Othello (1952) - film review

Othello is a courageous general in the Venetian army, renowned for his many military victories against Venice’s enemies.  But not everyone approves of his success.  A dark-skinned Moroccan, he is suspected of using witchcraft to compel the fair Desdemona to marry him.  Iago, whom he considers one of his most trustworthy subordinates, loathes him because he has favoured a rival, Cassio, over him.  Realising that jealousy is Othello’s greatest weakness, Iago conceives a vile plan that will destroy both Cassio and his general.  By stealing a handkerchief from Desdemona’s bedchamber and placing it in Cassio’s possession, Iago persuades Othello that Cassio has been having an adulterous affair with his supposedly unblemished wife.   Othello reacts precisely as Iago had anticipated.  Consumed by a whirlwind of raging passion, he resolves to kill Desdemona...

Orson Welles’s striking visualisation of Shakespeare’s Othello is a characteristically stark and brooding affair that, once seen, is never forgotten.  It is a profoundly unsettling piece, having the expressionistic nightmare feel of the director’s subsequent great work The Trial (1962) and the bleak other-worldly poetry of his earlier Shakespeare adaptation, Macbeth (1948).  Some may cringe at the sight of a white man blacking up to play the title character, but Welles’s portrayal of Othello is almost as laudable as his direction, one that seethes with pathos and a manic vitality.   There is a darkness, ferocity and visceral intensity to this film that transcends anything seen in Welles’s other cinematic creations, putting it on a par with his most highly regarded work, Citizen Kane (1942).

And yet this was not an easy film to make.  Whereas Welles was able to knock out Macbeth in three weeks, it took him four years to complete Othello.  When his Italian sponsor went bankrupt early into the shoot, Welles had to put the filming on hold so that he could raise the funds to complete it.  His appearances in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Henry King’s Prince of Foxes (1949) were motivated primarily from the necessity to make money to complete his work on Othello.

The stop-start production that beset Othello is all-too noticeable in the end product, particularly in the aggressive editing and use of cut-aways to disguise the absence of actors in key scenes.   This lends an uneven, slightly confused feel that, strangely, serves the film well.   The disjointed narrative emphasises the psychotic character of the duplicitous Iago (superbly portrayed by a longstanding Welles associate Micheál MacLiammóir) and Othello’s descent into rampaging paranoiac fury.  The bravura expressionistic cinematography further heightens the drama, providing a bold visual metaphor for the complex dual nature of Iago and Othello, the whiteness of life and hope gradually obliterated by an all consuming blackness that pours from the dark centre of the villain’s twisted soul.  Notice how the recurring criss-cross motif of trellis and shadows ensnare each of Iago’s victims one by one, as though they were mere flies caught in a spider’s web.  Iago ultimately suffers the same fate, imprisoned in a lattice cage in the film’s haunting prologue, which depicts the aftermath of the tragedy with a funeral procession that is shot almost entirely in silhouette.

In common with many of Orson Welles’s directorial offerings, Othello was not a commercial success when it was first released.  It was however well-received by the critics and was co-winner of the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952 (sharing the award with Renato Castellani’s now all-but-forgotten Two Cents Worth of Hope).  The film languished in obscurity for many decades, even when Welles’s other great films were resurrected and came to be regarded as unequivocal masterpieces.  The re-release of Othello in 1992 finally earned the film the acclaim it deserved and firmly established it as one of Welles’s finest achievements.

© James Travers 2010

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