When 'Midnight' Struck Orson Welles' Career

Terry Teachout writes in the Wall Street Journal that Chimes at Midnight, released in 1965, just as Orson Welles’ career as a film director would go into a long period of freefall, is being re-released in a “brand-new, never-seen-before restoration” next month. As Teachout writes, this restoration covers a multitude of cinematic sins:

The reason it had to be restored is that “Chimes at Midnight” was made independently and on the cheap, for by 1965 Mr. Welles had so antagonized the Hollywood establishment that no major studio would have anything to do with him. As a result, “Chimes at Midnight” was shot, edited and dubbed under substandard conditions, and the prints that have circulated since the film’s original release are all of low quality.

But why was Welles so hated by Hollywood? It wasn’t for his acting; Welles would have died a wealthy man if all he did was appear as a featured character actor in other directors’ movies. Instead, Welles plowed much of his own money from acting into self-funding his later pictures. As Welles said at his infamous American Film Institute tribute in 1975, where he was “honored” as a director by many of the same men who would never think of hiring Welles to direct a film for their studios:

As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work. In other words, I’m crazy. But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it’s a fact that many of the films you’ve seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or if otherwise–well, they might have been better. But certainly they wouldn’t have been mine.

Teachout wonders if it was perfectionism that eventually grounded Orson Welles’ film career:

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