The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s extraordinary cinematic career, Chimes at Midnight was the culmination of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff—the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son Prince Hal—here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both Henry IV plays as well as Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Welles created a gritty and unorthodox Shakespeare film as a lament, he said, “for the death of Merrie England.” Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic centerpiece battle sequence that rivals anything in the director’s body of work—Chimes at Midnight is as monumental as the figure at its heart.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary featuring film scholar James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles
- New interview with actor Keith Baxter
- New interview with director Orson Welles’s daughter Beatrice Welles, who appeared in the film at age nine
- New interview with actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow
- New interview with film historian Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?
- Interview with Welles while at work editing the film, from a 1965 episode of The Merv Griffin Show
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Michael Anderegg
New cover by Sterling Hundley