Othello

Orson Welles is a genius. No-one can deny that he has the most imaginatively fertile mind in the theatre today. His results, especially when dealing with Shakspere, are always controversial, be it in the movies with Macbeth or on the stage with Lear. For Welles is never one to back down from a challenge.

Particularly challenging is Othello, perhaps Shakspere's finest play and certainly his greatest Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). For all its length, Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials; yet Welles has come up with a film exactly 90 minutes long. Obviously this required extensive cutting of the original; and Welles fully realized the impossibility of trying simply to photograph a stage production of the play. The result is not Shakspere's Othello, but Welles' adaptation and interpretation of the Othello tale using Shakspere's words.

Some of the great poetry is gone, and the monumental construction is gone. But the marvelous Baroque drive and momentum of the inner line is still there. Welles has applied to it the kind of Mannerist treatment that has always come most naturally to him, introducing as he does such elements as the disproportionate, the unbalanced, the oblique, and the devious.

By all rights, the film should be a flop. Yet it is a brilliant achievement, owing in part to the fact that Welles knows how to make the most of the movie medium as a valid and unique art form. No-one but Welles would have devised, following the lead of the ancient Greek exodos, the grandly impressive (and wordless) epilogue, within which the story itself is a flashback--thereby imparting a new form and focus to the finished product. No-one but Welles could have thought up the settings for the drunken brawl and the killing of Roderigo. Welles' direction and camera work are virtuosic throughout: his untiring inventiveness is ever apparent; and he is a master of black-and-white, from a close-up of part of a white robe through all manner of chiaroscuro to a totally blackened screen. Indeed, so prolific are his ideas that some sequences of camera angles and shots speed by too rapidly. And who else would have dared to have Othello's final speech delivered straight upwards by a disservered head? The whole visual treatment, furthermore, is strikingly enhanced by the highly original musical score, featuring a wordless chorus and the forceful clangor of an over-amplified harpsichord.

Of the personae themselves, the laurels go to Michael MacLiammoir for his superb portrayal of the traitor Iago, whose evil is somehow intensified by two wisps of chin whiskers. Robert Coote is an unusually funny Roderigo. Welles, with his wide-range voice, is more than competent though not ideal in the title role. Suzanne Cloutier's Desdemona emerges rather colorless, mostly because her part has been so greatly cut, including the whole Willow Song scene. In places, the synchronization of the speech sound track is imprecise. Nevertheless, the film well deserved its Cannes Festival Grand Prize. It will outrage the Shaksperian pedant; but it will reward those who can appreciate Welles' powerfully fascinating display of technical virtuosity and unorthodox genius.