Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
FALSTAFF CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (Mr Bongo) will appeal most to those who already know their Shakespeare. Orson Welles’s 1966 film dipped into both the Henry IVs and a tiny part of Henry V to come up with an essay on the Falstaff-Hal relationship.
The chopping, the changing, the dubbing, the transporting of whole scenes out of their original context and into another, do not always make for true clarity. However, Welles, physically, must be everybody’s idea of Plump Jack “blasted with iniquity”: it’s a great performance.
The funny robbery scene (when he is disguised as a monk) benefits enormously from being played out in the open. The famous scene in the tavern, when he and the Prince (Keith Baxter) prepare for the Prince’s interview with his father, doesn’t have its full impact.
The final rejection, however, at Hal’s coronation is great and John Gielgud is particularly impressive when the king is raging on his deathbed. The Battle of Shrewsbury, fought in the early morning mist, is memorable.
The whole sequence – a series of striking, brutal, brilliantly photographed close-ups, superbly edited – really does make you feel as if you are right there in the middle of the fighting.
TOO MUCH JOHNSON (Mr Bongo). This long, unfinished and only partially edited 1938 film, shot when Orson Welles was only 22, proves to be a fascinating treat for all students of his oeuvre. The restoration includes the multiple takes and the mucking about and the experimenting.
The film is a very funny parody of a silent slapstick comedy and was initially made to preface each of three acts of a stage production of a farce by William Gillette. It never got shown.
Jealous husband (Edgar Barnes with moustache) chases his wife’s lover (Joseph Cotton, clean shaven with boater) through streets, over vertiginous roofs, in and round market crates and up and down a quarry.
The high spot is a classic comedy sequence with a horse and cart followed by a mass of people, who constantly enter and exit a one-way street, the chase gradually receding further and further into the distance. Perfection.
THE IMMORTAL STORY (Mr Bongo). Rich man pays sailor five guineas to make love to his wife. The old sea story (retold by Isak Dinesen) has been told many times. A rich, old and impotent man (Orson Welles) determines to make it happen in real life with real people in his home in Macao.
He gets his secretary (Roger Caggio) to pay a no longer young woman (Jeanne Moreau) 500 guineas and he pays a young sailor (Norman Ashley), who says he is 17 and a virgin, 5 guineas to act out the roles.
The film lasts just over an hour. Made in French for television in 1968, it is always intriguing but never quite as good as you hope it is going to be.
This dubbed-into-English version makes it even more artificial than it already is and the dialogue sounds very wooden.
