098 - Chimes At Midnight (1965)

DVD Box

Chimes At Midnight is an amalgamation of four of Shakespeare's plays - Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III - from the perspective of Falstaff, an otherwise minor character in the plays.

In Shakespeare's plays, Sir John Falstaff (Orson Welles) is Prince Hal's - later Henry V - friend and drinking buddy. The story focuses on the differing role that Falstaff has as he begins to find himself out of favour as Prince Hal's responsibilities start to become greater.

Theatrical Poster
Source: Wikipedia

Chimes at Midnight highlights a fundamental problem with going through a list of films with a whole range of genres. There will often be films that are simply fantastic, downright awful or - as in this case - ones that are incomprehensible to me.

I can understand that Orson Welles has been very clever with his film, taking a relatively unknown character that appears in many of Shakespeare's plays and expanding the personality of him in order to give him more appeal to the cinematic audience. Unfortunately, it becomes very difficult to rate a film that I genuinely didn't understand, so, for this reason, I have to award 0 stars.