattered Beatrice was. I met her about four years after that.
R: She lost her maternal grandmother between the death of Orson and Paol and her boyfriend dumped her. She had become cordial in early 1986 with Oja and something really ugly went down. She has not told me, except to say it was vicious and cruel. She got married soon after her mom's death, which was a mistake. She showed me the wedding photos and she looks sad and miserable.
When she does her book, I hope she loads it with photos of her during Chimes. I have seen her on stage from the 1960 play and being carried on baxter's shoulders. There are nice shots of her on the set with Margaret Rutherford and her dad. I have seen these cute, kinda sexy shots of her mother cuddling and goofing with Baxter
Baxter adored her mother. Joe says he went off on a tangent in Spain about how she scouted lcoations, shopped for materials for the costumes and cooked meals for the cast.
Joe and I separately urged Morgan to interview him about Sacred Beasts. Imagine him, Moreau and Perkins!
-
Black Irish
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 317
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:07 pm
-
Black Irish
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 317
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:07 pm
-
Black Irish
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 317
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:07 pm
-
Black Irish
- Wellesnet Veteran
- Posts: 317
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2012 10:07 pm
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