Chimes at Midnight

Many consider Chimes at Midnight (1966) the finest of all Shakespeare films and the crowning achievement of Orson Welles's European exile. Assembled from several plays into a single tragicomic portrait of Sir John Falstaff, it was a project Welles had nurtured for decades, and he poured into it his deepest feeling for friendship, ageing and loss.

Welles himself plays Falstaff, mountainous and melancholy, with Keith Baxter as Prince Hal and John Gielgud as the cold King Henry IV; Jeanne Moreau and Margaret Rutherford round out the cast. Made on a shoestring with notorious production troubles, the film nonetheless contains the astonishing Battle of Shrewsbury — a churning, mud-caked sequence of close-cut chaos that influenced the staging of screen warfare from Braveheart onward.

Long difficult to see because of rights disputes, it was at last restored and rereleased to renewed acclaim, confirming its reputation. Beneath its comedy lies one of Welles's most personal themes: the betrayal of an old companion by a rising man of power. Sorrowful, funny and visually inventive against every financial odd, Chimes at Midnight is Welles distilling a lifetime's art into the story of a discarded friend. Its long-awaited restoration confirmed what its champions always claimed: that this is Welles, and perhaps Shakespeare on film, at the very height of their powers. Beneath the comedy lies one of Welles's most personal themes — the casting-off of an old friend by a rising man of power — given unbearable poignancy.