Clevercell Very disappointing...

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Charles Herold (cherold) This review is from someone who struggles with Shakespeare. I have enjoyed productions of Shakespeare well enough, and usually can follow the story enough to follow it, but I just can't adapt to the language. At times it's like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.For someone like me, a fan of Welles but less so of Shakespeare, Chimes at Midnight is a tough one. The movie is beautifully directed, full of Welle's unique approach to composition and movement. Only Welles would put cross talk into Shakespeare, and much of the film is as visually glorious as Citizen Kane. The battle scene is electrifying and brutal, making most battle scenes feel like bowdlerized lies.I could generally follow the story. Falstaff is a scoundrel who is friends with the disapproving King's sons. There are various escapades and a war.But while I got the shape of many of the conversations, much of the time I had no idea what people were talking about. I have rarely struggled this much to understand Shakespeare, and I'm not sure why. It may be that the film is built out of the later plays, which are a lot tougher than something like Romeo and Juliet. It may be in part an effect of sound issues critics complained about at the time. I do wonder if it has to do with Welles approach to the material. Shakespeare's plays have a rhythm to them, and I wonder if Welles own rhythm is simply harder to follow. Would I follow Henry IV plays better than this revision of them? I just don't know.I don't understand the dialogue well enough to speak intelligently on any flaws there may be in the film's structure. I can only say that your enjoyment of this film will be conditional on your comfort with and familiarity with Shakespeare.

bkoganbing When I saw the BBC productions of Henry IV both parts it became my favorite work of the Bard. Anthony Quayle was really great as Falstaff in both of those plays. So I was anxious to see how Orson Welles did in the part, especially as in his Chimes At Midnight it was Falstaff who became the centerpiece. I was not disappointed in the slightest.As Welles grew heavier and heavier as he grew older there were many jokes about his corpulence, Robin Williams started his career on them in Mork And Mindy. But the man who played Charles Foster Kane really grew into the role of Falstaff in two decades and a half. Quayle probably needed padding. I'm informed in Citadel Film series book on The Films Of Orson Welles that Welles actually had to diet.Way back in the day when Master Will Shakespeare wrote Henry IV and Falstaff proved so popular that he was brought back for The Merry Wives Of Windsor he did not have the advantage of movie closeups. Welles the director made very good use of his camera in his closeups of the main characters of Falstaff, Henry IV played by John Gielgud and Prince Hal played by Keith Baxter. I think the Bard would have approved, he had to write descriptive words to get his points across.Chimes At Midnight started as an edited play done by Welles condensing Shakespeare's work. The play never found an audience, but Welles believed in it and took a lot of roles in a lot of mediocre work as was his fashion to get his work filmed. The results paid off beautifully.Welles filmed this in Europe and it became an 'international' film in that overused word. Most of his cast was British and that also included Margaret Rutherford. She plays Mistress Quickly and that's a role far different from Miss Jane Marple. The most popular courtesan in Mistress Quickly's bawdy house is Jeanne Moreau from France. The work was mostly shot in Spain which was becoming a favored location for filming and they also contributed Fernando Rey in the role of Worcester, leader of the rebellion against Henry IV.Welles hits all the right emotions in the audience playing Falstaff. He's at once lovable, outrageous, and exasperating. Gielgud is also wonderful as the patient father waiting for his older son to just grow up and stop hanging around with disreputable types like Falstaff. That the father just happens to be King of England and the son the Crown Prince is almost an incidental to a universal story. That the story is universal is proved by the wonderful adaptation Gus Van Sant did with this same material in My Own Private Idaho. A chance to see Orson Welles intoning the Bard's words is never to be passed up.

robertgazol Among the thousands of artists who have adapted Shakespeare, Welle's movies still are the least appreciated and estimated of them. Welles repeated Verdi's task in turning Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff, but in films rather than operas.We can only imagine what it is to adapt the pinnacle of the English comic literature, the huge hill of flesh Falstaff into a film knowing that you're at risk of being an heretic to loosel'd one of the masterpieces of the greatest author that ever left their mark on literature. But here we can say that welles really turned Shakespeare and inevitably into an loss of complexity. First of all like many artists (Verdi one them) that have the mistake of thinking that Falstaff is the main figure of Henry IV's plays, Welles adapts the historic tragicomedy in a melancholy comedy, political issues are ignored or comixed, Hotspur is transformed into bad comic scream-ever character. Shakespeare play is not really about Falstaff, despite that he dominate the stage, nor is a comedy in the basic term sense. Falstaff's quartet friends (Pistol, Bardolph, etc) lose all power. The play is all about politics, Hal and Hotspur, honor and kingdoms. That's the thing and to adapt such a corpus of literary complexity Welles wrong itself connecting the two plays parts when the first part works excellently alone.To escape the literary aspect of the review. Chimes at Midnight It's an excellent entertainment, a must view for those who want to see one of the three greatest comics characters (the others being Don Quixote and Pantrugel) in the cinema. Highpoints are Shrewsbury Battle, Falstaff's welles performance and direction as always. But not exaggerating in the purism, Chimes at midnight does not have the psychological depth of Macbeth (1948) or the beauty of performances of Othello (1952) and in my opinion he's the minor of the three Shake-welles films.

Randy_Kryn Well, a little more. When Orson Welles decided to remove and digest one character, John Falstaff, from several of William Shakespeare's works and build a failed play and then a masterpiece of a film around him, he successfully combined Shakespeare's inner-child and playfulness with some of the most subtle commentary on human nature in its diverse faces, masks, and merriments ever to appear on these creations of light we call cinema. The result: a team effort by Shakespeare and Welles--the bard meets the belly--in which Falstaff comes to life clothed in the girth bestowed upon him by both sides of the team as he frolics his way through dens of pleasure, landscapes of death. and the even more joyful and deadly emotions humans express until Will and Orson weave together the laughter of days and then a touch of despair as the night turns. And so we find these two men, with this film, jostling and combining talents, always just touching, simply with wisdom, what it means to inhabit human.