Falstaff Chimes At Midnight 50th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray Trailer
Posted May 5, 2015 05:40 PM by Webmaster
British distributors Mr Bongo have released a new trailer for the their upcoming Blu-ray release of Orson Welles' Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight. The release will be available for purchase on June 29.
For the 50th anniversary edition of Chimes At Midnight, Mr. Bongo worked with Luciano Berriatúa at Filmoteca in Madrid. The restoration has been undertaken with utmost respect for Welles' original vision of the movie, and is not based on providing a quality of picture and sound according to the standard of current technologies (attempting to better what Welles filmed in the sixties), but to recover the film so that the viewer can experience the movie the same way they could watch it at the time.
On the brink of Civil War, King Henry IV (John Gielgud) attempts to consolidate his reign while fretting with unease over his sons seeming neglect of his royal duties. Hal (Keith Baxter), the young Prince, openly consorts with Sir John Falstaff (Orson Welles) and his company of Diana's foresters, Gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon . Hal's friendship with the fat knight substitutes for his estrangement from his father. Both Falstaff and the King are old and tired; both rely on Hal for comfort in their final years, while the young Prince, the future Henry V, nurtures his own ambitions.
Orson Welles considered Chimes at Midnight his personal favorite of all his films. Perhaps the most radical and ground-breaking of all Shakespeare adaptations, the film condenses the Bard's Henriad cycle into a single focused narrative. Its international cast comprises of Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey, Margaret Rutherford, and Ralph Richardson as the narrator, in addition to Welles and Gielgud. The film's harrowing war scenes have proven especially influential, cited in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V as well as Mel Gibson's Braveheart.