JM (Jeanne Moreau)
...there was no chair. And what did I see? Orson's make-up kit, hidden. I said, "Look!" So I jumped around and said, "Don't say it! It's been hidden for days!" So in fact, as an actor he had stage-fright, and he was hiding himself and he said that he didn't have his make-up. So finally after 2 hours of shooting I said, "You know Orson, I've discovered everything. I know where the make-up is." He said, "You! So what I'm going to do, you know it takes 2 hours to do my make up!" I said, "We got times. Why don't you do it, the first scene the two of us?" It's the famous scene where Doll Tearsheet was jumping on top of Falstaff. So finally we get to that scene. And we rehearse. But it was not on the couch, was somebody else's. And finally we said, "Shoot!" And I jumped on him and he was squeezed and said, "You've hit hit my nose! Cut! We can't do it today!"
v.o.
Welles played against the traditional Falstaff, the lying drunken clown. He's created a character who's flawed and over indulgent, but also intelligent and humane. And his final rejection becomes more interesting because of it.
(Chimes at Midnight's playing)
OW
Falstaff I think is the most unusual figure in fiction. He is almost entirely a good man. He is gloriously life-affirming good man. And there are very few gigantic silhouette on the horizon of fiction were good. They are always flawed, always interesting because of their what is wrong with them. And Falstaff is, I don't... somebody once said that Falstaff was Hamlet who stayed in England and got fat, which is amusing to think of. But I don't think it's true because Hamlet is not a good man. There's hardly a good man in dramatic literature, who dominates the whole scene. I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied as I am in my humble way with the lost of innocence. There's always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter and purer where the haze smelt better, and weather was always spring time and duffy dills blue and gentle warm breezes. You feel that nostalgia in all Shakespeare's. And I think he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. I'm against my modern age, he was against his. And I think his villain was modern-people, just as they are likely to be continental. I would see the villain in Lear are none Anglo-Saxons, they are from over there and they represent the modern world which includes Sons being ungrateful to their fathers, and all the rest of it. I think he was a typically English writer, arch-typically the perfect English writer, and that very thing with the preoccupation with that Camelot, which is the great English legend. And innocence is what Falstaff is. He is a kind of refugee from that world. And he has to live by his wits, he has to be funny. He doesn't have place to sleep if he doesn't get a laugh out of his patron. So it's a rough modern world that he's living in. But you must to see in his eyes, that's why I was also very glad to be doing it in black and white because if it was in color he must have blue eyes. You got to see that look that comes out of the age of the memory existed but exist in the heart of all English poetry.
LM
Then that modern world exploded into one of the most violent, I think, battle...
OW
Terrible battle scene, yes. Which is supposed to show the end of chivalric idea, to show the way it's gonna be from now on.
LM
Even the funny tin-can running about, which is Falstaff in his armor, but it's funny pathetic, it's not funny in good way...
OW
Yeah.
(Chimes at Midnight's playing)
OW
The real fact is Hotspur another refugee from Camelot is dead. And the other man is getting ready to be the English hero. And to build that establishment, under what Shakespeare must have struggled because it was a very real establishment.
LM
Seems that the Chimes of Midnight give you a particular pleasure?
OW
It is my favorite picture. If I want to go to heaven in basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up. Because for me it is the least flawed, let me put it that way. It's the most successful for what I tried to do. I succeeded more, in my view, completely with that than anything else.
v.o.
Two years after Chimes of Midnight, Jeanne Moreau appeared in another Welles's film, The Immortal Story, playing a women tried to bring a fiction to life. Welles played Mr. Clay, a wealthy but friendless old-man obsessed with a piece of sailor's folklore, story of a penniless young man who's paid 5 guineas to sleep for one night with a woman he's never met. Mr. Clay can't accept that the story never really happened. And he commit the foley of trying to bring it to life.
(The Immortal's Story is playing)
LM
It's very tempting to see Mr.Clay almost ...
(end of part13)
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