Orson Welles shot Campanadas a medianoche in Spain between 1964 and 1965 for producer Emiliano Piedra. It was a low budget production, so the extended shooting schedule compelled Piedra to sell the international rights to the film for a twenty-year period to British producer Harry Saltzman.
Piedra had a negative copy struck of the film before the editing was completed, in 1965, to be send to the Italian music composer and to the sound house so it could be dubbed into English, since the film wasn’t shot with direct sound. The movie was released in Barcelona in December of 1965 so as to qualify for State funding that year, even though the picture cut had never been locked.
Three months later Piedra sent the negative to Paris, where Welles continued to work, at the LTC labs, finishing the post-production just in time to screen at Cannes. This post-production work entailed repositioning many frames, changing the angles of a number of them (and in some cases even flipping the shots to their mirror image), using slow motion as well as acceleration, adding transitions and dissolves, and even going so far as to add smoke to some images to obscure certain details that were in the shots.
At Cannes, where Welles received a special grand prize in honor of the 25th anniversary of the festival, Saltzman changed the title from Chimes at Midnight to Falstaff and he took possession of the original negative. In 1989 Piedra came back into possession of the original negative, claimed the rights in his name in the USA and printed new copies. However, by this point, all the instructions and notes regarding the color grading determined by Welles had vanished and the new copies did not correspond at all to the visual aspects of the original.
In 2009 Filmoteca Española decided to restore the negative and all original materials, duplicating them in a 35mm polyester copy and restoring both the definitive English and Spanish versions sanctioned by Welles in 1965 and 1966.
These two versions were then copied to 35mm, using the original definitive negative and from the original mono soundtrack negative. These copies are distinguished not only for their soundtracks – different languages, and different sound mixes, with the English version having more sound effects and additional music included in the battle scenes, that were not included in the Spanish version, which was released earlier – but also the head and tail credits were different, and most notably the visual quality was different. The restoration of the Spanish version was based on the copy deposited in 1965 at the Filmoteca, while the English version faithfully followed the grading instructions of the print presented at Cannes in 1966, that had been conserved by the Cinématheque française, with additional later corrections as well that Welles had ordered after the Cannes screening, present in a copy belonging to the Svenska Filminstitutet.

Luciano Berriatúa