Othello (1951)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Suzanne Cloutier, Robert Coote

Have I Seen it Before: Sure. I’ve been making jokes about Welles miscasting himself as the tragic Moor for years.

Did I Like It: Surprisingly, Welles only directed three Shakespeare feature adaptations for the screen, and it’s unfortunate that this is the weakest of the trilogy. It is not as clever, fully-formed, or expansive in scope as Chimes at Midnight (1965), nor is it as minimalistic and fully necessary energy as his Macbeth (1948).

The film has all the singular Welles cinematic trademarks. The camera never quite does what one might expect it to, characters talk over each other at a time where sound was treated so insanely delicately that to depict people in the way they might actually speak might tax the technology, and the film ultimately feels unfinished.

I don’t mean to introduce that word “unfinished” as a derogatory. Welles’ film career was so thoroughly cobbled together, that I can’t help but keep my eyes glued to one of his movies as it unfurls. There’s always a measure of panic that any of his films—aside from Citizen Kane (1941) and perhaps Touch of Evil (1958)—will complete unravel before the end credits. As films are hardly ever projected via film any more, his may be the only films where that experience can be beheld in all its glory anymore.

And then there’s that casting problem. It cannot be avoided, and I have a hard time believing it was accepted with any degree of widespread enthusiasm at the time of its release. Then, there might have been any number of men of color who could have brought the Moor to vibrant life for Welles’ camera, but instead Welles’ ego (I can’t imagine it was for the sake of the film’s commercial prospect) prevailed and he both directs and stars in the picture. Then, it feels like the wrong actor in the wrong role (he would have been glorious as Iago—here played by Liammóir), and now it’s just another example of where a modern audience has to parse out just exactly where lies the border between swarthy-face and outright blackface, or more importantly whether thats a distinction without a difference.

Filming Othello (1978)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s only ever been in any kind of wide release for home video since 2017, long after I had started writing The Devil Lives in Beverly Hills, Orson Welles of Mars or even The Once and Future Orson Welles. I wish I had been able to take it in long long ago.

Did I Like It: My opinion of Welles’ Othello (1951) was, at best, slightly muted (Welles miscast himself, forcing the film to land at the hind end of his Shakespeare features). However, I had a great degree of excitement for this film—produced for West German television and the last feature-length film directed by Welles which he fully completed in his lifetime, it belongs squarely in the realm of his later work. It is cobbled together from material and resources he already had sitting around the house, and thus is footage of a lunch conversation he had with some of the cast members, and footage of him at his moviola. 

And I. Am. Here. For it.

Whenever I am writing the fictional Orson Welles, there’s never less than an ounce of anxiety that I wasn’t getting his voice (or, more honestly, his unique syntax) quite correct. But that’s as it should be. My Orson Welles is a fictional creation, pieces of what is knowable about the man coupled with chunks of pulp heroes thrown in to fill in the gaps. It’s a singular and unusual pleasure just to spend time with the man as he talks quite honestly (strengths along with missed opportunities) about one of his films. We may not get any salacious gossip or a how-to diagram to make his films, but a perfect snapshot of his feelings about the larger portion of his work (Citizen Kane (1941) is not mentioned once in the 84 minute runtime), and with just a hint of his hopes for the future. He never stopped thinking that his next film would be the one to finally surpass Kane and if nothing else, that one characteristic is what drew me to the man as a subject all those years ago.