MacLiammóir and Edwards, the founders of Dublin’s Gate Theater, were instrumental in the young Welles’s introduction to theater it could be said they helped shape the great man’s fundamental understanding of filmmaking. The most notable change in the 1955 version is the substitution of a traditional title sequence for the original spoken credit sequence voiced by Welles ala Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.įilming Othello is a 1979 documentary directed by Welles about the making of the film featuring a table-side chat with Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards (Barbantio). Aldos, that makes this one of the label’s finest achievements.Ĭriterion presents Othello in a two-disc set, the first containing two different versions of the film, the 1952 cut premiered in Europe and the 1955 edit performed by Welles at the edict of United Artists. But it’s the splendid reproduction of the film itself, showcasing the work of its principal photographers, Anchise Brizzi and G.R. The new Blu-ray release from Criterion is a real stunner with a selection of extras that could have succeeded on their own as separate releases.
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Decades later each would expand their horizons (and their audience) with appearances in such unlikely TV fare as My Living Doll and The Honeymooners. The cast also features Doris Dowling in the pivotal role of Bianca and Robert Coote as the foolhardy Roderigo.
But special attention must be paid to Micheál MacLiammóir as the unknowable Iago (“I am not what I am”) whose race-baiting demagogue feels unnervingly contemporary.
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Compelled by racial hatred, sexual jealousy and pure bile, he stages a whispering campaign designed to usurp the black man.Īs critic Joseph McBride notes, Othello is a director’s movie and Welles’s performance, though deeply felt, is also subdued, as if the weight of the production hung over him frame by frame (the critic Eric Bentley commented, a little harshly perhaps, that Welles “never acts, he is photographed”).Ĭonsidering the turmoil surrounding the production, the other actors are uniformly compelling from Suzanne Cloutier’s porcelain self-assurance to Michael Laurence’s unsuspecting Cassio and Fay Compton’s brave Emilia.
The demonic Iago, never far from Othello’s ear, embodies all that havoc. Even the poorly synched dialogue, the result of that patchwork recording, adds to the sense of dislocation. Welles’s film emerged in an atmosphere of civil unrest and personal chaos and he wanted the film to reflect that the movie abounds in fractured, hallucinatory montages shimmering dissolves of roiling water, birds in flight and a reeling sky that mirror the disintegrating psyche of the tormented moor. The actors are either framed from a distance, posed on jutting castle tops out of de Chirico or their profiles fill the screen in looming close-ups recalling Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Those films have willfully disorienting aspects but Othello’s visual scheme is the most purely baroque of Welles’s career. With a fatalistic flourish, the movie begins with its gloomy ending, not unlike Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and, yes, Citizen Kane.
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It’s not enough that the lonely African feels betrayed by his own “sooty” skin thanks to the scheming Iago, Othello fears he may be betrayed by his own wife. Though Othello is widely admired, his ancestry paints him as a perennial outsider, not just to others but to himself as well. Othello is the story of a proud General, a transplanted moor newly married to Desdemona, the daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian senator. Because this is Orson Welles, the result of all that turmoil is a grand, visionary work of art. Money dried up on a daily basis prompting the broke director to moonlight on other movies to shore up cash. The 1952 production of Othello is exhibit A.įilmed over a turbulent three year period in and around Morocco, Venice and Rome, Welles was bedeviled by an ever-changing cast and crew resulting in reshoots by five different cinematographers and assembled by four different editors. Shakespeare didn’t invent Orson Welles but he did define him it can be said that if any one director took arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it was the man behind Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight. Written by William Shakespeare (Adapted by Orson Welles)Įdited by Jenö Csepreghy, Renzo Lucidi, William Morton, Jean Sacha Aldo, Anchise Brizzi, George Fanto, Alberto Fusi, Oberdan Troiani Starring Orson Welles, Suzanne Cloutier, Micheál MacLiammóirĬinematography by G.R. 1952 / Black and White / 1:33 / Street Date October 10, 2017
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