Othello (1951)

Scalera Film, Mercury Productions
Director: Orson Welles
Starring: Orson Welles, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Suzanna Cloutier

Honors:
Grand Prix - Cannes Film Festival

Orson Welles’ passion for creating motion picture art superseded every limitation presented to him, as well as the abandonment of Hollywood’s system for the filmmaker that helped pave one of its finest films. Here, in Othello, this passion is on full display as he writes, directs, produces, and stars in his adaptation of the William Shakespeare tragedy. With a production backstory it manifests his desire creating, performing, and admiring the performing arts and movie making. Produced through a series of road blocks, it was a feature several years in the making that is hastily created, beautifully constructed while being a somewhat mangled, and incapsulates the struggles the a filmmaker through the remainder of his career.

 

Othello is a Shakespearian drama about vengeance through creating distrust within the marriage of an authority figure as a form of manipulation. A Moorish general in the Venetian army, Othello (Welles) becomes the center of ire of his jealous, yet trusted ensign Iago (Micheál Mac Liammóir). Using Othello’s recent marriage to the noble lady Desdemona (Suzanna Cloutier), Iago plants distrust in the general’s that she has been unfaithful with a loyal captain Cassio (Michael Laurence), sending Othello down a destructive path. Uncovering the truth that Desdemona what faithful all along comes too late for Othello as he had killed his wife, left only with enough will to punish his secret enemy Iago before, in grief, claiming his own life.

 

Filmed in numerous beautiful locations throughout Europe, Orson Welles employs the stunning scenery and elaborate architecture to deliver an authentic feeling Shakespearian story to the movie screen. The script uses much of the original Shakespearian dialogue, but trims off a great many scenes to pare down the five act play into a final picture that runs approximately 90 minutes, leaving many portions of the picture feeling rushed, often with hurried editing. As the titular character, Welles’ performance commands the screen in his common manner, a presentation troubled only through the prism of acting in blackface. One could defend that in doing so this production keeps in a manner beholden to how the part would have been portrayed in the years when the play was originally performed. However, this can be set aside as the Moorish nature of the character plays little role in fullness of the story and picture. In a way the feature appears a mess, but in another manner it is splendid in keeping its roots and presenting a love letter to the author and his work.

 

Intended in a way to be a follow up to Welles’ previous Shakespearian adaptation of MacBeth (1948), the feature of Othello became an erratic production that needed over three years to finish, filled with a number of stops and stalls willed into being with the efforts of the famed filmmaker to be completed. With MacBeth being considered a troublesome disaster between Welles and studio producers, the filmmaker made his way to Europe to in pursuit of new projects, which included for a period being the originally writer for Alexander Korda’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) before being dismissed.

 

Othello became a viable project for Welles under Italy’s Scalera Films, penning the script while leading the project as producer, and setting himself as both director and star on a proruction to be shot in various Mediterranean locals. In 1949, while awaiting the delivery of the costumes with his cast and crew in Morocco, Welles was brought the unfortunate news of Scalera going bankrupt, immediately ceasing Othello. Thus began Welles’ story of determination to get his vision created.

 

Funneling his own money into the project Orson would get the movie started before running out of money himself. To help fund the picture Welles would take time to find personal acting work throughout Europe, both on screen and in radio, periodically returning to get more of Othello in the can. The jerky nature of production was in its own way a trouble as cast and crew would be altered to suit the needs of the movie until Welles was able to finish principal photography in early 1951. Through all the difficulties, casting and quality suffered, but it did not quell the passion Welles has for his vision and creativity, scrounging enough resources and effort to complete the picture despite having no distributor signed on.

 

For Orson Welles, Othello was a shrewd effort of production manipulation as the filmmaker to find the means to deliver what was needed from his cast and crew.  Micheál Mac Liammóir was an older choice for the role of Iago, a decision justified by Welles to capture a more impotent and jealous character as an antagonist. The performance of Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier was the result of recasting because of the jerky nature of production as she filled in as Desdemona and became an ally of Welles in many of his future, unfinished works. Various other English performers would appear in keys roles, including Robert Coote and Fay Compton as Roderigo and Emilia.

 

Due to extensive location shooting near the sea or in rooms that created great echoes, most all of the audio from principal photography was in need of voice dubbing which too was a hasty process, evident in the poor lip synchronization. It would take work to make the dubbing passable, but in the meantime Othello would see a premiere viewing in a Rome screening in November of 1951. For this initial viewing all audio was dubbed in Italian, sidestepping a need proper lip-syncing as this first version was used to drum interest in film. Meanwhile Welles continued to finish the final English language picture which competed as an entrant at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival in May 1952. Audio would be cleaned up slightly and topped with a unique soundtrack by Italian composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino in time for the festival screening, which met mixed critical reviews, with most negativity centering on the poor audio quality.

 

Despite the critiques Othello was praised for its visuals, and like many well-made Shakespeare motion pictures, it was given rather high regard for its classical acting nature. Welles and his feature came away from Cannes sharing the festival’s top prize that year and the attention it needed to be distributed widely in Europe and later on in America following more work to clean up the sloppy audio.

 

For Welles what we observe here in his producing of Othello parallels much of what he had to do for the rest of his career in motion pictures. Othello was just one example of the work it took for him to simply create by continually needing to find funding to get just enough to keep shooting his next project.

 

For the most part, Othello was ignored by Americans with mainly critics and film students taking the time to really view and study to the feature. Welles’s daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, in the early 1990s supervised a restoration of her father’s film, looking to improve visual and audio quality well after Welles’ death. In an age when black and white films were being colorized for home video markets, intial naïve critics praised the restoration. However, like colorization of older movies, the restoration would be met with great reproach. Apart from the cleaned visuals and re-synching of the dialogue, scenes were altered, additionally sound effects added, and the entire soundtrack was rerecorded. The film lacked the nuances of the original Welles version in the shortsighted move. The restoration would meet critical attack, but it did open a door to anew preserved copy of the original version of the feature.

 

Othello is not so much a good film as it is a study of Orson Welles and his career in his post-Hollywood period. His passion is on screen for all to observe, even if the work is not always of peak quality. For anyone who loves film, Shakespeare, and the meeting of the two, this feature is a fine film to digest for it is filled with more than what meets the eye.