Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 6, 1955

Othello (Mercury; United Artists) has all over it the stamp of Orson Welles’s brummagem genius. Is there a file of soldiers with spears or a brave display of banners? Depend on it, the camera will catch them sharply etched against the sky.

Does Welles—playing Othello, of course—stride on screen to erupt a Shakespearean torrent? Depend on it, the camera will be angled upward from the floor so that Welles looms at least ten feet high while the other actors seem scarcely more than midgets.

Welles is producer and director as well as starring actor. He shot his film in Venice and in French Morocco, where the frowning battlements of an 18th century Arab citadel at Mogador serve beautifully for the exterior scenes supposedly laid in Cyprus. Everything is done with great bravura style, from Orson’s putting out a candle with the flat of his hand to a murderous shambles in a Turkish bath where Roderigo (Robert Coote) is trapped and killed, screaming beneath a slatted runway. When Welles strangles Desdemona, it is the most artistic strangling ever: he presses a silken scarf over her face, outlining every agonized feature just as if a nylon stocking had been pulled over her head. When Welles stabs himself, there is a good five minutes of reeling walls and ceilings as he takes his time about dying.

Yet, despite the camera tricks, engulfing shadows, dizzying vistas of colonnades and architectural arabesques, the film moves forward with a pulse-quickening stir and bustle. As the jealous Moor, Welles captures the falcon-look of a Kabyle from the Atlas Mountains; Michael McLiammoir plays a foul-fiend of an lago with reptilian intensity; and Suzanne Clothier as Desdemona, though not quite entrancing enough to “sing the savageness out of a bear,” wins compassion as she is bewilderingly overwhelmed by her mate and fate.

Love Me or Leave Me (MGM) is a Hollywood paradox: a CinemaScope musical that has the bite of authenticity. In telling the story of Ruth Etting, the famed torch singer of the ’20s, the film rings true just by following the broad outline of her career as it was carried in the tabloid headlines of the day.

A farm girl from David City, Neb., Ruth was singing in obscure Chicago nightclubs when she first encountered a Runyonesque character who called himself Colonel Martin Snyder. Actually, the colonel had been born Moses Snyder in a West Side slum, and the closest he had come to the military life was in the Chicago gang wars. Known familiarly as “The Gimp” because of a pronounced limp attributed to 17 shotgun slugs in his leg, Snyder soon proved his ability as a show-business Svengali. He married Ruth and managed her from dingy nightspots to nationwide popularity. But the incessant obbligato to her torch songs was Snyder’s fearsome behind-the-scenes frenzies. Mostly, his uncontrolled temper was directed at Ruth’s employers, and the combination of her talent and his tan trums boosted her earnings from $25 to $2,500 a week. After 17 years of his table-thumping furies, Ruth asked for a divorce. Snyder’s reaction was typical: correctly suspecting that her accompanist, Myrl Alderman, was the man she really loved, Snyder shot and wounded Alderman.

Scripters Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart have added a minimum of embroidery to this story. As Snyder, James Cagney has his best role in years and serves it well, mounting to successive levels of exasperation with as much ease and artistry as Bix Beiderbecke ever displayed in reaching the high note on his cornet. Cameron Mitchell makes the luckless Alderman a consistent and believable hu man being as well as a clay pigeon. Those who remember the sexy serenity with which Ruth Etting handled such numbers as the title song, Everybody Loves My Baby, At Sundown, and It All Depends on You, may find Doris Day’s characterization of the star both too pallid and too girl-next-door. Doris tries hard, but, like the film costumes that are supposed to represent the F. Scott Fitzgerald era, she just isn’t the real thing.

The Far Horizons (Paramount). The Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Northwest in 1804 is one of the most remarkable in the history of exploration. Its two leaders took a party of some several dozen men, a woman and a child through thousands of miles of virgin wilderness inhabited by hostile tribes. At the end of three years of hazardous journeying there had been only one death in the party—from a ruptured appendix—and but one scuffle with the Indians (two redmen were killed in an attempt at horse stealing).

The very qualities that made Meriwether Lewis and William Clark great explorers—coolheadedness, caution and iron self-discipline—are precisely the ones the moviemakers have thrown out the window. The Lewis and Clark of Far Horizons (Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston) are Hollywoodized into a pair of buffoons who would have trouble finding the corner mailbox. History records that Sacajawea, the expedition’s Indian interpreter, was one of the wives of a French guide and the mother of his son. Hollywood knows better: actually, she was unmarried Donna Reed, a high-fashion pulse-thumper turned out in beautifully tailored buckskins. Heston finds her a tasty dish even if her name is too much for him to master: he calls her “Janie” for short and proposes marriage. For all its duels with knives, wild Indian attacks and synthetic quarrels between the leaders. Horizons ends by creating the one effect the producers were presumably trying to avoid: unadulterated dullness.