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64 dga quarterly C L A S S I C S survives in a bewildering number of versions, none of them entirely Welles'. There's no definitive cut of the electrifying Touch of Evil, ei- ther, though the late-'90s restoration of the movie, supervised by Wal- ter Murch, at least follows some detailed notes left by the director. In these movies, and in The Trial (1962), whose striking interiors were filmed in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay railway station in Paris, you can see Welles continuing to experiment with the medium, trying to achieve dramatic effects through editing rather than relying so heavily on elaborate tracking shots, which were in his reduced circumstances often too complicated (and too costly) to stage. (When he had some financial resources, in Touch of Evil, he managed to execute a spec- tacular one, right at the beginning—which in the studio's cut wound up running under the opening credits.) And his editing experiments made it possible for him to pull one fi- nal masterpiece out of his magician's hat, Chimes at Midnight (1965), a film made, like his other European movies, on the fly and over a period of years, but somehow possessed of an improbable serenity— a sense of rightness that, every artist knows, comes too infrequently. Playing the fat knight, John Falstaff of Shakespeare's "Henry IV" plays, Welles, both as actor and as director, seems the master of rev- els here, a prodigious orchestrator of sensual pleasures. "I would my means were greater, and my waist slenderer," Falstaff says. But de- spite the usual paucity of means, Chimes at Midnight, like Kane, has PHOTO: UNITED ARTISTS/PHOTOFEST a headlong, remarkably var- ied rhythm, which carries the viewer from scenes of raucous carousing to scenes of solemn ceremony and back again, and includes, too, moments of rapt contemplation. The movie also finds room for a superb, mournful battle sequence, edited to a precise and accelerating tempo: It may be the most complex act of montage he ever committed to film. At the end of experimentation, sometimes there's a great discovery. In Chimes at Midnight, which has recently been digitally restored, Welles found a way to be fully himself again in the art that had thrilled and frustrated him for so many years. In his final movies, the essay-style documentaries F for Fake (1973) and Filming 'Othello' (1978), Welles is primarily an editor, ruminat- ing over ancient footage and rearranging history as best he can. The last shot of his last finished film shows the old experimenter getting up from his flatbed editing table, turning out the light, and walking slowly away, as if, like Falstaff, he were hearing the chimes at mid- night, and marveling once more at the days he'd seen. ® FEATURING: Filmmakersdestination.com 818.777.7OPS (7677) DOWNLOAD MOBILE APP FROM APPLE APP STORE AND GOOGLE PLAY STORE Universal Studios Everything you need On The Lot PRODUCTION AND POST-PRODUCTION SERVICES FOR: TELEVISION COMMERCIALS FEATURES STILL SHOOTS SPECIAL EVENTS AND MORE . . . NBCU Studio