Word: desdemona
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Thus begins the Orson Welles version of Othello, with the joint funeral of the Moor and Desdemona, and the imaginative execution of Iago. The entire film is prefigured by this non-Shakespearean opening sequence: the sense of evil leading to tragic death, the theme of innocent beauty wronged, the symbolic imprisonment of man in a cage of passion...
Symbolic prison bars recur throughout the film, but never in a blatantly intrusive way like the self-conscious symbols of La Dolce Vita. Othello overhears Iago's baiting of Cassio through a barred casement, he looks in upon Desdemona through her leaded window, and finds out the greatness of his guilt behind a barred gate in the castle. His only escape from the cage of his passion is suicide, and one he has stabbed himself with a dagger, he leaves his prison, free to die in the bedroom beside his wife...
...director always has one trump card to play in his films: Welles the actor. His Moor is in the tradition of his great roles, the Charles Kanes and the Harry Limes. His best scene is his appearance before the Doge of Venice, in which he defends his courtship of Desdemona...
Died. William Embry Wrather, 80, petroleum geologist, longtime (1943-56) chief of the U.S. Geological Survey, who pioneered the use of micropaleontology (the study of fossils) for finding oil with the 1918 strike at the Desdemona field in Texas, later in Washington spearheaded the wartime campaign to make the U.S. self-sufficient in vital materials that led to the discovery of substantial domestic deposits of vanadium, tungsten, manganese and other valuable ores; of a stroke; in Washington...
Next spring she will play Desdemona to Sir Laurence Olivier's first Othello. Last January she was named the outstanding actress in the West End during 1962 for her part in Peter Shaffer's linked one-acters, The Private Ear and The Public...