Word: gunn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American Shakespeare Festival production of Othello in Stratford, Conn., perpetuates a tradition in which the play and its hero shrink with each successive revival. Moses Gunn and his director Michael Kahn proceed along the familiar tack that Othello is good, loving, noble, trusting and innocent until jealousy and grief tear him asunder. Gunn conveys all of these qualities admirably. His stage presence is commanding and his line delivery persuasive, though it is somewhat mannered when he elongates single words for emphasis...
Special Vanity. The trouble lies in the fact that Gunn accepts Othello's image of himself. That image is one of soldierly simplicity and unflawed purity. On those terms, he is totally undone by lago's villainy. But in reality, he is chiefly undone by himself. A different sort of man would have been immune to lago's innuendos about Desdemona's sexual infidelity and the circumstantial evidence of the telltale handkerchief unwittingly supplied by lago's wife (Jan Miner). Othello succumbs to his panicky jealousy either because he is unsure of himself...
...Gunn is not alone in psychologically violating the play. There should be a good deal of Juliet in Desdemona. After all, she is a virginal young girl swept into sensual love with the Moor, who is anathema to her father in much the same way that a Montague was to a Capulet. But Roberta Maxwell conjures up a prim housewife somewhat baffled by a hubby with a bad case of the sulks. Sne achieves an affecting poignance only in her deathbed speech. As for lago, he should be Lucifer's child trailing a brimstone stench of evil...
...Director Norman Jewison. Ashby seems to have picked up Jewison's stylistic slickness, which is stamped all over the movie like a muddy footprint. One Landlord love scene consists of almost nothing but enormous closeups of lips and hands against a glaring white background. Ashby and Scenarist William Gunn make things easy on themselves throughout by portraying the tenants as a group of whimsical, life-loving characters out of The Time of Your Life; Elgar's snooty family is caricatured with pig-bladder subtlety...
...MARY K. GUNN East Chatham...