Starting at the end, with a double funeral & a brutal punishment, no Shakespeare film gets off to a grander, more exciting start. In Orson Welles’ savagely edited adaptation (in both text & film), OTHELLO is less a tale told than a tale retold. And best appreciated if you already know your Shakespeare. Heroically raising his budget via mainstream acting gigs between spurts of shooting in various countries, he then put the puzzle together higgledy-piggledly in a triumph of Cubist imaginative editing logic. (It has the feel of a Sergei Eisenstein epic, a filmmaker Welles later found too 'formalist' . . . just like Stalin!) Often, the effort involved shows, but not in a detrimental way. Though the casual merging of post-synch dialogue is initially off-putting for English-speaking audiences. (Does it improve as the film goes on or do we adjust?) Yet the sum effect is too thrilling to mind even the larger problems & missteps. With most of the perfs superb, whomever ‘voiced’ them. Along with his earlier MACBETH/’48 and his later CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT/’65, the three greatest Shakespeare film adaptations ever made . . . or imagined.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: There are three main differences from the original 1952 Euro-cut and the Stateside release of ‘55: Switching from the more Wellesian spoken credits to printed titles with added bits of unnecessary explanatory narration (advantage 1952); redubbing Desdemona with a more forceful British stage actress (advantage 1955); superior visual quality in the 1952 source material (game, set & match to ‘52). On the recent Criterion edition with both cuts, François Thomas gives an excellent summary of the changes. (Yet never mentions the difference in visual quality!)
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As noted above, MACBETH and CHIMES. How lucky to have them all so easily available after decades in hiding. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/chimes-at-midnight-aka-falstaff-1965.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/macbeth-1948.html
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