The Magic World of Orson Welles (43 page)

To the extent that the film is about fatherhood, it shows that state to be exceedingly fragile, and here again the pattern is the same as in the previous films, where male authority is uncertain and dependent. Although Falstaff and the old king have an anxious vulnerability that is typical of parents in Welles's work, it is interesting that Falstaff has more vitality and even physical agility than the prince's true father. Falstaff clings hopefully to the prince, like a doting mother, trying to manipulate but being manipulated in turn, while the king withers away, always suspicious of his son. As for the prince, he lacks any clear identity beyond the cold, practical purposefulness he has learned from birth. Keith Baxter is particularly good at conveying what William Empson called the character's “parasitic” absorption into whatever world he encounters: in the tavern scenes he seems slight and rather boyish, like a sensual Tony Perkins; on the battlefield against Hotspur he is resolute, heroic, and a model of chivalry; in the closing moments he begins to take on the chilly demeanor of his father. He is, furthermore, systematically destructive to his various “hosts.” He breaks Falstaff's heart, of course, but he also kills off Hotspur and literally takes the crown from a dying king. Having outgrown them all, he is grimly isolated, walled up in a castle like so many of the frustrated wielders of power in Welles's earlier movies.

But if Hal has many faces, he is also ruthlessly forthright about his true intentions. Never a hypocrite, as several critics have called him, he pauses amid the gaiety of the tavern to tell Falstaff that he will “banish fat Jack”; he announces to his father that he will henceforth “be more myself”; he sends a message to Hotspur confessing that he has “a truant been to chivalry” and will redeem his honor with a “single fight.” The problem is that the other characters never quite believe him, and for understandable reasons. Even Poins (Tony Beckley), his rather sinister, perverse companion in revelry—and
the true hypocrite of the film—cannot accept the prince's confessions of weariness and grief on the days just before he assumes the crown. This, too, Poins assumes, must be a kind of dissembling, but in fact Hal has never concealed his feelings. He is an honest pragmatist, burdened by neither his father's guilt, nor Hotspur's sometimes crude machismo, nor Falstaff's cynicism about power. In a way he is paler, more cryptic than these others, who are more obviously ruled by their passions. Thus when the king broods on the way he got the crown, or when Hotspur promises to die bravely in the act of rebellion, or when Falstaff drifts into melancholy, there is a vivid, irreconcilable conflict between the nature of the man and the nature of the world. Hal, on the other hand, seems always perfectly aware of his capabilities, just as he always knows what time it is. The only thing that keeps him from becoming an utterly callous figure or a pure egoist like Kane is that he expresses an authentic sympathy for the men around him who are outmoded and dying: he speaks in awe of his father's crown; he gives a moving eulogy for Hotspur; and he grieves inwardly and promises to “enlarge” Falstaff from banishment. It is precisely because he has these personal emotions that his fate is so sad. He is led by hereditary ambition to outstrip everyone else, finally becoming a purely public man, surrounded by plotting courtiers, whose inner pain has been subordinated to the need for powerful rule.

The two sources of the film's tragic view—the passage of youth and the necessities of politics—are most apparent in the opening and closing images. At the beginning, before the credits, we see Falstaff and Shallow (the latter played by Alan Webb) moving across a snowy landscape, the whiteness in the air recalling both
Kane
and
Ambersons
, where snow is a multivalent symbol of innocence and death. The two aged men resemble pathetic clowns, one huge and swollen, the other tiny and thin; as they amble painfully toward an empty inn and sit before a fire, they discuss old times, Welles's booming voice contrasting with Webb's fluty tones:

SHALLOW
: Is Jane Nightwork alive?

FALSTAFF
: She lives, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW
: Doth she hold her own well?

FALSTAFF
: Old . . . Old, Master Shallow.

SHALLOW
: She must be old. She cannot choose but be old.

A tight close-up of two faces in firelight shows the lines and pocks of age, like the close-up of a dying Major Amberson. “Jesus, the days that we have seen!” Shallow cries, and Falstaff slowly replies, “We have heard the chimes at
midnight, Master Shallow.” Stirring music and a montage of military scenes provide backdrop for the ensuing credits, but the basically elegiac tone of the film has been established with force. Clearly this will not be a purely comic, saturnalian version of Falstaff, but rather a story about a charmingly unscrupulous bohemian, a critic of the times, who has outlived his influence and who broods over his old age.

The elegy is combined with the political theme, the old man passing away at virtually the same time as Hal assumes the crown. In the last shot, Falstaff's giant coffin is hauled slowly off by Peto and Bardolph, the camera rising on a crane as the cart bearing the coffin is pulled through the gates of Mistress Quickly's inn. The mistress stands in the gateway, while in the distance, across a barren field, we see the castle of the new king. Richardson's voice reads from the Holinshed commentary on Henry V: “a majesty was he that both lived and died a pattern in princehood, a lodestar in honor, and famous to the world alway.” This judgment of Hal is not entirely untrue to the character we've seen, but in any case it is powerfully ironic, the stark visual juxtaposition of the inn and the castle underlining the conflicts of the film as a whole. Hal has forsaken “sport” for politics, comradeship for an isolated rule—and the result is death.

Figure 9.3: Falstaff's coffin is hauled away amid the visual juxtaposition of the inn and the castle.

Everywhere Welles has contrasted the two worlds of the action—the inn and the court. The Boar's Head is a vast, oak-beamed bawdy house, lined with narrow corridors and occasionally filled with revelers. The stench of old beer seems to hang in the air, and Welles has done nothing to give the place the artificial charm of “Merrie England.” It is a bare, rough, excremental atmosphere, filled with spontaneous, pansexual displays of affection, where, in the latter parts of the film, imagery of disease and death predominates. Hardly an attractive realm, it is at least preferable to the castle, which resembles nothing so much as the cold vaults of the Thatcher Memorial Library. The film proper opens inside this tomb-like palace, where ceilings are lost in darkness and voices echo down the empty chambers. The king gives audience to the Percys (I, iii of
Henry IV
, part I) and is photographed from a low angle seated at his throne, a Nuremberg light burning the edges of his crown. Henry, a victim of age and the sins of his past, is a gaunt, sepulchral figure whose very breath emits frosty clouds. The light streaming down to where he sits is at once regal and ethereal, but it is also barred like a prison. From the beginning he is depicted as a dying man, a wraith garbed in ornamental clothes; in contrast to his rival Falstaff he is bodiless, and Falstaff's stomach mocks him in the same way that comedy always mocks tragedy. Falstaff, on the other hand, has inflated himself to ridiculous proportions, eating and drinking in defiance of any sense of propriety; one of the film's many paradoxes is that his death will result more from a broken spirit than from bloated flesh.

In Shakespeare's plays the prince is situated somewhat between the twin excesses of the king and Falstaff, which, as I have suggested, have a relationship rather like the superego and the id. In Welles's film, however, the prince sublimates the body when he moves to the castle and assumes the crown. He becomes not so much a kingly presence as a priestly presence, his physique melting away and his face assuming the dignity of his father. In
figure 9.5
, for example, he is shown giving official forgiveness to Falstaff, who has been guilty of interrupting the coronation. The scene is borrowed freely from
Henry V
, where Falstaff is already dead and the king pardons an anonymous criminal; it is one of Welles's most daring revisions of Shakespeare, but it functions beautifully within this film, Hal's order to “enlarge” the prisoner becoming a crucial pun. The new king looks sadly into the distance, recalling lost youth and friendship, his face already showing a certain strain. Near the beginning of the film he promised to “imitate the sun, / who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That, when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wondered at.” Now, having become king, he has followed his dying father's advice to “busy giddy minds with foreign wars” and has ordered an imperialist expedition to France. His majestic face, however, is distinctly pale, and the sun behind his head struggles with the “base contagious clouds,” diffusing its light ambiguously.

Figure 9.4: Henry IV (John Geilgud) seated at his throne.

Figure 9.5: Hal, now a king, orders Falstaff to be “enlarged” from prison.

Welles foreshadows this conclusion early in the film when he turns the prince's most important soliloquy (“I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyok'd humor of your idleness”) into a crucial exchange with Falstaff. The two stand in the gateway to the inn, Falstaff in his nightshirt at midday, Hal remarking, “If all the year were playing holidays / To sport would be as tedious as to work.” At the end of the speech, which Hal has delivered partly to himself but within Falstaff's hearing, there is small banter about the jobs Falstaff will be given once the heir apparent becomes king. The old man becomes visibly uneasy as a result of the prince's confession. Hal walks away across the field toward the castle, waving good-bye, while Falstaff stands in the gate, feigning gaiety. The prince's farewell and his physical passage from inn to castle are of course the underlying movements of the story, but his remarkable forthrightness in this scene is also a key to what Welles has called the “beady-eyed” aspects of his character. He is, after all, mainly his father's son, and it is sometimes difficult to tell where his sense of responsibility ends and where his ambition begins. The ending of the film therefore strikes a balance somewhere between tragedy and melancholy satire.

Critics agree that
Chimes at Midnight
is Welles's most satisfying production of Shakespeare, but the reason is not simply the interesting moral and psychological structure I have been trying to describe, nor the fact that the plays are adaptable to his philosophy or temperament. Actually, one reason the film is so good is that the history plays are in some ways more naturally “cinematic” than either
Macbeth
or
Othello
, which have a simpler, more unified design. There is something inherently montage-like in the way Shakespeare juxtaposes the various characters and their worlds, moving from the high seriousness of the court to the comedy of the tavern, or setting off Hotspur's valiant pre-battle promise to “tread on kings” against Falstaff's commentary on “honor.” As we have seen, Welles recognized this quality very early in his career and had tried in
Five Kings
to create the effect of cuts, dissolves, and fades, using elaborate lighting and mobile platforms to give the audience the feeling of movies. With film itself, of course, he had the opportunity to
move instantaneously across space, matching and contrasting several plot lines with even greater force.