The Great Movies III

Lewton may have found his overall approach by happenstance in Cat People, which began as a title without a story and developed its minimalist style as a result of the low budget. But he and Tourneur had found a note that worked, and in various ways Lewton found it again in such films as I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and The Body Snatcher (1945). He made "movies that are often more like symbolist poems or obscure fetishistic rituals," wrote Geoffrey O'Brien in the New York Review of Books. "They are not so much frightening as unnervingly strange and shot through with a palpable melancholy."

Do the movies still work today, or are they too quiet? Depends on your tastes. Paul Schrader made a much more specific version of Cat People in 1982, which I admired for its own qualities, including the use of atmospheric New Orleans locations. But the 1942 movie gets under your skin. There is something subtly alarming about the oddly mannered good-girl behavior of Simone Simon, and the unearthly detachment of Kent Smith as her husband, and the rooms and streets that look not like places but like ideas of places. And something touching about Irena, who has never had a friend, and fears she will kill the only person she loves, and is told she is insane. At the end, Oliver pays her a simple tribute: "She never lied to us."

There live not three good men unhanged in England. And one of them is fat and grows old.

How can it be that there is an Orson Welles masterpiece that remains all but unseen? I refer not to incomplete or abandoned projects that have gathered legends, but to Chimes at Midnight (1965), his film about Falstaff, which has survived in acceptable prints and is ripe for restoration. I saw the film in early 1968, put it on my list of that year's best films, saw it again on 16mm in a Welles class I taught, and then could not see it for thirty-five years.

It dropped so completely out of sight that there is no video version in America, Britain, or France. Preparing to attend the epic production of both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I wanted to see it again and found it available on DVD from Spain and Brazil. Both versions carry the original English-language soundtrack; the Brazilian disc is clear enough and a thing of beauty. What luck that Welles shot in blackand-white, so there was no color to fade.

This is a magnificent film, clearly among Welles's greatest work, joining Citizen Kane, The MagncentAmbersons, Touch ofEvil, and (I would argue) The Trial. It is also magnificent Shakespeare, focusing on Falstaff through the two Henry IV plays to his offstage death in Henry V. Although the plays are much abridged, it is said there is not a word in the film not written by Shakespeare.

Falstaff, "this huge hill of flesh," is one of Shakespeare's greatest characters-the equal, argues Harold Bloom, of Hamlet. He so dominates the Henry IV plays that although Shakespeare promised he would return in Henry V, he reconsidered; the fat knight would have sounded the wrong note in that heroic tale, and so we learn from Mistress Quickly of his death, as he "babbl'd of green fields."

Welles was born to play Falstaff, not only because of the physical similarity but because of the rich voice, sonorous and amused, and the shared life experience. Both men lived long and too well, were at odds with the powers at court, and were constantly in debt. Both knew disappointment, and one of the most sublime moments in Welles's career is simply the expression on his face at the coronation of Henry V, when he cries out "God save thee, my sweet boy," and the new king replies, "I know thee not, old man.

Prince Hal, later Henry V, is played in the film by Keith Baxter, who looks dissolute enough in the roistering at the Boars Head Tavern, but as early as act i, scene 2 is an unpleasant hypocrite in the monologue where he admits his present misdeeds but promises to reform at the right time. In Shakespeare, this is a soliloquy; in Welles, Falstaff listens in the back of the shot and is forewarned. Later, in an echo of that composition, the prince looks impatiently toward the field of battle as Falstaff, behind him, questions the concept of honor. That each man hears the other's intended soliloquy adds a dimension to both.

Welles as director uses some of his familiar visual strategies; the vast interiors of Henry IV's castles contrast with the low ceilings and cluttered rooms of bawdy houses, just as the vast space of Kane's great hall contrasts with the low ceilings and dancing girls of the New York Inquirer. Royalty in Chimes at Midnight is framed by vast cathedral vaults, with high windows casting diagonals of light. Welles uses dramatic camera angles, craning to look up at the trumpeters atop the battlements as Henry IV rides off to battle.