1965 Shakespearean adaptation, dir. and starring Orson Welles:
IMDb /
allmovie. Falstaff!
And this is Orson Welles at his Orson Wellesiest: he's most
definitely got fat by this point, but he's admitting it and playing
Falstaff as a fat but powerful man, rather than relying on camera
tricks to make him appear svelte. The filmmaking tricks here were
mostly around the budget: he got funding by claiming he'd use it to
make two films with the same cast and on the same sets, the other
being a Treasure Island which might have had some commercial
success, and then he just didn't get round to doing the Treasure
Island bit.
This specific thing had its genesis in Welles's 1939 stage project
Five Kings, an epic that would run from Richard II to Richard III.
That would have had a young Burgess Meredith as Hel, but Welles went
off roistering with him rather than directing rehearsals, the thing
was eventually cut down to more or less the events we see here, and it
was a complete financial and critical disaster. A 1960 revival also
didn't do well.
But what strikes me here is that the great John Gielgud as Henry IV
seems to be in an entirely different film, one that needs
traditional acting rather than the physicality of Falstaff's sections.
It's an odd contrast, and one can't tell whether it was intended by
Welles or simply something Gielgud couldn't be stopped from doing.
Certainly the production does assume that you know the Shakespeare,
because the refocusing of this on Falstaff gives little time for
explaining what's going on.
This Falstaff is much more straightforward and honest than the
Falstaff of Shakespeare (as variously interpreted over the centuries).
He's just out for a good time, and he fails to understand that his
protégé and source of funds Hal is growing up and will not be
grateful to Falstaff for all the good times Falstaff arranged when he
was younger. If anything, it's Hal leading Falstaff to the wrong here
rather than the other way round.
And alas this disconnection reaches its climax in the coronation
scene. I don't get on with what's often known as "cringe comedy", but
which I think of as the Man Who Gets It Wrong: someone is doing a
thing which he (usually he) believes to be right but which everyone
else knows is wrong, and he's allowed to make a fool of himself and
dig himself ever deeper rather than anyone telling him. And that's
this scene for me.
Oh well. The story worked better than this telling of it. I talk about
this film further on Ribbon of
Memes
and even if you don't normally do podcasts I recommend this episode,
because we had my friend Michael Cule as a guest; and he knows his
stuff, as well as being very entertaining.