Word: othellos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Othello is Orson Welles, surrounded by a number of movie techniques taken from Murder at the Rue Morgue. Any resemblance to a Baroque (as opposed to Mannerist) play written by W. Shakespere, also known as William Shakespeare, is, however, coincidental. Some will feel that all's well that ends Welles, but most will enjoy him for his own sake at the Beacon Hill...
Particularly challenging is Othello, perhaps Shakspere's finest play and certainly his greatest Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). For all its length, Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials; yet Welles has come up with a film exactly 90 minutes long. Obviously this required extensive cutting of the original; and Welles fully realized the impossibility of trying simply to photograph a stage production of the play. The result is not Shakspere's Othello, but Welles' adaptation and interpretation of the Othello tale using Shakspere...
...black-and-white, from a close-up of part of a white robe through all manner of chiaroscuro to a totally blackened screen. Indeed, so prolific are his ideas that some sequences of camera angles and shots speed by too rapidly. And who else would have dared to have Othello's final speech delivered straight upwards by a disservered head? The whole visual treatment, furthermore, is strikingly enhanced by the highly original musical score, featuring a wordless chorus and the forceful clangor of an over-amplified harpsichord...
...what it is all about. But Author Llewellyn has lived on both sides of the diphthong curtain (he has been both an enlisted man and a captain in the Welsh Guards), and he plays this theme until a sense of caste becomes a vein of madness as authentic as Othello's jealousy...
...best tale is the description of a modern psychoanalyst's nightmare, which Russell subtitles "Adjustment--a Fugue." An unhappy analyst dreams--in a night of misgiving--that Shakespeare character, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and several others, are turned into happy, well adjusted, normal--and frightfully dull-human beings...