Page 86 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Hollow Crown I 75

"Lord of Misrule" by C. L. Barber in his book The Fortunes of Fal-
staff. (A fictional character, Falstaff may have been modeled on the
actual Sir John Oldcastle.)
The Chimes at Midnight is the greatest of all Shakespearean films
and boasts a unity of pace and simplicity of purpose lacking in Will's
rambling tetralogy. Welles's approach to the narrative rates as an
improvement rather than a bowdlerization, but thematically what
he accomplished is at best controversial. "The Falstaff story," Welles
insisted, "is the best of Shakespeare—not the best play, but the best
story." Though that may be true, the words reveal more about the
man speaking than the work spoken of. The film's power to fasci-
nate derives largely from the degree to which Welles employed
Shakespeare to serve his own ends rather than lending his consider-
able gifts in the service of the Bard.
It is significant that Shakespeare wrote these plays relatively early,
between 1595 and 1599, before the period of the great tragedies. The
playwright associates with Hal, and the prince's rite of passage is a
literary projection of Will's own difficult journey toward maturity.
Welles directed Falstaff toward his career's close; although he would
continue acting for another two decades, this was his swan song as
an auteur. The stage tetralogy ends with a grand early-spring sense of
life's happy renewal, but the movie closes with a melancholy late-
autumn aura of pervasive death and decay.
Though Welles followed Shakespeare's story line, he altered the
focus. Welles made Falstaff (whom he would play) the central char-
acter. He would portray Falstaff as the clown as tragic hero rather
than as humorous relief and a foil to the Henrys. Filmed during the
mid-sixties, mostly in Barcelona and Madrid, Falstaff fits the tenor of
those times. Welles's vision of the rift between Henry IV (Sir John
Gielgud) and Hal (Keith Baxter) is formed by the generation-gap con-
flict, with Falstaff as an aged hippie guru, part Timothy Leary
("sack" substituting for LSD) and part merry prankster Ken Kesey,
while the tavern itself is depicted as a virtual commune, an Eliza-
bethan Alice's Restaurant. Battle scenes, brilliantly realized in
unglamorous black and white, were aimed squarely at the youth
audience during that era of divisive war in Vietnam.
"He [Falstaff] is the most completely good man in all of litera-
ture," Welles said. Welles discovered in his source what he wanted
to find, and the subject matter allowed him to express himself at
that point in his life both personally and professionally. For Will,