The Magic World of Orson Welles (44 page)

Throughout the film, Welles's free editing of the plays and his fine instinct for abrupt transition serve to heighten the tension between Shakespeare's characters. For example, at the end of the opening scene, Hotspur (Norman Rodway) stands glowering in a castle corridor, sneering at “that sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales,” wishing to have him “poisoned with a pot of ale.” Suddenly we are given a close-up of the prince, who drains a cup of sack and wipes his lips. In the previous shots in the castle, the conspiring Percy family has been photographed from radically low angles, the camera cutting sharply from one portentous view to another; inside the inn, however, the images are closer to a democratic eye level and the camera tracks dizzily, moving back from the close-up of the prince as he tosses his cup to a page, then following him as he walks past a row of wine vats and into the arms of four playful whores. Later the film takes us just as abruptly from the Gadshill robbery to the interior of the castle, reversing the order of Shakespeare's scenes but underlining the conflict between the king and his son: the robbery closes with the prince and Poins skipping down a sunny path, congratulating themselves on the prank they've just played on Falstaff (“Were't not for laughing, I should pity him”). Immediately the screen goes dark and a great iron door swings open, the king entering a murky throne room to ask, “Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?”

During the closing parts of the film, these transitions establish subtle thematic connections between parts of the story, even though the principle of visual contrast remains in force. The king's soliloquy on sleep is shot with Gielgud standing in a dim corridor before a window, and when it ends Welles fades to a close-up of Hal, seated in daylight beside a lake, remarking, “Before God I am exceeding weary.” This speech, in turn, is followed by Falstaff's melancholy exchange with Doll Tearsheet, in which he lies down on a dirty bunk and laments his age and fading strength. Still later, when Hal mistakenly thinks his father has died and takes up the crown only to discover that the king has risen from a sickbed, Welles is able to break the scene in half, inserting a counterpointed moment with Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence (a much-revised version of a few lines from III, ii of
Henry IV
, part two). Hal takes the crown from his dying father's bed and kneels in a chapel, swearing to guard it against “the world's whole strength,” while in the background priests sing a dirge. We then cut briefly to the inn, where the three “comic” characters sit before a fire; the camera never moves, simply watching firelight
on faces and allowing a profoundly sad yet funny moment to comment on the inevitability of death. Falstaff sits uncomfortably, drinking sack; the stuttering, nearly deaf and dumb Silence is at the left, holding a pig in his lap; and the shrill-voiced Shallow is at the right, bending across Falstaff's belly to make himself heard:

SHALLOW
: And to think how many of my old acquaintances are dead.

SILENCE
: We shall all f . . . f . . .

SHALLOW
: Certain! Tis Certain! Death, as the psalmist said, is certain to all. All shall die.

(Eight seconds of pure silence, as the three gaze thoughtfully ahead into the fire. Shallow suddenly bursts out with a loud question that startles Falstaff.)

SHALLOW
: How a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamford fair?

SILENCE
: A good yoke of b . . . b . . .

FALSTAFF
:
(Somewhat perturbed)
Death is certain.

Sometimes even bolder ironies are created by presenting two events simultaneously, as in the sequence leading up to the battle of Shrewsbury, where we see heavily armored knights being loaded ridiculously upon horses with the aid of pulleys, while on the soundtrack Hotspur cries out: “Come, let me taste my horse, / That is to bear me like a thunderbolt / Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales!”

The battle itself, of course, is a privileged moment, in which the director frees himself almost entirely from a theatrical text so that he may present a sustained wordless action that is nevertheless worthy of Shakespeare's poetry. Staged on a windswept plain that evokes images from both John Ford's cavalry westerns and Eisenstein's late epics, the battle is composed out of hundreds of brief shots and becomes the finest example of rhythmic montage in Welles's career. Interestingly, however, it was photographed as a series of long takes, Welles working on the theory that the combatants wouldn't have time to “warm up” if they performed in brief intervals. “I filmed the battle scenes,” Welles said, “with a crane that shifted position very quickly at ground level, as quickly as possible, to follow the action.” The mobile crane was important not only because Welles was able to take in broad areas of the field but also because the rapid editing of what were originally shots in motion creates a different rhythm than the standard battle scene, which uses multiple cameras in relatively static setups. In
Chimes at Midnight
we cut from one dynamic moment to another, the individual images disclosing different levels of action
and the camera lending an eerie quality to the blood and gore because of its sudden, almost balletic movements.

Welles also claimed to have edited the battle sequence so that “each shot would show a blow, a counterblow, a blow received, a blow struck, and so on.” Critics have generally taken him at his word, but close analysis shows that he did nothing of the kind—and good thing, because the “blow given, blow received” formula would have resulted in monotony. Like most directors he cuts from an army on the left to an army on the right and frequently shows a mace crashing down on one part of the field only to cut to a man falling in another place. Once in the heat of hand-to-hand combat, however, he simply throws a series of brutal and confused images on the screen; the “center cannot hold,” and the men have lost their identity in a struggle for survival.

This is not to say that the battle has no “plot” or artistic logic. The shots reproduced in
figures 9.6
–
9.15
give some sense of the overall strategy, as well as the visual qualities of the sequence. It begins with a horse charge over a misty, frost-laden field, but when the lines converge, every vestige of separate armies is lost, and images of knights on horseback give way to ranks of ugly foot soldiers, occasionally photographed in fast motion or with confused jerks of the camera, hacking away in the midst of crowds. The battle is initiated with cries of “For Harry and Saint George!” only to degenerate into ignoble savagery, with men beating viciously at prone bodies. As the day of carnage wears on, the field becomes a quagmire of mud and blood, piles of soldiers writhing in slurred motion and falling down atop one another. Occasionally one glimpses a helmeted knight struggling like a dinosaur in quicksand, or a mass of men so caked with mud that, as Pauline Kael has remarked, they seem to have become their own memorial statuary. An extraordinary series of individual images stays in the mind. A dark figure stabbing at a dying man and then, in surrealistically fast motion, moving to another part of the field to thrust his sword into another wounded soldier; groups of men gathered around anonymous shapes on the ground, cutting away like a crowd of jackals surrounding carrion. In one shot (the last of the series), we see the legs of two men writhing in slime, the figure on the bottom jerking spasmodically as if in parody of sexual climax. It is a significant image because it undermines completely Hotspur's eloquent, poetic love of war. Early in the film Welles has suggested that a passion for military derring-do is a displacement for sex (the dialogue between Hotspur and Kate is intercut with buglers blowing pompous calls to arms), but here the underlying eroticism of the chivalric code (“Yet once ere night / I will embrace him with a soldier's arm / That he shall shrink under my courtesy”) is exposed in all its cruel perversity.

Figures 9.6–9.11: Battle sequence from
Chimes at Midnight
.

Figures 9.12–9.15: Battle sequence from
Chimes at Midnight
.

The success of the battle scenes, however, has less to do with the manifest content of the images than with the soundtrack and the half-hidden, evocative qualities of the photography. Welles hinted at this fact when he said that he did not “stroll about like a collector choosing images and putting them together.” “I am most concerned,” he said, “with rendering a musical impression. . . . The visual aspect is that which is dictated to me by poetic and musical forms.” Hence the battle is nearly as impressive if one simply listens to the sounds. The grunts of the soldiers and the clang of metal have been weirdly amplified, like radio sound effects, with the noise of combat set in counterpoint to music and choral voices composed by Francesco Lavagnino. The harsh, sped-up dissonance of battle contrasts with the extreme regularity and slowness of the choral chant, creating a spooky, fatalistic quality, as if all this action were going nowhere but to death. On the screen the horses and men are obscured by fog and dust or are photographed in such rapid motion that one barely has time to absorb the details. Welles has commented, “The danger in cinema is that in using a camera you see everything. What one must do is succeed in . . . making things emerge that are not, in fact, visible.” In other words, the director's job is to weave a spell, in this case with pure speed and the suggestion of heated violence, none of it fully apparent in the isolated images.

This indirection is a key to Welles's overall approach to the visuals, which represent a special problem in any adaptation of Shakespeare. The richness of the Shakespearian text is in its language, of course, and in its manipulation of theatrical convention; hence too much photographic realism tends to overwhelm the poetry. As André Bazin once observed of Molière, “The text . . . takes on meaning only in a forest of painted canvas and the same is true of the acting. The footlights are the autumn sun.” Because Welles began as a theatrical director, he understood this axiom and was uneasy about the specificity of film in general, preferring instead the “poetic” qualities of an art that suggests more than it shows. The purpose of cinematic images, he said in an interview concerning
Chimes at Midnight
, ought to be to “transform the real, to charge it with a ‘character' it does not possess.” (A far cry, it can be noted, from the notions about realism that both he and Gregg Toland espoused while working on
Citizen Kane
.) In
Othello
Welles had used Moorish seascapes and Venetian façades as expressively as any studio designer, but the Henry plays presented an even greater difficulty. Although their epic grandeur begs for cinematic adaptation, the “outdoor” spectacle conflicts with period costumes and blank verse. Welles remarked that the only films in which “costumes and nature have learned to live in juxtaposition” are traditional genres like American westerns and Japanese samurai adventures. And while
Chimes at Midnight
is the closest thing to a western Welles ever made, it is a western without a tradition. One of his problems, therefore, was to create a believable natural environment for Shakespeare's men on horseback. He said that he wanted to avoid the feeling he had gotten from Laurence Olivier's
Henry V
, where “people leave the castle . . . and suddenly they meet again on a golf course somewhere charging at one another.”