“I have heard the CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT” Orson Welles plays Falstaff in his final theatrical performance on the Dublin stage in 1960

November 25th, 2011

Orson Welles began his career as a stage actor at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin, Ireland on October 13, 1931.  At the time Herbert Hoover was the President of  The United States of  America.

Orson Welles ended his career as a stage actor at the Gaiety Theate, in Dublin, Ireland in March, 1960. At the time John Kennedy (an Irishman) was President of  The United States of America.

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Since I’ve always considered Orson Welles Falstaff (the movie) to be his greatest cinematic acheivement, I’ve often wondered why his ghost staging of Chimes at Midnight in Dublin in 1960 has been so ignored in most Welles biographies.  For instance, I have never seen a cast listing of the Dublin production, or even realized that Hilton Edwards was the credited director of the play.  Now, thanks to a new documentary on Welles in Ireland, we have a lot of material on Welles final appearance as an actor on the stage.

Unfortunately, the documentary presumes Welles career went dramatic downhill after his last stage appearance in Dublin.  Of corse, nothing could be further from the truth.  Welles greatest film, Falstaff, was not widely seen in cinemas until 1967.   Like the stage version of Chimes at Midnight, the film version was clearly a  great big “Flop” at the box office, just as Citizen Kane was in 1941.  But Falstaff was also quite clearly a cinematic masterpiece, and it was the film Welles himself felt was his “testament.”  I find it quite idiotic that the makers of the documentary would spend so much time on Welles “commercial work” rather than even mentioning his film version of Falstaff. In my view, it is sheer stupidity,  and I daresay my friend Simon Callow might also may want to have his name taken off of this documentary, for he was obviously quoted out of context.

I certainly don’t object to the facts, for instance saying that Chimes at Midnight was a flop, which clearly it was, Financially.  But what Welles’s film’s have ever been successful?

It’s like saying, “well yes, Van Gogh made some great paintings, but why the hell did he not become successful?”

Are you kidding me? Who could anyone who knows anything about ORSON WELLES be so stupid!!

That  is why THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND will never be seen.

Now obviously everyone has their own unique opinions on what they feel are the greatest films of all time, but when you think of  Orson Welles directing a series of five plays by Shakespeare, one has to wonder how anyone can think that Citizen Kane could possibly be a better film than Falstaff. I guess it is because Welles had the great Herman M. as his co-writer, rather than that hack writer, Mr. W. Shakespeare.

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From  THE TRINITY NEWS (a Dublin University Weekly)  March 10, 1960

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT — Gaiety Theatre

Few men of the present day theatre have sought so consistently to throw off the shackles of conventional drama as Hilton Edwards and Orson Welles have done. The combination of their talents promised an exciting evening’s theatre–a promise which was richly fulfilled. In Chimes at Midnight, each part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV has been cut to about a third of its length, and the two have then been skilfully welded into a coherent narrative by the introducton of a spoken commentary taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles.

In the original, Falstaff’s part in the action is almost incidental, but in this adaptation it is his relationship with young Hal, and the latter’s relationship with his father, which are the main themes. The martial and political events of Shakespeare’s two plays are very lightly passed over in this adaptation; Hotspur, for example, is given no time to develop as a character. A great deal of expendable Shakespearian material has been cut; the aim is to give a stirring impression of swift-moving events. The one weakness in the play lies in the ending, where Prince Hal’s contemptuous  dismissal of Falstaff seems to point too narrow a moral. Kingly duty, for all its sanctity, seems to be a hollow thing when pitted against Falstaff’s lovable vitality. It is true that the defect is present in Shakespeare’s original, but it was intensified in the adaptation by the fact that the martial and patriotic aspects of the story received so little emphasis.

With this malleable material at his disposal, Hilton Edwards had ample scope for the demonstration of his fluid conception of the drama. The stage, which had several levels was left bare, although occasional use was made of representational pieces of scenery which served merely to suggest the setting. An army in progress was represented by a roll of drums and a man in armour carrying a banner. The deliberate avoidance of naturalistic effect had the result of vividly stimulating the imagination of the audience, and of imparting an extraordinary pace and panache to the production.

The acting varies from the mediocre to the brilliant. Orson Welles fills the stage with his immense bulk and his hugely whiskered face, and the theatre with his resonant vice and powerful dramatic presence. he captured the boastfulness, the mock hyprocrisy, the lovableness and the cowardice of the Fat Knight. yet there seemed to be something lacking. Perhaps the actor was tired after after the afternoon matinee, but Welles failed to put across the immense vigor of Falstaff. This lethargy extended even to his verse-speaking; his throwaway technique was engaging, but one quickly felt a lack of variation.

Keith Baxter as young Hal gave a performance of great dash and energy which was slightly marred by a lack of smoothness in his diction Reginald Jarman was superb as the King; he gave just the right impression of tortured strength, and he spoke the verse with noble authority. In smaller roles Patrick Bedford was a lively Poins, and Shirley Cameron conveyed admirably the earthy pathos in the character of Doll Tearsheet.

This is a memorable production, in which one partcular moment and one scene stand out. The moment is the sudden, shattering pathos which Welles brings to Falstaff’s simple statement to Doll: “I’m old,” and the scene, that in which whcih we see the dying King, alone and helpless, with only his crown beside him, in the huge emptiness of the stage.

B. R. R. A.

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CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT -  Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Being the adventures of the Fat Knight and the Prince of Wales
from the historical plays of William Shakespeare

The Court of King Henry the Fourth
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King Henry IV (Henry Bolingbroke) Reginald Jarman
Hal, Prince of Wales (later King Henry V) Keith Baxter
Prince John of Lancaster Peter Bartlett
Earl of Westmoreland Stuart Nichol
Lord Chief Justice Terence Greenidge
Gower Alan Mason
Page to Gower John Southarn

The Boar’s-Head Tavern in Eastcheap
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Sir John Falstaff Orson Welles
Doll Tearsheet Shirley Cameron
Mistress Quickly Thelma Ruby
Justice Robert Shallow Keith Marsh
Master Silence Aubrey Morris
Ned Poins Patrick Bedford
Pistol Rory Macdermott
Bardolf Leonard Fenton
Peto Peter Bartlett
Nym Henry Woolf
Sheriff Fang Rory Macdermott
Francis, a Drawer Lee Harris

Rebel Forces Loyal to Edmund Mortimer
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Harry Percy (known as Hotspur) Alexis Kanner
Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester Aubrey Morris
Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland Terence Greenidge

Chorus Rory Macdermott

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Opened March 1, 1960 at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
(Previewed at the Grand Opera House in Belfast)

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Bonhams to sell a Treasure Trove of Production Material on Orson Welles’s Masterpiece CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

November 6th, 2011

Chimes at Midnight is Welles’s masterpiece, the fullest, most completely realized expression of everything he had been working toward since Citizen Kane, which itself was more an end than a beginning.

–Joseph McBride, ORSON WELLES.

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Bonham’s Auction house will be selling an archive of rare production material on November 22 in London that belonged to the executive producer of Chimes at Midnight, Alessandro Tasca, who was a cousin of Guiseppe Lampedusa, the author of the classic Sicilian novel The Leopard.

The presale estimate for the collection is between £40,000 and 60,000 (British pounds).  Ideally, it would be wonderful if an archive could obtain the material, such as The University of Michigan or the Lilly Library, where it could be available for Welles scholars, but it would seem doubtful that either institution could afford the asking price during these lean economic times.  Presumably Simon Callow interviewed Alessandro Tasca before he died in 2000, but if he didn’t, it would obviously be nice if he could access to the archive so he could include it’s contents in the third volume of his upcoming Welles biography.

Another tantalizing possibility would be to collect the material in a lavish Taschen type of book devoted to Chimes at Midnight, as was done with Les Bravades, after it was auctioned off  by Rebecca Welles.

Here are the highlights of the archive, as listed in the auction catalogue:

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A series of 23 wash and watercolour drawings by Welles for Chimes at Midnight, some annotated by him (each c.250 x 500mm).

A series of some twenty stills from Don Quixote with the drawings and watercolors commissioned by Welles from the stills, by Ivano Staccioli and other artists.

Papers including some fifty sheets of production and location notes and memos by Welles, with the odd sketch, relating to Chimes at Midnight, Don Quixote and The Dreamers.

Photographs of Welles on the set of Chimes at Midnight, together with the negatives.

Other stills (one of Welles and Tasca on the set of Cagliostro, another of them setting up a TV short in 1961).

A substantial series of approximately 80 letters and notes or memos by Orson Welles to Alessandro Tasca, the majority signed, about ten being autographed, the remainder typed, dating between 1964 and 1984.

Retained copies of letters by Tasca to Welles.

Some 25 telegrams from Welles to Tasca.

Correspondence relating to Welles’s death (Tasca being the last person to have seen him alive).

Proposed budgets for the never made King Lear, The Big Brass Ring and The Dreamers.

A contract signed by Orson Welles with Central Casting.

Scripts for Orson Welles films or projects (some in duplicate), including Chimes at Midnight,  The Other Side of the Wind, The Big Brass Ring, The Dreamers, The Cradle will Rock, King Lear, The Magic Show and Mercedes.

Orson Welles’s library ticket for the Los Angeles Public Library, 1985.

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The papers chart what were, as Tasca himself confessed in his interview with Cahier du Cinema in November 1985, their many tempestuous rows, not least when Tasca had the temerity to leave the set in order to attend his daughter’s wedding. But after the Wellesian storms, comes the sunshine, as a (fairly typical) letter shows:

“I have put a severe strain on the most valued of all my friendships; behaving stupidly and brutishly and am most profoundly ashamed for having done so. It’s an indisputable fact that you must be left alone to do your job your way, and that’s the way it’s going to be from now on, believe me”; having, in the same letter, launched into a discussion of the correct negotiating techniques to employ with agents, he ends: “But that, of course, doesn’t change my boorish treatment of your good self, in whom I hold a regard higher than I could ever express and a personal affection which makes my behaviour all the more inexcusable”.

Many of Welles’s notes have been scrawled on the set, and give a tangible sense of being there with him; as in one hand-scrawled missive:

WHERE’S THE WIND?

I don’t believe there was a weather forecast for wind. I suspect (production manager Gustavo) Quintana of having been ordered to keep us inside during (producer Emiliano) Piedra’s absence. CHECK.

Often they are trivial in the extreme, and all the more valuable for that:

Dearest Sandro,

Last night I asked Rose Marie to call you and say not to come this Morning…

I’ve just now found out that she forgot. Forgive me! / Could you arrange to get me some more Cigars?

love,

O.

In this interesting memorandum headed “Cinematographer: And The Crew” Welles discusses his preference  for a lighting cameraman, who ended up being, not an Italian, but a French man, Edmond Richard, who had shot Welles’ previous film The Trial:  

With almost any other director it would be logical to use, for the European filming, a European cameraman: not a Yugoslav (they are good but slow) but an Italian. However, in my pictures I am, to a very considerable extent, my own cameraman. All basic decisions particularly as regards the lighting must be made by myself. This means that we require a good technician who is also a good leader of his crew, and above all, a fast worker. It goes without saying that he must be fully capable of lighting a scene entirely on his own, but it is essential that he understand and cheerfully agree to an arrangement whereby all the important initiatives in the photography come from me – in other words, he must accept a sort of partnership in which I am, in the crunch, the senior partner.

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Something Cloudy, Something Clear: A book on Orson Welles’s THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND due out in 2013

October 25th, 2011

Given the length of time it has taken for The Other Side of the Wind to be untangled from the legal web that has held it from public view for so long, it was inevitable that a book on the making of the film would be released before the film itself.  Here is Ray Kelly’s report on the upcoming book:

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AN ADVENTURE SHARED BY DESPERATE MEN  (THAT  FINALLY CAME TO NOTHING)

By RAY KELLY

While the future of The Other Side of the Wind is always cloudy, one thing appears clear: A  book chronicling the making of this unfinished Orson Welles film is in the works.

Josh Karp, who teaches journalism at Northwestern, is writing about The Other Side of the Wind for St. Martin’s Press. Due in 2013, An Adventure Shared By Desperate Men (That Finally Came to Nothing) looks at the filming of the 1970’s Welles movie starring John Huston as an aging director attempting to revive his career with a hip, artsy film.

Karp has written for Salon, TV Guide, Premiere, The Atlantic Monthly Online, The LA Times Sunday Magazine and other publications.  He is the author of  A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing.

Karp, who is conducting some of his final interviews for the book, agreed to field a few questions from Wellesnet.


RAY KELLY: Your previous two books have dealt with golf and National Lampoon. What attracted you to an unfinished Orson Welles film?

JOSH KARP: The simple answer is that it’s a great story and something I could gladly work on for a year or two.

What first got me interested were the stories from the set. I’d read about Rich Little and the midgets; John Huston driving the wrong way on the highway; a movie funded by the Shah’s brother-in-law; Welles seeing the amazing sunset outside the open studio door and saying, “It looks fake.”  I just loved all of that.

Then you had Welles and Huston who are almost literally characters out of novels (Huston was once described as “A Hemingway character lost in a Dostoevsky novel”). Complicated, charismatic, larger than life men and remarkable artists.

Someone told me recently that you couldn’t make small talk with either of them, simply because they’d led such interesting lives that you felt foolish bringing up the weather or the Dodgers game.

The biggest thing, however, was the depth of the story. It’s one thing to have great anecdotes and colorful characters. But, the more I learned about The Other Side of the Wind I felt there was something deeper than just a great narrative.

Though Welles claimed it wasn’t autobiographical, the way the story converged with his own life and relationships; and then the way in which the making of the movie began to mirror the movie itself just seemed deeply meaningful and symbolic.

One person I interviewed said that the on set atmosphere was almost surreal sometimes. It was hard to tell what was real life and what was the movie, both on and off screen. To me that was fascinating.  That’s the long answer.

Can you elaborate on the title An Adventure Shared By Desperate Men (That Finally Came to Nothing) ?

It’s a working title and may ultimately change. But the phrase is from Peter Viertel’s book Dangerous Friends which is about his relationship with Huston and Hemingway, but also includes a bit about The Other Side of the Wind.

According to Viertel, Huston said he loved working on the movie because it was his favorite kind of undertaking – not unlike the storyline in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – “an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing.”

And that seemed to capture something about The Other Side of the Wind.  A sense of people coming together and working against the odds to do something remarkable, but who ultimately are in it for the experience and love of filmmaking as much as for the result.

For those who were there, the movie was an adventure and people willingly came along for the ride, often without compensation.  For just about everyone involved it was a once in a lifetime experience that they still list prominently in their bios 40 years later.

That quality really appealed to me – a filmmaking odyssey and all of the interesting people, events and roadblocks that intersected with it. It kind of begs that essential question about art – namely, what is more important, the act of creation (the adventure) or the result.

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Richard France’s Introduction to his play, OBEDIENTLY YOURS, ORSON WELLES

September 29th, 2011

Richard Frances’s play Obediently Yours, Orson Welles was published by Oberon Books earlier this year in a volume entitled Hollywood Legends: ‘Live’ on stage.

Besides the Welles show, it features two additional plays, one on Marlene Dietrich, the other about James Dean, along with an introduction by Simon Callow.  Dr. France has graciously given his permission for Wellesnet to post his preface to the play here.  In addition, Glenn Anders has alerted us to an audio interview with Richard France you can listen to Here.  It includes comments about Richard France’s two books on Welles, The Theatre of  Orson Welles (sadly, still out of print) and Orson Welles on Shakespeare.

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INTRODUCTION TO OBEDIENTLY YOURS, ORSON WELLES

By Richard France

Orson Welles was rightfully contemptuous of academics, refusing all the honorary degrees that he was offered and heaping scorn on those of his “learned “bee-ographers” who dared to base our writings about his life and  accomplishments on anything other than the charming fairy-tales that he had so skillfully crafted over the years.

Frankly, it’s hard to fault him on either count. These, after all, were the same fairy-tales that sustained him long after the “pigeons” (as he called potential investors) stopped returning his phone calls. And had he lived long enough to witness the birth of nano-technology, there can be no doubt that he, too, would have recognized it as the only known substance on the face of this earth smaller than the mind of an academic.

I was living on a small farm in southern Maine at the time, annotating the third and final play-script – the enormous crazy-quilt known as “Five Kings”  — for “Orson Welles on Shakespeare,” when I received an offer from the University of  Southern California to spend a year as visiting associate professor with their (so-called) Theatre Division, now even more pretentiously known as its School of Theatre.  “Stay put,” I was told, especially by the very few academics whom I respected. “That place is known on campus as USC’s own little gulag..”

I’d been eking out a living by doing voice-overs in Boston, a two-hour drive from my home. And while debt-free, there were no wind-falls awaiting me in Maine. So, the opportunity to triple my average income for a year, plus a $2500 stipend to pay for the visuals and to index the “Welles on Shakespeare” book, plus a subsidized apartment above the smog line in Laurel Canyon proved irresistible. I was also able to convince myself that since we’d be  parting company in such short order, even the vilest and most insecure of my colleagues would realize  that I was no threat to them.  Silly me !

Some years earlier, the Asian-American company, East West Players, had produced “Station J,” my epic about the evacuation and internment of our Japanese population during World War Two. So, when I alerted my good friend, Mako that I’d be in Los Angeles, he invited me to return to East West as his dramaturg. In addition, a number of my voice-over clients in Boston apprised me of a recording studio in L.A. where, through a process known as phone-patching, we could continue working together.

Did I say triple my income? Mako introduced me to an L. A. agent, and I was soon recording promos and commercials for clients out there, as well. From the outset, it was agreed to that none of these outside activities were to interfere with my primary responsibility, which was to my students. Even so, I soon found myself in the cross-hairs of a particularly venomous assistant professor.

“I don’t see how Dr. France can continue doing everything he’s doing,” she hissed at one of our faculty meetings, prompting two of the deadest of the department’s dead-wood to bob their hollowed-out heads in agreement.

“Eventually, something has to suffer.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“We hope it won’t be your classes, Richard,” the older, and even dumber, of the two dead-woods chimed in.

My assurances that I would never allow that to happen, and it never did, seemed to put the matter at rest. Or so I imagined. In fact, the poison has only just begun to spread.  When the time came, and my student evaluations far surpassed my “bitch noir,” she merely dismissed these results as “gender distinction,” and intensified her campaign to discredit me.

Early in the second semester, I was in my office, with the door open, when one of my graduate students, an acting major from South Africa, appeared, crying hysterically. “My mother!” she blurted out. “She’s dead!”  All I could think of was trying to comfort her as I guided her to a chair. We sat across from each other, holding hands, as she revealed what happened. Not only was her mother’s death completely unexpected, by the time word of it reached my student it was too late for her to return to South Africa for the funeral.

The following week, I found myself in the provost’s office, charged with sexually harassing the student whom I had simply tried to comfort. Also present was my dean, the very person who had persuaded me to spend that year at USC, looking even more sanctimonious than usual. “What would you have done” I asked him, making no attempt to disguise my anger, “let her fall on the floor?” (He didn’t know it at the time but his days at USC were also numbered.)

Confronting one’s accuser is (supposedly) a corner-stone of American justice. It wasn’t my student, that I was sure of. But when I asked who then (as if I couldn’t guess), I was denied that information on the grounds that I might also get it into my head to harass my accuser. And given my angry reaction to the disgusting charges I was facing, both my dean and the provost considered this a real possibility.

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The DVD Debut of Orson Welles’s THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is Not Very Magnificent!

September 16th, 2011

I asked Roger Ryan to write a review on the DVD release of The Magnificent Ambersons and below is his report.  As Roger notes, reps from WB Home Video have previously stated their intention to restore Ambersons to it’s full glory, stating: “We’re still looking for better materials on The Magnificent Ambersons.  We waited for King Kong and Citizen Kane and it was worth it.  It will be worth it for Ambersons, and yes, we will release Journey Into Fear when we do Ambersons.”

Let us hope that is still the case and that this sub-standard release is indeed just a “stop-gap measure” as Roger suggests!

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THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS  ON DVD

By Roger L.  Ryan

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On September 13th The Magnificent Ambersons made its very belated DVD debut in North America as an Amazon.com exclusive “add-on” for customers who buy the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray of Citizen Kane. Even though fans had been very vocal about wanting Ambersons released on DVD for a decade or more, the disc has arrived with virtually no fanfare from the Warner Home Video publicity department. There is a good reason for this: the new Ambersons DVD is disappointing.

The release feels like it just barely escaped being issued on the “Warner Archive Collection”, a recent division of Warner Home Video that provides “burn-on-demand” product to a niche audience. With an emphasis on “B-movies”, these releases are primarily un-restored existing prints transferred quickly to DVD-R and sold via a dedicated website. The discs contain little-to-no extras and cannot be purchased in stores or rented. Thankfully, Ambersons arrives on a properly  “pressed” DVD, but like many of the “Archive Collection” discs, the film looks and sounds like it received very little restoration effort and the release contains no special features whatsoever. During on-line chats and in interviews, Warner Home Video has insisted for years that the delay in releasing Ambersons on DVD was due to an on-going search to find “better elements”.  Evidently, no “better elements” have been found.

The good news is that the new Warner DVD still manages to be the best home video version of the film available in terms of picture quality. DVDBeaver.com has done a screen-grab comparison of the new disc compared to earlier releases from France (Éditions Montparnasse) and the U.K. (Universal), and the Warner issue appears to have the sharpest picture and best contrast of the three. However, it is also clear from the screen-grab comparison that the image on the Warner disc is cropped more severely than the one found on the Universal U.K. release. While the Warner packaging states the film has been “Digitally remastered for enhanced picture and audio quality”, the result is a lot less impressive than what Warner has been able to do with other releases from this same time period. The print used features damage throughout in the way of dirt and scratches although nothing particularly detrimental that would distract the viewer from enjoying the film (by comparison, the new Citizen Kane Blu-ray has no noticeable damage at all). Although barely discernable, the bottom half of the frame shifts to the left for a split-second two or three times during the course of the film which suggests a less-than-perfect video conversion. The audio is acceptable and some of the more severe pops and clicks that were evident on the earlier VHS release have been eliminated. At the same time, some additional audio distortion and hiss makes itself apparent near the film’s end that wasn’t present on the videotape release.

As previously mentioned, the disc contains no special features, not even a chapter menu. You do get a Spanish language track along with English, French and Spanish subtitles. It would have been nice if the disc contained the film’s trailer which actually contains snippets of scenes present in Welles’s initial 131 minute edit that were excised when RKO completely reworked the film into its current 88 minute incarnation. Ironically, the two main production stills used as artwork on the front and back of the DVD case are both from scenes that are no longer in the movie.

It has been suggested that the outdated copyright scroll that appears at the end of the feature (used by Warner Home Video in the 80s and 90s) could indicate that this new DVD contains a transfer that is not new at all. Perhaps the search for “better elements” continues and Warner decided to issue this disc with an old transfer as a stop-gap measure. Perhaps a high definition Blu-ray version with plenty of bonus features will eventually be released within the next couple of years. This, of course, would be most welcome. But The Magnificent Ambersons was not treated well in 1942 and, so far, the film has been treated equally poorly in the 21st century.

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