August represented my second twofer in this series, as I needed to watch slightly more than one film per month to get through the remaining Welles films I hadn't seen. However, it also forced me to stretch my definition of "feature film," which gets at a larger issue with the remaining "filmed art," for want of a better phrase, that I had to parse through when I first laid the groundwork for this series.
The "Orson Welles filmography" Wikipedia page contains a number of items that I do not, strictly speaking, consider to be films, for length or other reasons. Some I excluded, but some, just as randomly, I included. My second film in August, The Immortal Story, fits into the latter category.
The Immortal Story is a 58-minute "movie." Is that a feature? By some definitions, yes. By my own personal definitions of silent films made a hundred years ago, yes. By the standards of a film released in 1968, when standard feature length was much more firmly established? Eh.
Part of the problem with me watching The Immortal Story was that I decided not to watch Journey Into Fear, a 68-minute film released in 1943. However, putting myself back into the mindset of myself nine months ago, I believe I decided to exclude this not based on length, but based on the fact that Welles is only an uncredited director on this film. The credited director is a man named Norman Foster, who I have not otherwise heard of.
In any case, I have now watched The Immortal Story so I guess I've ruled on its worthiness to be considered a feature film, and since we've started out talking about its classification, let's get into it first, even though it was the film I watched second. (Although I actually watched both of my Welles features on Sunday as a kind of day-night doubleheader, to use the baseball terminology.)
Before we get to it, though, I'll mention one annoyance related to it that caused me to consider excluding it from this series on that basis alone. The film is available for free on YouTube, but the version that's up there is compromised. You start watching it, and after about a minute, the screen freezes. The clock is still running, but the image doesn't move. When it does resume about two minutes later, two minutes of the story has been missed. If this were the only time it happened, I probably would have just pressed onward, but it happens again periodically throughout the running time, making the viewing impossible.
Instead of walking away from it entirely, I decided to check on iTunes to see if it was rentable. It was. So I went ahead and rented a 58-minute "movie" for $3.99. With no small amount of grumbling.
The Immortal Story is most certainly not something that could be stretched out to feature length. It's basically sort of a parable, and if there's any stretching, it's to get it to nearly an hour at all.
It concerns a rich old man living in China (Welles, naturally) whose dying wish is to stage a story that has been told by sailors for generations. The story is about a penniless sailor being selected from the streets and brought back to a mansion where he is fed and led into the bedroom where a beautiful woman sits ready for him -- the mansion owner's wife, who is set to be impregnated by the sailor. The rich man (Mr. Clay) becomes obsessed with the idea that although the story is likely apocryphal, he wants it to become some sailor's reality, so when he tells the story, it will be true.
The film has some interesting thoughts about the storytelling tradition and about the willingness of various participants to fulfill the roles that are proscribed for them. Both the sailor Mr. Clay's bookkeeper conscripts (played by Norman Eshley) and the woman Clay hires (played by French treasure Jeanne Moreau) are able to intuit what Clay is doing -- it's a very well-known story I guess -- and balk at the requirements of them in intriguing ways. The film is a bit of a trifle I suppose, but it does take itself quite seriously, especially in comparison to Welles' most recent previous film, which I'm about to discuss in a moment.
Technically, I noticed a few Welles touches. For example, when we are first introduced to Clay sitting in a restaurant, he is reflected multiples times through the mirror that's next to his face, like the climactic shot of Kane in Citizen Kane. And of course the character Welles plays is a variation on the others he had played, which were somewhat dictated by his increasing girth -- though whether that is a technical detail or not is hard to say.
Let's move on to Chimes at Midnight.
This was my first cinematic introduction to Falstaff, played by Welles (naturally), who is a literary figure much discussed and referenced, but who has generally evaded me to this point in my life. As you would probably know (because I am very late in coming to this information myself), Falstaff was a character who appeared in a number of Shakespeare's histories -- a big, larger than life figure who enjoyed his alcohol (referred to in the text continually as "sack") and his skirt chasing, and was a close confidant of Prince Hal, a.k.a. Henry V in his younger years. He has the naughtiness and the verbal dexterity of characters in Shakespeare's comedies, and indeed, the plays he appeared in resembled his comedies at least for the parts involving Falstaff.
Welles has said it was his life's ambition to play Falstaff, to the point that one almost wonders if his excessive indulgences in food and drink were designed to prepare his own body for the role. The interesting trick he pulls off here is to combine the appearances of Falstaff in five Shakespeare plays and give them a single narrative cohesion within one story. It's something Welles first did on stage before making this filmed version of it, and even though I'm a bit of a rusty Shakespeare scholar, it seems to be a phenomenally successful experiment. Welles himself said this was his greatest cinematic accomplishment, which is pretty crazy coming from the guy who directed Citizen Kane.
I certainly wouldn't go that far, but this did immediately become my second favorite film I've watched in this series. That's not quite the compliment that it seems, given that many of the Welles films I had not yet seen had remained unseen by me for a reason. But there have only been one or two that didn't work for me on some level, so that does strengthen Chimes' accomplishment.
I'm not going to delve too much into the story, but I can give you a general overview. It involves the period of time when the young Henry V had to fight off a claim to the throne by a man his own age, also named Henry, who represented what many believed to be the rightful king of England, who was instead languishing away in prison. Henry IV, Prince Hal's father, was considered to be a usurper -- in part because of the small detail that he had the previous king killed (not checking my facts on this but I believe that's accurate) -- and in order to defend his father's right to the throne, Hal had to set aside his carousing ways and take up arms, as did his drinking buddy John Falstaff. As Hal grows into a more serious person, set to eventually become king himself, he outgrows Falstaff, to the latter's great disappointment.
I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, but I have actually never read any of the histories. I stuck to the comedies and tragedies that were assigned to me in two different college courses. I've seen a couple filmed versions of Henry V and Richard III, but never actually read the texts myself. My point in telling you this is that I could discern nothing about Chimes at Midnight that did not seem to read as one continuous narrative from one text, and I consider that to be incredibly impressive. If I'd been more familiar with these five texts, I might have easier seen the seams, and they might have distracted me. But Welles loved his Shakespeare and was certainly equal to the tasking of assembling this coherent homage to the Bard's work.
Technically, this is one of Welles' better realized efforts. The black and white cinematography (by Edmond Richard) is really great, and I was particularly impressed by the editing. The big battle scene at the film's center has a really impressive montage quality, with quick snippets of swords clashing and bodies in distress creating quite the portrait of the chaos of battle. It may have been the highlight of the film for me, even with Welles' delicious performance of Falstaff, and the typically high-level contributions from the likes of Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV.
I've had a vast preference for Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies, meaning I was really surprised to enjoy the scenes of the carousing of Falstaff and Hal as much as I did. I think one of the things that enhanced my enjoyment was my decision to turn on the subtitles, which I now think I'm going to make a regular habit when I watch Shakespeare. It's not that I couldn't have followed what was going on, but having the text on screen allowed me to catch the great plays on words that were Shakespeare's (and Falstaff's) bread and butter. Given how important word choices are for Shakespeare, and how the cleverness of any particular unfamiliar turn of phrase might get lost if you are not laying eyes on it, I don't think it's any sign of failure that I benefitted from the subtitles. Rather I view it as an enhancement of something I suspect I should have enjoyed quite a bit anyway.
Okay, just two more movies in this series, F for Fake in October and The Other Side of the Wind in December.
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