Word: moores
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moor Time...
Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier have done it, but no black man has ever acted Othello in a major movie. Now LAURENCE FISHBURNE is close to signing on to play Shakespeare's Moor in a version directed by Kenneth Branagh. Some actors, given current sensitivities, might balk at playing theater's most famous wife killer, especially if they had won renown as bad husband Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It? But at least this time Fishburne won't have to wear mean purple bell-bottoms...
...FIRST IMAGE OF THE TRAGEDY of Othello, the Moor of Venice -- the beautiful and delirious Orson Welles movie now spiffed up for its first U.S. engagement in 36 years -- shows Welles in blackface, upside down and dead. Even when he was a young man, a 25-year-old making something called Citizen Kane, the legendary actor-auteur enjoyed imagining himself as a corpse onscreen. It was his impudent prophecy: that he would soon be cast on Hollywood's funeral pyre like a discarded sled...
...Welles made a wonderful movie -- an eccentric adaptation that is in spirit as true to Shakespeare's text as, say, Verdi's Otello. The director's brilliant conceit was to film this tale of the ebony Moor and his blond bride in images of stark chiaroscuro, the blackest black and the whitest white. No moral or visual gray tones here. Dark cloaked figures rush toward the Grand Canal, and pigeons scatter up into an angry sky. The spider-webbery of shadows casts doom across an innocent face. It is a canvas, of baroque silhouettes and diagonals rampant, that marries text...
CINEMA Welles' restored Moor prompts a call for more...