This Thursday, Orson Welles’s most-underseen masterpiece Chimes at Midnight is coming to the Scarecrow Video Screening Lounge. Welles, of course had a legendarily messy filmmaking career, one that can be reasonably-evenly divided between his studio films and his independent productions. The studio films are the most famous, featuring also the former consensus all-time #1 Citizen Kane, the butchered masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons and the too-twisted-for-Hollywood noirs The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil. His independent films include the dishonest documentary F for Fake, the schizophrenic and multiform funhouse Kane Mr. Arkadin, an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial (which Welles quite rightly notes is a comedy) and three Shakespeare films: Macbeth, Othello and the greatest of them all, Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles combines parts of the two Henry IV plays with bits from Henry V to tell one story about the fat, blustery rogue Sir John Falstaff.
Seattle Screen Scene 