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The opening takes account of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, the stately gliding of the funeral is jangled by the frenzied note of the iron cage dangling over the procession. Doomed bookends for a noir flashback, Iago (Micheál Mac Liammóir) is a dissolute hawk at his general's wedding, "I'll poison his delight." Othello (Orson Welles) by contrast is a wounded grizzly, Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) the alabaster doll he clutches to. Tragedy of he "who dotes yet doubts," masculine and racial anxieties at the nucleus of a collapsing civilization, coldly exploited by the protagonist's alter ego. "So I will turn her virtue into pitch, and out of her own goodness make the net that shall enmesh them all." Not the sound stages of Macbeth but Italian and Moroccan locations, still the vision is even more claustrophobic because Welles in exile sees Shakespeare's words as the disembodied shards of a nightmare. The famously turbulent production inspires wondrously fragmented forms: Extravagant angles, disconcerting cuts, a perpetually reeling camera to pulverize "the tranquil mind." Iago pushes Othello toward the precipice of jealousy as the pair toe the edge of a seaside cliff, the Moor's upside-down face rouses to laughter that melts into the cawing of seagulls. Torch-bearing figures descending corkscrew steps, trumpets tilted diagonally on battlements, a galley's shadow seesawing on the castle's wall—the shredding of Tintoretto and Piranesi canvases, a ragged splendor. (Amid such feverish flurries, a touching view of a pooch whimpering in flooded catacombs.) Mann's T-Men for the Turkish bath ambush, dilated with infernal steam and shrieking mandolins as the sword plunges through floor slats. "Leave it to time": Welles is his own best critic later in Filming Othello, by the Moviola playing Iago to his younger image. With Robert Coote, Hilton Edwards, Michael Laurence, Fay Compton, Nicholas Bruce, and Doris Dowling. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |