Martin Scorsese names “the greatest battle scene of all time”
Rising to fame and industry-wide acclaim in 1973 following his impactful film debut, Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese joined the unofficial cinematic clique, the ‘Movie Brats’. Alongside Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Brian de Palma, Scorsese would go on to redefine cinema in the so-called New Hollywood era.
Mean Streets may have introduced Scorsese’s crucial noir crime niche, but it was in 1976 that Scorsese reached a summit with the magnum opus, Taxi Driver. Admirably, Scorsese has managed to maintain relative consistency for five decades and shows no signs of slowing down, with Killers of the Flower Moon entering cinemas later this year.
Throughout his long and illustrious career, Scorsese has branched from the comfortable canopy of shady New York crime movies, bringing us sports drama in Raging Bull, a masterful biopic in Aviator, and a biblical epic in The Last Temptation of Christ.
One gaping movie genre that Scorsese has neglected, however, is the war drama. All of his above-listed ‘Movie Brats’ made war movies, whether tracing the steps of guerillas in Vietnam or Storm Troopers in a galaxy far, far away. Ostensibly, Scorsese has little interest in war movies, given his staunch anti-war stance and the fact that it’s a well-saturated genre.
All the same, the American filmmaker appreciates a cracking war movie when he sees one, especially if it is the fruit of the cinematic deity Orson Welles. Scorsese has, on several occasions, noted Welles’ brilliance and irreplaceable hand in the evolution of filmmaking.
“I started realising camera movement because he used that wide-angle lens a great deal, and if you use a wide-angle lens and you move quick enough, you see the walls speeding past you,” Scorsese once told AFI while dissecting Welles’ innovative style. “And this is what I think Welles bought to the cinema, to American cinema particularly. Because up until that time, it was the seamless film in a way, the hidden camera, the camera that you couldn’t tell was there. So, Welles was the one to really open up the pandora’s box.”
It comes with little surprise that Scorsese’s favourite war movie and battle scene are found in Welles’ towering oeuvre. Speaking to Time, Scorsese once singled out Chimes at Midnight for having the greatest battle sequence in cinematic history.
“I think if you’re gonna look at Welles, I think you should go to Chimes at Midnight. There are so many different levels to the film,” he praised. “Out of this ‘Shakespearean’ play comes this extraordinary filmmaking. As far as action scenes are concerned, the best battle scene ever put on film is in Chimes at Midnight“.
Scorsese added: “I know the guys who did Braveheart studied it, I know we studied it a lot. It’s different from Eisenstein, it’s different from Alexander Nevsky, it’s different from Potemkin, of course. Never quite anything like it.”
Watch the battle scene from Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight below.
