Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

[HarryLong]

Both parties apparently believe this film is an untapped goldmine of profit, I guess

Wow, are they delusional.
Now I love this film & I'm sure there are a goodly number of cinephiles who want to see it ... but an "untapped goldmine?"
Please ...

[Tommaso]

I did a search on Chimes at Midnight yesterday and it came up on Turner Classic Movies website for purchase. Does anyone know anything about this DVD? I don't want to get my hopes up in case it's too good to be true. Anyways, good to be here and I look forward to much discussion.

The disc is also listed at amazon, and there are quite a few customer reviews. It is a dvd-r and should certainly be considered as some sort of bootleg. I am surprised that TCM are selling it, but then, I'm equally surprised that amazon did.... According to the reviews there, it seems to be quite decent, but certainly not 'the real thing'.

[atcolomb]

Lets hope that someday a decent dvd version will come out and i cross my fingers that Criterion can stang the rights to do it!!

[Jarpie]

I ordered Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff from HMV which they are selling exclusively, unfortunately it uses the same master as the spanish DVD so the picture quality pretty horrible.

[HarryLong]

I did a search on Chimes at Midnight yesterday and it came up on Turner Classic Movies website for purchase. Does anyone know anything about this DVD? I don't want to get my hopes up in case it's too good to be true. Anyways, good to be here and I look forward to much discussion.

The disc is also listed at amazon, and there are quite a few customer reviews. It is a dvd-r and should certainly be considered as some sort of bootleg. I am surprised that TCM are selling it, but then, I'm equally surprised that amazon did.... According to the reviews there, it seems to be quite decent, but certainly not 'the real thing'.

And that link now brings forth the message: "Sorry, this item is either discontinued or does not exist."
Amazon still shows several versions. I think the one I got hold of (bought by a friend... I think from a vendor in Argentina) is the fifth one down.

[hamsterburger]

It appears that a UK release is on the way

[Jonathan S]

As the distributor as Palladium, I think it's a safe bet this will be the same as the "pretty horrible" HMV exclusive mentioned three posts above.

[atcolomb]

What a shame....They can release a blu-ray version of Showgirls but trying to release a well made dvd version of Chimes...Orson must be laughing right now.....

[muflibird]

The dvd released by Studio Canal a few years ago was a stunning transfer with full, crisp sound. Not only was the print almost immaculate, dialogue in the first reel had even been synced up nicely with the picture. Unfortunately, even this superb version is marred by minor sync problems that crop up from time to time later in the film. After spending a few evenings lining up spoken words with moving mouths on a timeline, it seems clear that the actors did an incredible job of post-recording their lines. Unfortunately, the mundane chore of editing the dialogue tracks was done haphazardly. A shame, because watching a pristine print of "Chimes" with properly synced audio is a revelation.

[John Edmond]

Are you sure that the audio sync problems are a dvd problem, and not inherent to the film? It's not unheard of for independently shot Welles films to feature dubious ADR. Sorry, it's just that none of previous thread pages confirmed how the audio had been restored - whether it was just de-muffled or also synced.

[muflibird]

I didn't mean to suggest that Studio Canal synced up the audio, though they may have. You're correct - audio problems originated with the film. I saw it in a theater in 1969, and the first reel was notoriously out of whack because of sloppy lab work (According to Barbara Leaming's biography of Welles). As critic Pauline Kael had promised, I sometimes struggled to figure out which character was supposed to be speaking. I've sampled three dvd releases in the past few years, and in each one, the huge problem with the first reel has been addressed, though the Studio Canal version is the only one that actually nails it. Oddly enough, the cheap disc from Nostalgia Films has slightly better overall sync in the second reel than the Studio Canal release.

Even within the reels, there are differences. Lines, sometimes single words, that were obviously out of place, have been dragged where they should be. Are dvd manufacturers responsible for the changes? Not necessarily. The source prints themselves could represent various stages of tinkering with the soundtrack that may have taken place in the late 60's, after the horrible American release. My original point was that the actors' dialogue replacement was amazingly well done. The sound editing and laboratory work were not. It is a more enjoyable film when audio and video match, and, these days, making them match is not that hard.

[Peacock]

Surely if you move the dialogue around for sync now your also moving the background sounds and score too?

[muflibird]

Good point. The answer is, virtually never are the background sounds and score an impediment to syncing up the dialogue. Lavagnino wrote a superb score, but it amounts to only about forty minutes of screen time. Subtract credits and battle scene, and thirty minutes of music is spread across an hour and forty-five minutes of film. Bear in mind that well over half of the print Studio Canal used, is just fine the way it is.

To give an example of the sort of changes that are needed, when Henry IV inquires about his "unthrifty son," actor Andrew Faulds as Westmoreland has three lines with the king. While the first two fit precisely, along comes, "Here is Sir Walter Blunt, my Lord, new-lighted from his horse," about six frames late. Sound keeps pouring of Faulds' mouth six frames after his lips stop moving. The effect is jarring. What sound is in the background? Low-frequency room ambience. Mind you, Faulds did his looping session perfectly. Someone simply pasted the final bit of audio in the wrong place. Before the battle of Shrewsbury, a few lines of Gielgud's are off just far enough to be distracting. The sound in the background: wind.

The picture in the Studio Canal release is ravishing. All the misplaced lines can be set right in a few evenings. No Othello-sized restoration, with its attendant problems, is required.

[Roger Ryan]

As alluded to earlier in this thread, an on-going sound restoration has been in the works for over a decade. It could very well be finished (I saw/heard two reels of the film featuring the restoration four years ago). The legal debacle has kept the film from getting a proper release with the restored sound or not. "muflibird" is correct that it wouldn't take much effort to sync up the post-recorded dialogue with the lips. As I recall, a more controversial aspect of the restoration was an attempt to give the soundtrack a more realistic spatial sense by making it sound like characters in the background were further away than characters in the foreground, etc.

By the way, one of the many sad ironies surrounding the work of Welles is that his original edit of OTHELLO required/requires no restoration. Beatrice and her team put a lot of effort into restoring the elements to a subsequent U.S. edit (with very questionable results) which Beatrice owned. Welles' original European edit of the film actually features a better mixed soundtrack with better sync than the restored U.S. release. A more cohesive Venice sequence at the film's beginning and a few better shot choices throughout make Welles' original edit the superior version. Unfortunately, Beatrice has suppressed the availability of this version in favor of her own "restored" edit.

[cinemartin]

Rosenbaum has written quite a bit about the restorations to Welles films, and I tend to follow his logic on it. By making a more realistic spatial sense would be going against what is there. Coming from radio, Welles was always very precise about his audio ideas and spent a lot of time perfecting the recording and mix of the film. The restored Othello was a travesty compared to Welles' original cut(s). What Welles accomplished with that film and to a certain degree with Chimes was an aural and visual assault where you didn't know where the sound was coming from while the visuals reinforced the sense of spatial instability. The problem with the restoration(s) is that it is being done by people who want to make the sound subordinate to the image, where I believe Welles was working from the opposite direction. Just because some lines appear to be off-sync in Chimes doesn't mean it's necessarily flawed. In fact, the disconnect between sound and image offers up a new relation to think about in place of a smooth sync. If there's one thing that Welles' post Hollywood films point to (with Lady From Shanghai fitting in as a nice precursor), it's the abandoning of smooth edits and narrative continuity for something rougher, more urgent, and far more abstract than what he has done before. He pioneered techniques that were adopted by many filmmakers in the future and he never settled down into a so-called "late period" - he was constantly experimenting.

[Roger Ryan]

For the most part, I agree with this. Certainly Welles' original European sound mix on OTHELLO (one could refer to it as the original recording as well since he re-recorded large portions of dialogue for the U.S. release) is much more dynamic and feels more like an ideal marriage between the aural and visual elements - I was most struck by Welles' use of echo in the scene where Othello learns of the discarded handkerchief. At the same time, Welles bemoaned the fact that his resources and budget restricted his ability to get the sound he wanted in many of his post-Hollywood films. In the end, my preference is to have the dialogue synced properly with the lips, but leave the "mix" (especially the score) alone.

I would hesitate in using THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI as an example of Welles deliberately breaking with traditional methods of continuity. While Columbia president Harry Cohn famously decried that the film made no sense, it is obvious from looking at the cutting continuity to Welles' original edit that the director was careful to include the necessary scene transitions and expository moments to guide the viewer through the complicated story. It was only through the extensive recutting done by the studio that the continuity started to become truly incomprehensible. This is not to say that Welles was making a traditional thriller, but he knew when an audience needed to see a seven-second shot of a boat going from one location to the next, shots that the studio must have thought were superfluous even though they would have clarified what was going on.

[cinemartin]

I agree with you about Shanghai. But I believe that necessity (especially for Welles) is the mother of invention. If any filmmaker had more money (or less) on any particular project, it would almost certainly come out differently. That seems to be the fundamental point behind George Lucas' revamp of Star Wars and pretty much all of his films. That's fine by me I suppose. It's sad to me that I can't readily see the original THX, but that's another point altogether. My point is, Welles is not around to put something right. That doesn't condemn all efforts to "revamp" (for lack of a better word) his films a priori; the problem lies with a particular reconstruction done by someone else repressing Welles' original film. Where he's lost control of a film at a certain stage (too many films) and someone goes back to tinker with it, I just hope I can compare the versions as opposed to supplanting one version for another. To me there's a difference in the original theatrical cut of Touch of Evil and the one that Murch et al did, but it's not a fundamental difference; it's just 2 different teams' interpretation of footage filmed by Welles. I'm sure you'll agree that a studio version of Ambersons is worth a million Jess Franco's Quixotes.

However with films like Othello and Chimes, Welles followed those films (even compromised by funds) to their conclusions. I know this will sound extreme, but I liken the soundtrack restorations to someone doing a version of F For Fake with less cuts to make it easier to follow. I always have the feeling that people say "I love Welles! Great filmmaker! But I think he should've done it like this! I think I'll fix it myself! Surely it's what he would have done himself? I mean, if he had the money (or modern tools, or today's sensibility, or my tastes....)". I know it's personal preference but I want to be able to view the film as Welles finished it and judge it by what is there, not what could be there.

A side note: when you're talking about Welles's European Othello, are you talking about the one that premiered at Cannes with the spoken credits? I actually have never seen that version, but would love to. Unfortunately, I've only seen the American cut (which I loved), but I at least got to see the unrestored Criterion laserdisc of it.

[Roger Ryan]

A side note: when you're talking about Welles's European Othello, are you talking about the one that premiered at Cannes with the spoken credits? I actually have never seen that version, but would love to. Unfortunately, I've only seen the American cut (which I loved), but I at least got to see the unrestored Criterion laserdisc of it.

Yes, the one with the spoken credits. I was able to see it five years ago at the Locarno Film Festival's Welles retrospective and I was taken aback at how good the synchronization and sound mix were. My immediate reaction (having only seen the '92 restoration version previously) was that this version of the film needed little to no sound restoration at all - it played beautifully. The soundtrack just sounded more Wellesian to my ears, more substantial and not nearly as compromised as the '92 resto would suggest. The European cut also incorporates more footage for the Venice scenes, which strengthened those scenes in my opinion, as well as the occasional alternate shot (a close-up of the dead Desdemona's face is quite chilling and more effective than that strange, compromised "blown-up still" from the earlier medium wide shot used in the U.S. release - did Welles think the close-up would be too gruesome for U.S. audiences?).

I believe there is a difference between changing the editing scheme of a Welles film (one which we know he had final cut of) and attempting to correct audio glitches. We know Welles was not happy with the sync issue on CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, so I wouldn't argue with some corrections in this regard. However, re-recording a music score to present it in stereo (as in the '92 OTHELLO) is a huge mistake. Sometimes the choices are not as cut-and-dry: MR. ARKADIN, for example, was taken away from Welles before he finished editing. Examining the extant rough cuts of Welles' later films, it was discovered that Welles would often keep duplicate action shots (from different camera angles) on the same reel; eventually, he would choose one over the other for the final cut. When ARKADIN was taken away, a couple of these duplicate shots ended up in the released version(s) due to the fact that Welles had not decided which take/angle he preferred (and, apparently, the subsequent editors didn't care to decide either!). Is this being true to Welles? Not really. When Criterion's "Comprehensive Version" of ARKADIN was put together, the duplicated shots were eliminated resulting in cleaner, better-looking sequences in my opinion. Fortunately, Criterion issued two additional versions of the film, so the viewer would have a choice. The same goes for the most recent issue of TOUCH OF EVIL. I too think it's important to have the original theatrical cut available (as well as the preview version) even though I prefer the '98 reconstructed version as it corrects some of the issues that Welles himself made note of.

Oh yeah, you'll get no argument from me regarding Jess Franco's DON QUIXOTE - it's a complete abomination.

[cinemartin]

Re Cannes Othello: I've heard a few different people say almost exactly the same thing as you regarding the Venice sequence and specifically the close-up. I frustrates me that I can only think about what kind of power this shot would have - I know my imagination could never account for it! Perhaps Welles did think it was too much for an American audience. It's discussions like this that get me all fired up, hoping Criterion would release a nice Othello box in the vein of Arkadin. As comprehensive as possible, perhaps even highlighting what happened between 52 at Cannes and 55 when it was released in the modified American version. As for the American version, the re-recorded music truly is a mistake. You really must see the unrestored American cut; I think you would find that the sound was in no more need of restoration as the 52 cut that you saw.

There's no way I could disagree with you on the Arkadin and Touch Of Evil sets (I'm definitely going to sidestep any discussion of aspect ratio for the latter - I don't have a fully formed opinion of it anyway). Both presentations are great and about as comprehensive as you can get. I will have to say, though, that I think I prefer Confidential Report to the "Comprehensive Version", but I'm very glad that I can (and do!) watch both. If Chimes gets its audio tweaked, I can only hope it's released with the original so I can have the pleasure of watching 2 versions of a great film. And I will also second the assessment of the Studio Canal disc of Chimes. It looks and sounds really good. So yeah, for all my minor quibbles it would be a great day for film lovers if any version of Chimes is officially released on DVD or (hopefully) Blu.

[Titus]

There's been an Italian DVD of this that's supposed to be pretty good that was just released within the last few months, but Amazon doesn't seem to have it available and I'm worried it's been taken out of print, much like the Studio Canal one a few years back. Does anyone know of any alternatives for Italian DVDs that might still have it in stock?

[tojoed]

There's been an Italian DVD of this that's supposed to be pretty good that was just released within the last few months, but Amazon doesn't seem to have it available and I'm worried it's been taken out of print, much like the Studio Canal one a few years back. Does anyone know of any alternatives for Italian DVDs that might still have it in stock?

I think this might be it.

[ellipsis7]

However dubbed it seems...

[DanV]

Falstaff - Special Edition (I Classici Ritrovati)

[Titus]

Thanks for the suggestions. For anyone else whose interested, there are also a couple of Italy-based sellers on Amazon marketplace that are selling what looks to be the right edition. Pretty reasonable prices.