Directed by Orson Welles • 1966 • Spain, Switzerland
Starring Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, Jeanne Moreau
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s extraordinary cinematic career, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was the culmination of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff—the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son Prince Hal—here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both “Henry IV” plays as well as “Richard II,” “Henry V,” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Welles created a gritty and unorthodox Shakespeare film as a lament, he said, “for the death of Merrie England.” Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic centerpiece battle sequence that rivals anything in the director’s body of work—CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is as monumental as the figure at its heart.
Directed by Orson Welles • 1968 • France
Starring Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, Roger Coggio
Orson Welles' first color film and final completed fictional feature, THE IMMORTAL STORY is a moving and wistful adaptation of a tale by Isak Dinesen. Welles stars as a wealthy merchant in nineteenth-cent...
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1982 • Germany
Starring Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is a deliriously stylized tale of hothouse lust and simmering violence. Set amid an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French sea port, this da...
