OTHELLO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 15

OTHELLO

(Marceau Films-United Artists) Y Cert. E were (no need to be falsely modest about it) a knowledgeable but sparse audience when the Orson Welles Othello opened in. Wellingtonand temperatures were still around freezing-point at the box-office when the season closed. A great deal of selective film-going, you will gather, is still not being done, and though one can’t blame the unthinking multitude for missing a good thing, particularly when no trumpets blow, I suspect, too, a snobbish

aloofness among the Shakesperians. Whoever they were (and why), the absentees missed an enthralling display of screen artistry which caught most of the spirit of the play with the help of rather less than a quarter of the text. For this is (as

you might expect) a pictorial Othello, an exciting progression of superb images in which just enough is used of the original dialogue to hold the sequences together and give them impetus and direction. Welles, who has no objection to standing on his head if it will give him a new camera-angle (indeed, the first frame of the film shows his inverted face), begins with the bodies-in a prologue which is the very ocular proof of his capacity. Bells toll, as long converging files of chanting monks escort the dead Othello and his Desdemona to their burial. And while the corteges pass, the doomed Iago-crammed in a_ steel cage-is hoisted to the battlements. As the dark shadows circling in the sky suggest, his heart is not for daws to peck at. ...If there be any cunning cruelty That can torment. him much and hold him long, It shall be his... Othello is a magnificent affair of battlements and banners, a chiaroscuro of courtyards and cloisters, Renaissance splendour and squalor, glittering sun and black shadow. Of the players I enjoyed Michael Mac Liamoire’s Iago best. Welles often throws away his lines and too often the eye peers through the portal of the head as if he were in the breach at. Agincourt instead of on the beach at Cyprus-though I would not say of him that "all that’s spoke is marr’d." Suzanne Cloutier’s Desdemona is, if anything, a little too restrainedparticularly in the more climactic pas-sages-and Roderigo (Robert Coote) too much a clown. But Mac Liamoire’s Iago is a persuasive piece of villainy, cold, unsmiling, soft-voiced, venomous — an Irishman Italianate, if you like. But it is to Welles the director, of course, that the chief credit belongs. This is, he straightforwardly affirms, a motion-picture adaptation of the play, and in the movement and the pictures he has, I believe, captured the essential spirit of Othello. In this he has been well served -by his cameramen-Anchise Brizzi, G. Araldo and Robert Fantoand, indeed, by all his crew. . He that hath eyes to see let him see!