Raphael Holinshed

The crowning achievement of Orson Welles's extraordinary film career that was the culmination of the filmmaker's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff; the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV's wayward son Prince Hal, here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace.