Superbly In Synch with Shakespeare

TITLE: OTHELLO

DIRECTOR AND ADAPTER: ORSON WELLES

THE BOTTOM LINE: Eccentric and wonderful, like its creator, this 1952 work ought to trigger further restorations of neglected Welles films

THE FIRST IMAGE OF THE TRAGEDY of Othello, the Moor of Venice — the beautiful and delirious Orson Welles movie now spiffed up for its first U.S. engagement in 36 years — shows Welles in blackface, upside down and dead. Even when he was a young man, a 25-year-old making something called Citizen Kane, the legendary actor-auteur enjoyed imagining himself as a corpse onscreen. It was his impudent prophecy: that he would soon be cast on Hollywood’s funeral pyre like a discarded sled.

How right he was. More than any other great director, Welles suffered a career of fits and starts: he would start a film, and then his niggly investors would give him fits. (The ill feeling was mutual.) In Hollywood, Welles was effectively banished by his early 30s. RKO Radio Pictures chopped The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’ brilliant follow-up to Kane, by a third (from 131 min. to 88), ordered a new ending shot by a different director and even sent Ambersons out as the bottom half of a double feature, in support of Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. Republic Pictures cut 20 min., which has since been restored, from his Macbeth in 1948. And so, that year, Welles set off on a European tour that would last nearly four decades. His first stop was Italy, where he would begin Othello.

Alas, Welles’ first independent production gave him, for his pains, a world of sighs. Backers kept promising funds, then withdrawing them. Suzanne Cloutier, who played Desdemona, would act as seductress to Welles’ potential patrons. “He would dress me in full costume,” she recalls, “and we’d visit the King of the Berbers. I’d lie on a couch, and we’d try to convince this king to give us his army for extras.”

For three years and more, the star-director and his ragtag band of actors hopscotched the Mediterranean, shooting a sequence whenever a few Eurodollars turned up. Notes Welles biographer Frank Brady: “A Tuscan stairway and a Moorish battlement are in the film, both appearing as parts of a single room. Roderigo kicks Cassio in Massaga and gets punched back in Orgete, a thousand miles away.”

Othello shared the top prize at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, but another three years elapsed before it opened in the U.S. Welles had a lingering fondness for the movie; in 1978 he directed a documentary about its making, Filming Othello. It was his last picture. “He always talked about Othello with great love,” says his daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith. “Yet he was under the impression that it was not a good movie. ‘If only I’d had the money and not had to work under those conditions,’ he said, ‘I’d have made a much better movie.’ “

As it was, Welles made a wonderful movie — an eccentric adaptation that is in spirit as true to Shakespeare’s text as, say, Verdi’s Otello. The director’s brilliant conceit was to film this tale of the ebony Moor and his blond bride in images of stark chiaroscuro, the blackest black and the whitest white. No moral or visual gray tones here. Dark cloaked figures rush toward the Grand Canal, and pigeons scatter up into an angry sky. The spider-webbery of shadows casts doom across an innocent face. It is a canvas, of baroque silhouettes and diagonals rampant, that marries text to texture in vintage film-noir style. Othello: the postwar man who feels betrayed by his wife. Desdemona: the innocent woman brutalized by her suspicious spouse.

The film was brutalized too; in the U.S., at least, it was rarely shown. Then in 1989 Intermission Productions, at the request of Welles-Smith, launched a search for the film’s original elements. They turned up in a New Jersey warehouse, and a restoration team set about polishing the visuals, re- creating the score and synchronizing, to the extent possible, words with lip movements. Restoration supervisor Phillip Schopper sees the new Othello as a revival supplemented by modern technology: “We did things that Welles wished he’d been able to do, but couldn’t.”

Othello should be just the beginning of a true restoration. Welles made only 18 films, and at least five might-be masterpieces remain to be seen. It’s All True, a three-part Technicolor film Welles shot in Brazil in 1942, ran afoul of censors and studio executives, and the film was aborted. In the late ’60s Welles shot part of The Deep (Dead Calm), with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau. Around the same time he completed a 40-min., stripped-down (no Portia) version of The Merchant of Venice, but somebody stole the sound track. The Other Side of the Wind, a made-in-Hollywood story starring John Huston, reached the stage of a 2 1/2-hr. work print. But in 1979 the film, partly financed by an Iranian company, was seized by the Ayatullah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Don Quixote, which Welles shot in spare moments over three decades, has been edited by director Jesus Franco and will be shown next week at Seville’s Expo ’92.