“Welles … directed the film with an imaginative and expressive clarity that propels it to the front rank of his movies — and of the history of cinema.”
—The New Yorker

“One of the very pinnacles of Welles’s art, matching a forceful, visual dynamism to melting, mellifluous reading of Shakespeare’s text.”
—Artforum

Newly restored, Orson Welles’ majestic labor of love, cobbled together over a period of years as the auteur took odd jobs to raise money, is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s ongoing Falstaff narrative, which the Bard spread over several plays.