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Chimes at Midnight (1966)

Director: Orson Welles

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From Time Out Film Guide

The mongrel heritage of Chimes at Midnight is hard to credit, given the intensely personal reading of English history and literature that emerges from an incongruous Spanish/Swiss co-production of a life of Falstaff culled from five Shakespearean texts and Holinshed's Chronicles. Infused with a politically acute nostalgia for Merrie England, this elegiac tragi-comedy comes over as uncompromisingly modern entertainment, from its playful ruptures of traditional film grammar to its characterisation of Falstaff as hero at the crossroads of history, a spiritual and thematic precursor of Peckinpah's Cable Hogue. Welles waddles through the foreground with an eye on his own problems of patronage, while behind the camera he conjures a dark masterpiece, shot through with slapstick and sorrow. Magic.

Author: PT 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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Cast & crew

Director: Orson Welles

Producer: Emiliano Piedra, Angel Escolano

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau, Norman Rodway, Marina Vlady, Alan Webb, Fernando Rey, Walter Chiari, Andrew Faulds, Ralph Richardson full cast

Duration: 119 mins


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