"Chimes At Midnight":should I be excited?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/orson-welles-rarely-seen-masterpiece-is-restored-and-rereleased-2313302.html
kind of cool, hope this makes the rounds. i saw a terrible print of this in college. was still great. the sound was really the worst part.

I adore this film, partly because my college library's secondhand VHS copy was in horrible condition; its condition added to the movie's specialness.

I hate this movie.

yeah? why?

btw I'm not crazy about Welles' performance, and you'd think he'd be perfect casting.

LOL, thanks for one-upping me in the anti-barometer challops fest.

welles looks great in it, will have to see it again to make my mind up about the performance itself.gielgud was pretty good iirc.

btw if yr cool with crappy vhs quality prints the whole thing was up on youtube a while back

kael's review/essay on this is one of the most heartbreaking things i've ever read

Managed to find a copy of the c. 2007 Gaumont (?) restoration of this and it's still spectacular. Possibly my fave Shakespeare adaptation. Don't get the haters.

i know eric's a smart dude so i'm just gonna assume he's joking. 'chimes' is right up there with 'le regle du jeu' for me; it's about as good as movies get.

i lost some respect for harold bloom when he off-handedly referred to all of welles's shakespeare movies as 'dreadful' but i suspect he was just bitter that welles didn't cast HIM as falstaff.

Trying to get through his Macbeth makes me itchy inside. Othello makes me sleepy but I think I like it.

It captures the spirit of the plays very well, and Keith Baxter as Hal is terrific.

I hate this movie.

― ephendophile (Eric H.), Thursday, July 14, 2011 5:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

maybe just stop posting?

It probably comes down to this for me: every Welles film I've seen (and it's a relatively smallish number) is fanstastic... almost intrinsically better than any other movies (yea for egregious, meaningless superlatives!). But the reason I probably hold this even above the other stuff is that Welles the actor is probably at his very best here. Quinlan aside, he's a magnificent fat actor here.

―Eric H. (Eric H.), Saturday, 24 January 2004 17:00

Are you guys pretending not to see this post to be funny or do you really not see it?

Although maybe he changed his mind. I don't know what an anti-barometer challops fest is, either.

Inside joke. He and I rarely agree.

Ohhhh. That's cute.

Yeah, I love this movie more than siberian husky puppies.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/orson-welles-rarely-seen-masterpiece-is-restored-and-rereleased-2313302.html
kind of cool, hope this makes the rounds. i saw a terrible print of this in college. was still great. the sound was really the worst part.

― tylerw, Thursday, July 14, 2011 11:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

it may have been the print, but it might have just been the film. like the other films welles made in europe, this suffers from a kind of slipshod post-synch soundtrack. sometimes it's trippy and inventive, but the synch is poor and the whole thing lacks dimension--that is, it all sounds like it was recorded in the same studio with no regard for ambiance/reverb/etc. some have claimed this as a kind of distanciation device but i dont' buy it. anyway the film is mega-awesome just the same. best film of the 1960s? maybe.

Welles and Jeanne Moreau's erotic teasing is the only convincing moment like this in a film in which he starred -- second maybe to Dietrich-Welles (they act more like old buddies in TOE arguably).

it may have been the print, but it might have just been the film.
yeah true -- for a dude who held shakespeare's language in such high esteem, welles sure did not care about sound quality on his bard adaptations! othello is bad, too -- i almost wish that was just a silent movie, some of the imagery is so great. and macbeth, well, that might be half bad dubbing, half wonky scottish accents.

It's not that he didn't care -- he had no money!

he should've taken a little bit of cash out of his booze budget then

the print i watched in college was itself not very bad but the sound was pretty harsh, yes. i'm dying to see it again

The restoration - supposedly pulled by Beatrice Welles soon after it premiered - cleaned up the sound and fixed most of the sync issues. It's on the t0rr3nts.

he should've taken a little bit of cash out of his booze budget then

― tylerw, Friday, July 15, 2011

i know this is probably just meant as a lol, but seriously, as i said upthread, the story of how much he slaved to get this made and how much he had to make-do is kinda heartbreaking. the fact that he turned this thing around under those conditions at all is pretty damn remarkable.

you don't really talk about that -- is there an article/book about it?

it's crazy how good this is for a film that you basically had to see for about 5 minutes in 1966 unless you're really lucky. i guess we're all about to get lucky, hopefully.

haha i guess the first post wasn't as clear as i thought w/o looking again

kael's review/essay on this is one of the most heartbreaking things i've ever read

― death to ilx, long live the frogbs (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, July 14, 2011

i don't know of any specific book, but there's stuff spread across various welles bios and articles. really it's just the story of his whole career after kane in microcosm: how he had to go begging for funds, how he nobly tried to stitch it together over years despite not having the cash to get the sync and other things properly taken care of, how he was savaged for a "flawed" film by the same people who wanted him to make another formally perfect masterpiece and who knew damn well how he couldn't get the funding to do so, etc etc. i am sure you know all this already amst.

ok i thought there might have been something uniquely tragic about this film. the article linked above says rights issues w/ this one are partly because a producer bailed out the bankrupt production at last minute, so there were effectively two producers (not working in collaboration) and legacy rights got real confusing when they died. see also roberto rossellini--who similarly worked on the margins after the late 1950s and many of whose films are similarly tied up in unbearably complicated rights issues.

Welles was enough of a charlatan (and it's well-documented) for me not to feel sorry for every one of his iconoclastic gestures, but I do feel sorry for how CAM turned out.

i dunno, what i get out of the bios of welles i've read is that he was in many ways his own worst enemy. (booze comment was a joke, yeah) -- but his short attention span was as much a problem as financial matters. dude had to much going on in his mind to really focus on finishing things. at least that was my basic understanding.

i mean, you read those two books (road to xanadu and the other one, blanking on title) and it is ridiculous how many projects he'd have going at one time in the 30s and 40s -- and film was just one part of his ambitions. it's almost remarkable that he finished *anything*. by the time he was halfway through one project he had already thrown himself into another.

The David Thomson bio is most clear on those points -- he kinda deserved his fate.

I garbled my penultimate comment. I meant to say that it's hard for me to feel sorry for him, etc.

thomson's book is pretty odious, in my opinion. it barely deserves to be called a biography.

the frank brady bio is probably the fairest to welles, tho i think simon callow's books will supplant them when he finishes the last one. 'this is orson welles' is a terrific read, too.

http://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/david-thomson-on-orson-welles/

Odious how? It's as judicious as possible. Besides agreeing with most of his judgments about the movies, I liked how he cut through the layers of hagiography created by the likes of Bogdanovich.

Funny how two of my favorite biographies of the last fifteen years (this and Edmund Morris' Dutch) have serious structural problems.

yeah those callow books are my faves. any idea when the next one will be out?

I read one at least 20 years ago. I checked the two on my shelf, Bogdanovich and Leo Brady, and it must have been the Bogdanovich. I really don't remember it being in Q&A format, but I know it wasn't the Brady.

Leo Braudy, I should say.

just because somebody's problems are self-imposed to a great extent doesn't mean you can't feel bad that he didn't finish certain things.

alfred you don't like this film? or just feel that it's flawed? i'd agree if the latter.

I love it! Flawed for sure.

my issue with the thomson book was that it didn't read like a biography so much as a rehashing of information he'd gleaned from other welles biographies by writers who'd actually bothered to do original research.

i agree that his comments about the films themselves were solid, though his repeated insistence that welles's 'missing' films should never be shown because they could never live up to the myth, blah blah, really grated on me. jonathan rosenbaum had some justly harsh words for thomson in this respect.

seeing this tonight, going ahead at getting excited

just saw this on the big screen for the first time, feeling p overwhelmed

like there's so much to react to and talk about with this movie, it engages with the text in such an interesting and original way

they did an incredible job remastering the sound, basically every line was loud and clear and instantly comprehensible to the point where some of the actual performances seemed better (welles himself seems much better now that he doesn't seem to be mumbling half of his dialogue)

I don't remember ever starting this thread but am glad I did. Still my favorite of his films and the damned rumored Criterion release ... Where is it?! Call me a peppercorn!

some nice stuff here - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/24/looking-for-citizen-welles/

saw it on the screen not long ago and sat enthralled

The Criterion certainly sounds better than CaM ever has.

The supps have an excellent Keith Baxter interview, w/ a couple of great Gielgud anecdotes.

the Baxter interview is A+. He was a cute boy too.

man, Gus Van Sant must have watched the same shitty print we all did, for he purloins shamelessly ideas for staging and costuming from this thing.

well there's a reason

Ken Branagh did it on a budget