Othello (1952-Orson Welles)

This is an old black-and-white movie that was lost until the early nineties, when Welles' daughter helped restore it.  Good thing, because this is a damn good movie.  It starts with the end-Othello and Desdemona are carried up to a castle on biers while Iago is lowered from inside the castle in a cage.  Funeral music is played in the background.  It stops, and then you realize that the low rumbling sound is the mass of priests or monks surrounding the biers praying.  This opening is much more powerful than I could do justice to.  The first few scenes are cut slightly and strung together out of order with narration.  The night scene with Cassio's fight and dismissal is quite well done, except it is very obviously day.  But the interior of the fortress which the fight spreads into is well worth the mistake.  All of the interiors are very impressive, showing how much Welles was a film director rather than just a Shakespeare director.   Iago, Roderigo, and Cassio can be hard to tell apart sometimes, mostly because of the lack of color, and yet in this production it seems appropriate.  The three actors are basically interchangable, and while they certainly do capable jobs, they don't come close to having the presence of Welles as Othello.  The cinematography as Othello begins to go nuts is done very well, and the separation of Othello's big speech giving up the military from his conversation with Iago by showing him start to lose it gives it a lot more power.  And yet he still seems to have some control until he gets the news that Cassio is given his command.  The text has been cut and rearranged fairly extensively, but it still works without a hitch.  The attempted murder of Cassio takes place in a bathhouse instead of the standard street, and at the end Iago kills Rpderigo not on the pretense of killing the murderer as in the text, because here everyone leaves before it.  He does it purely out of cruelty and self-defense-that's his real purpose anyway, but here it's undeniable.  The scene of Desdemona preparing for bed while ominous music plays is yet another powerful scene, and when Othello comes in he puts the candle out with his palm and doesn't react, showing just how much he's lost his mind by now.And when Othello kills himself it is in a huge rotunda in the temple, with everyone else gathered around a kind of porthole at the top; at his death the cover is shut with a large clang.

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