SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Hitchcoc I won't go into a long review here. Several of you have done admirably in recreating this marvelous presentation. It's Shakespeare but then it is not. Orson Welles did a masterful job of taking a favored comic character, Falstaff, and putting him on the screen as the center of attention, rather than a peripheral supporting character. The language sparkles all the way through. We manage to see his underlying power all the way through. He is a braggart and a bumbler and a real control freak. If you ever doubted that Orson Welles was one of our most magnificent actors, take a look at this. It is he who controls every scene while deadly battles and significant in-fighting occurs in the post Richard III era. I had never heard of this film. Excellent.

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.

MisterWhiplash Orson Welles appears in this film larger than ever (ironically, according to the IMDb trivia, he had to slim down to play the role - perhaps there was extra padding, one can only assume). He has the build of a boulder, and the face of the character Hagrid from Harry Potter aged in his 70's. Welles was in his late 40's, turning 50, by the time he took on the role of Sir John "Jack" Falstaff, the man who held his own court and council during the years of Henry the IV, but was sort of an outsider. He was a fool, a liar, a sweet guy who could get the attention of men and woman far and wide - from stutterers to the likes of women played by Jeanne Moreau - and yet he was never really 'apart' of the kingdom, that stuffy place where Henry (as played by a platitudinal John Gielgud) is in ill-health from the beginning of this story - even as he, along with his son the Prince Hal (later Henry the Fifth) - controlled the kingdom from outside invading influences.I saw the film with someone who didn't really get what many of the characters want or any dimensions to them (outside of Falstaff, who is a force of nature). I can understand it. It's hard to get a handle at times on this story or even some of these characters; some of that, frankly, we can put on the Shakespeare dialog, which is beautiful and beguiling and deep and existential and poetic and, in 21st century times, slippery almost. But for me, the emotional component was always there, and Welles was a Mega-Master of Shakespeare even back in the 1930's (re his productions of Macbeth, Julius Caesar, even the rough draft of this film, Five Kings). So by the time he got to this, rough-hewed as it is, Chimes at Midnight is like his Final Dissertation as a master filmmaker.Can I just take a moment out to talk how great Welles is here? He commands every second on screen. It can be said he hams it up. Can you blame him really, if it falls into that? I read more depth though in nearly every scene; even in those where Jack Falstaff hears people mock him, he takes it in stride, and can give it as good, or better, than he takes. His tongue is so sharp, and his reactions so BIG, that it's easy to read this as campy. But it's a deeply felt performance, with Welles swallowing this character into his solar plexus. He never plays Falstaff as being as regal as, say, Henry IV, or as Hotspur Percy, who is like many a Game of Thrones character (to put it in modern parlance) who just wants that friggin crown and wants it all his own.I think the characters know what they want, or are trying to figure it out far as it goes. If there can be a legitimate criticism it's that Baxter, as Hal/young Henry V, is kind of the weak link among the cast. Albeit this is a cast with Welles, Moreau, Gielgud, Fernando Rey in a small but commanding role as another warrior. But he takes up a lot of screen time, and is best when having to do fierce reaction or passive poise - enjoying the company of Falstaff he's fine but but totally convincing. No matter - when someone like Welles or someone like Gielgud or Rodway as Percy or Rutherford as the Mistress mining the place Falstaff calls his court... it makes the journey much more entertaining. When you have a Shakespeare adaptation, especially one as ambitious and wild as this one, you got to have a cast that can pull out the emotional connections. They're here.And if Welles really pulls out all the stops with his acting - it may even be his dare I say most towering, monolithic work as an actor, with the range going from bawdy comedy and sweet kindness to shattered tragic tones and bewilderment and shock, everything is there - the filmmaking reaches up to it. There is a battle sequence midway through the film as Henry's troops fight oncoming invaders. My God. Just... if you can get a copy of the film, if nothing else that sequence holds up as one of the two or three essential battles on film. There's chaos, there's fast cutting (yet, even with Welles, you always can see what's going on, far as it goes), and yet there's a story going on as Falstaff, who is on the sidelines of the action, tries not to get involved and even plays dead, and Welles is really crafty in cutting back to this. He apparently only had 100 men at a time to work with. He makes it look like triple that - and all the mud and blood that goes with the dirtiness of an epic battle.It's a filmmaker who loves Shakespeare so deeply, yet he connects it with his own life as an artist and doesn't lose that. It may not matter to some, but I liked that this could be a metaphor for not just Welles but anyone on the margins looking in, unable to break through (especially at the end, as Henry V finally reaches the throne). The energy and force of the direction, the acting, the writing, it triumphs over technical flaws - the syncing of dialog in parts, the fact that parts just connect enough, as it did with Othello in the filmmaking - and in a couple of the performances in spurts. It ranks with the major Welles films, and I do hope it gets to DVD soon (I lucked out with a Welles retrospective that kind of had to play it to be complete) so I can revisit it; I have a feeling, with time, it'll deepen like Kane with appreciation for the craft and ideas on display.

Jackson Booth-Millard I know that Orson Welles has done Macbeth and Othello from William Shakespeare as films, but this one he directed is different because it mixes small bits and pieces from a few of them, particularly Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Richard II, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Basically Henry IV (John Gielgud) is the ageing king watching with discontent over his son Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) as he lives a rude and irresponsible life with overweight and constantly drinking Sir John Falstaff (BAFTA nominated Welles). I will be honest and say that I did not understand everything going on, admittedly mostly because of the usual Shakespeare higgledy-piggledy dialogue that I can usually get to grips with, but I know that Hal becomes Henry V, there is a big battle, and in the end Falstaff supposedly gets what's coming to him. Also starring Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet, Norman Rodway as Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, Marina Vlady as Kate Percy, Fernando Rey as Worcester and Alan Webb as Justice Shallow, with narration by Ralph Richardson. Despite not knowing what was going on most of the time, Welles gives a good performance as the overindulgent git, and his size do provide many of the good bits of humour, of course the most memorable scene is of course the big battle scene in the middle, also because of Welles in that fat metal suit, it may not be to everyone's taste, the critics rate it well, it is Shakespeare and Welles combined, so it is certainly a watchable historical comedy drama. Orson Welles was number 16 on 100 Years, 100 Stars - Men, and he was number 45 on The World's Greatest Actor. Good!