Chimes at Midnight

Chimes at Midnight (1966) has a strong claim to be the finest of all Shakespeare films, and it is 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 nursed for decades, and he poured into it his deepest feelings about 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 complete the cast. It was made on a shoestring amid notorious production troubles, and yet it 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.

Rights disputes made it hard to see for years, until it was restored and rereleased to renewed acclaim. Under the comedy runs one of Welles's most personal themes, the price of loving a young man who is bound for power, and the film gives it real poignancy. Sorrowful, funny and visually inventive against every financial odd, Chimes at Midnight is Welles distilling a lifetime's art into one portrait of an old knight and his appetites. The restoration confirmed what its champions had always claimed: this is Welles, and perhaps Shakespeare on film, at the very height of their powers.