Movies at the Library: Orson Welles’ other masterpiece

The next screening in our Movies at the Library series — to be shown on Tuesday, November 1 — will be a film called “Chimes at Midnight.” If that title doesn’t strike a responsive chord in your memory bank, it’s quite understandable.

For even though it was directed by the legendary Orson Welles, “Chimes at Midnight” has languished in undeserved obscurity ever since it was released in 1965. That neglect over the past five decades has outraged the movie’s coterie of admirers who proclaim that it should be recognized as Welles’s “other masterpiece.”

That is saying a great deal, especially when we pause to remind ourselves that Welles’s first masterpiece — and his debut as a film director — was “Citizen Kane,” which is arguably the most celebrated achievement in the history of cinema. To this day, it ranks as number one on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.

But in the aftermath of that extraordinary 1941 triumph, Welles went through long stretches of frustration and disappointment in his career. Because he refused to bend to the will of the Hollywood studios in an era when the studio bosses ruled the U.S. motion picture industry with an iron hand, he constantly had to scramble and scrounge to get the financial backing he needed to make his films.

Welles did direct a few other good movies after “Citizen Kane.”  His second one, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” comes to mind, as does “The Stranger” and “Touch of Evil.”

But during these years, the 1940s and 50s, he was mainly praised for his work as a gifted actor, often in pictures made by other directors. Think of his dazzling performance as Harry Lime in the Carol Reed classic, “The Third Man.”

Throughout his career, Welles was drawn to the works of Shakespeare. During his pre-Hollywood years, when he was building his early reputation as a theater director in New York, his projects included innovative adaptations of Shakespearean plays.

Then a little more than a decade later, he directed film versions of “Macbeth” and “Othello,”  and, Welles being Welles, in each of them he cast himself in the title role.

But the Shakespearean character that fascinated him the most was Falstaff, the lusty and boisterous drinking companion of young Prince Hal in the two “Henry IV” plays, and the ludicrous, bumbling suitor in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Which brings us back to “Chimes at Midnight,” a film built entirely around the character of Falstaff. Over the years, Welles often said he regarded Falstaff as Shakespeare’s greatest creation, and he was determined to give the rollicking knight his due, and then some.

So, in a brilliant display of his creative genius, Welles assembled scenes featuring Falstaff that Shakespeare had scattered through the three plays and stitched them into a lively revision that shifted most of the focus from the royal family to the tavern buffoon.

To help clarify the new version, he added a narration read by the esteemed Ralph Richardson, who is just part of a splendid cast that Welles put together for this venture. Keith Baxter is superb as Prince Hal, and in the role of the king he succeeds, Henry IV, the great John Gielgud is at his elegant, starchy best.

Two of the most popular actresses of that era were cast in the film’s juicy female roles. Jeanne Moreau plays the prostitute, Doll Tearsheet, and Margaret Rutherford is Mistress Quickly, the tavern’s bawdy hostess.

But the movie belongs to Falstaff, and there’s no need to ask who took on that part. Welles had been miscast on past occasions, but not this time. In so many ways, physical and otherwise, he was the perfect choice to play the corpulent knight, an exuberant glutton for not only food and drink, but also for laughter and love and all kinds of high jinks.

In a 1982 BBC interview, Welles revealed that “Chimes at Midnight” was his favorite film, and he went on to say: “If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up.”

As for his performance as Falstaff, he regarded that as the triumphant peak of his acting career.

So please join us next Tuesday at 7 p.m. when we’ll be taking our seats in the library’s lower level community room to view “Chimes at Midnight” — or, as it’s known in some circles, Orson Welles’ other masterpiece.