othellos

[Michael]

Thank you EVERYBODY for all these great posts on "Othello". I only have a the DVD version of the movie and have never seent he LD version. So...... could would someone Please be willing to send me a copy of it? If so, please e-mail me, I would be greatly appreciative of it.

Thanks! Michael
NMPTheatre@hotmail.com

[colwood]

I just saw Othello for the first time and I have to say that it is a spectacular picture (I enjoyed it somewhat more than Macbeth, which I also just saw for the first time, and is also a good movie). Unfortunately, the only version I have access to right now was the 92 "restored" version.

After reading this thread I'm a bit confused. I know that Welles did two cuts, one for Europe and one for America. The 92 version was based on the American cut. I presumed the 95 Criterion Laser version was based on the European Cut. However, on the Othello film page here at wellesnet, Jeff wrote: "The 1995 Criterion Collection laserdisc edition, using the negative of the original 1955 US release version...."

I presume that the 52 European cut could be called "Welles' cut." That said, is there a released version out there of Welles' cut? And if so, is it the 1995 Criterion LD?

[jaime marzol]

othello fans, i have some shocking news. i received my copy of the french othello from tony. i'm SHOCKED! i watched it twice. it's the best othello going. it has more scenes in it, that's right MORE FOOTAGE! MORE FOOTAGE! I WATCHED IT TWICE IN 2 DAYS! it more closely corrsponds to welles intentions in narrative, and in the look. less grey, more blacks and whites! it is in french, but who cares, all othello fans know all the dialogue.

tony is looking to build up his welles collection, and this french othello puts in the weeds the 2 american othellos we have now. i will never again pop in my voyager disc.

also interesting, without that incredible voice, welles as othello is not such a towering presence, even with that big orson head, he's some what diminished. he's just like a regular actor.

a very interesting experience.

i have received 3 boxes of trade tapes in the last few days, more reviews coming.

[jaime marzol]

also, they did not have a master with just music and sound effects to work from, all the scenes with no dialogue are original sound track, original effects.

the dubbed scenes had to be rescored.

[Tony]

Jaime:
Do you mean that my French Othello was re-scored and that the sound effects were re-done where there was French dialogue dubbed? I never noticed this; it seems seemless! If you're correct, I wonder when it was done? Because the new music and sound effects don't mis-match the film, as do Beatrice's.

[jaime marzol]

yes, everywhere there is dialogue, the score is different. the sound guys on this project were artists. they display a masterfull use of ambient sound so you don't feel those abrupt changes in sound quality.

a scene will have their dialogue, their scoring for the first part, then the second part of the scene has no dialogue, so the second part goes back to being welles' ambient sound, sound effects, and scoring, and the part with dialogue, their construction completely! and you feel no jump in sound quality. very impressive work. they were passionate about what they were doing, unlike the guys that put together the CITIZEN WELLES disc.

[Tony]

Jaime:

If there is no jump in sound quality, how can you tell? You must have a good sound system, and/or be knowledgable in this area.

Also, What's the Citizen Welles disc? I thought that was a book!

[alan smithee]

I think it's not so difficult to find a copy of the original version of 1952. I recorded it some years ago from the french channel Antenne 2, in english with subtitles. And everybody can compare the different footage and even surprisingly find that the voices of actors are dubbed by Welles in the american copies. So it's not completely true, how Rosenbaum says, that "nobody knows that, except a friend of mine in France, Francois Thomas, who did a dissertation on Welles sound work". Anyway, it is correct to say that the european version is closest to Welles intentions? Welles itself prepared the 1955 editing and redubbing, so even the american version is strictly a Welles version. Different, less beautiful at my personal opinion, but... And don't forget all the troubles about the birth and shooting of Othello (I've collected a lot of stories and facts about it), during the editing (months at the moviola, with Renzo Lucidi in Rome, Jean Sacha in Paris, John Shepridge in London), and even after (in the summer of 1951, Welles shows Othello at Venice Film Festival, but the copy that comes in the morning is in very bad condition and the scheduled projection is suspended. “Legal problems ”, says the author at press conference. “The film is not ready, the sonorization is bad” , says Antonio Petrucci, director of the Mostra. And one month after the gold palm at Cannes, at Berlin Film Festival, the film is cancelled officialy for some antigerman declarations made by Welles during his journey in Berlin in 1950. So, maybe we can assume that Welles itself was unsatisfied about this first edition (a little bit like Coppola for Apocalypse Now, maybe). Quien Sabe?
P.S. Sorry for my poor english. Bye.

[alan smithee]

Oops, I forgot. You can compare, for example, the voice of MacLiammoir (that plays the Moor) in american Othello with the Dublin Gate Theatre production directed by Hilton Edwards (who plays Iago), published in LP by Spoken Arts Records of New York (catalog number 783). I found it in a old market in Ireland.

[colwood]

Tony, the Citizen Welles disc is a DVD of The Stranger, The Trial, and Hearts of Ages. Jeff has a comparison/review of it linked off of the Stranger film page here at Wellesnet.

Having just seen it recently, I am very interested in Othello. I guess as Alan said, maybe Welles was unsatisfied with the Othello that world premiered at Cannes. Not having aquired a vast knowledge of the filming of Othello, I have to ask, since Welles was putting up the money for filming, did he own Othello? Did he have final cut, so to speak? Was the version at Cannes rushed there or did he have time to tweak the editing to his liking? If the French cut had different or additional footage like Jaime posted, does anybody know if Welles cut this later or had anything to do with this cut?

I am interested in seeing this movie as Welles envisioned it. But info on this French cut sort of puts that into a different light now, I guess. I am very interested in seeing this French version but I guess for now, can we say that Welles' version which premiered at Cannes, and according to Criterion they based their Voyager disc on, is his "final cut?"

[jaime marzol]

tony:

it's easy for me to tell in othello what is where. after watching the american voyager version 80 times, you put on the french version, i don't need subtitles, and i can hear a different score. it's just that i know the copy i have so well, that i right away saw the changes in the french copy you sent.

i don't think welles had anything to do with this french othello, the dubbing sounds too well architeced to have been done in 1960, it sounds more like 1990 technicians, but that is just a guess, it might be 1989, or 1991!

on citizen welles:
i'm always for the small guy trying to bring a product out with no money, but lots of passion, and drive. to me, passion is preferable to technical luxuries. graver's documentary had a lot of passion, and had a lot of information that we heard for the first time. citizen welles was a small guy putting out a product with no money, no passion, no inspired artwork, nothing. it was just a money making venture, and it shows. their dressing to these 2 great films is very bland.
..................

[L French]

Here's the review of OTHELLO that appeared in the New York Times when it opened in 1955, and a follow up article in the NY Times on the restored OTHELLO...

_


THE NEW YORK TIMES September 13, 1955

OTHELLO
Film review by by Bosley Crowther


How much of Shakespeare's Othello you are likely to be able to perceive in Orson Welles's motion picture version of it, which came to the Paris yesterday, is something this dazzled reviewer would not like to have to guarantee. Shakespeare himself, set down before it, might have a tough time recognizing his play.

For the great Mr. Welles apparently decided, when he set out to make and play this film in the authentic locale of Venice some six or eight years ago, that the text and even the plot of the original were incidental to the dark and delirious passions enclosed in its tormented theme. That theme is, of course, the tragic downfall of a man racked by jealousy, aroused by the treacherous rumor-mongering and conniving of an ungrateful friend.

What matters it that Othello bears a sense of social stigma in the play, based on the fact that he is an alien, a professional soldier, and, particularly, a dark-skinned Moor? What matters it that Iago, his villainous and deceitful "friend," hates him because he fancies Othello has captivated his wife? These are details and motivations that have been completely overlooked by Mr. Welles. All that he seems to find intriguing are the currents of hate and villainy.

And so this extraordinary picture, which it took more than three years to make and equally as long—or longer—to re-dub and prepare for showing here, is strictly an un-literate, inarticulate, and hotly impressionistic film, full of pictorial pyrotechnics and sinister, shadowy moods.

Let's be completely forthright about the talent revealed by Mr. Welles. He has a wonderful skill at image-making but a blind spot where substance is concerned. For instance, he makes of the murder of Desdemona a chilling nightmarish display of stark faces, frenzied movements, architectural compositions, and shifting lights, cut into a montage with accompanying music and screams. But he backs up this hot, erratic action with little feeling for character or regard for the genuine human torment that is implied in this melodramatic display.

It would be hard to improve upon this rendering of Othello for sheer mise-en-scène. Mr. Welles has got Venice and Cyprus (or what passes for Cyprus) down to the ground. All the urbanity and stony beauty of the great Adriatic port and the island of Othello's triumph are made sharply visual in this film.

But, alas for the import of the drama! It is mainly spectacle—elaborate, expensive, complicated—with no continuity, meaning, or soul. Mr. Welles's own dusky Othello is a towering shadow of a man, monstrous in his pictorial movements but as hollow and heartless as a shell. And Michael MacLiammoir's Iago, which should be the sparkplug and fuse of the play, is not only vague in behavior but also almost impossible to understand. You can't expect much from an Iago when you can't hear the little that he says.

Suzanne Cloutier's Desdemona is a beautiful, frail, and gauzy girl who might be tremendously moving if you could sense her in relation to her man. But Mr. Welles has kept her an image of feminine anguish and nothing more. Her grief and the tragedy of her murder are purely theatrical displays. Robert Coote's Roderigo and the Cassio of Michael Lawrence are almost undistinguishable figures in a decidedly unclear plot.

There are flashes of brilliant suggestion in this tumbled, slurred, and helter-skelter film. But they add up to nothing substantial—just a little Shakespeare and a lot of Welles.


OTHELLO

Produced and directed by Orson Welles; adapted by Orson Welles, from the play by William Shakespeare; cinematographers, Anchise Brizzi, G. R. Aldo, George Fanto, Oberdan Troiani, and Alberto Fusi; edited by Jean Sacha, John Shepridge, Renzo Lucidi, and William Morton; music by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino; production designer, Alexander Trauner; released by United Artists. Black and white. Running time: 90 minutes.

___


March 1, 1992

ORSON WELLES OTHELLO MADE CHAOS INTO AN ART FORM

By Ben Yagoda


On Sept. 12, 1955, "Othello," a film produced and directed by Orson Welles and based on the Shakespearean tragedy, opened at the Paris Theater in New York. Reviewing it in The Times, Bosley Crowther wrote: "There are flashes of brilliant suggestion in this tumbled, slurred and helter-skelter film. But they add up to nothing substantial -- just a little Shakespeare and a lot of Welles."

Other critics concurred, as did the public. After a brief run, the distributor, United Artists, withdrew "Othello" from release.

On Friday, "Othello" finally gets another chance. It will open an engagement at the Cinema 2 in Manhattan, to be followed by a national release. "And thereby," as Shakespeare wrote in another play, "hangs a tale." It is the tale of a film made in fits and starts that more or less vanished and has now reappeared in refurbished form.

It begins in the late 1940's, when Welles went into exile from Hollywood. The half dozen years since his magnificent debut with "Citizen Kane" had proved that he and the studio system were fatally incompatible; since then, he had been in Europe, trying to finance his "Othello."

In the spring of 1949, cast, crew, equipment and the 34-year-old director assembled in Mogador on the Moroccan coast, which was to stand in for the Cyprus of the play. Only one thing was missing -- costumes; the supplier, it turned out, had not been paid. Welles scraped together enough money to hire a crew of local tailors to construct substitutes, but it would take them at least 10 days. What to do in the meantime?

Film a scene without costumes, of course. Welles decided to set the murder of Roderigo in a Turkish bathhouse and directed his crew to hurriedly transform a Mogador fish market. The actors wore only towels. As shot, the sequence is one of the film's most striking images.

And so it went. Welles would shoot until money ran out, then go off to on a fund-raising trip or acting job. (He created his unforgettable Harry Lime in "The Third Man" in the midst of making "Othello.") He would film whenever and wherever he could -- the locations included Venice, Rome, Paris and Perugia, Italy -- and daringly splice them together. In one scene, a closeup of Iago shot in Morocco cuts to a view of his back shot in somewhere in Europe. Amazingly, the cast and crew would always reassemble whenever Welles was ready for them.

"Sometimes we weren't paid," says Suzanne Cloutier, who played Desdemona to the Othello of Welles and the Iago of Micheal MacLiammoir. "But Orson Welles and Shakespeare -- it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

"Othello" was finally completed in 1952, in time for Welles to bring it to the Cannes International Film Festival. "Othello" was really a film without a country, so he jokingly entered it under the Moroccan flag. Only when the festival director came to his hotel room in a panic and asked if he knew the Moroccan national anthem did Welles learn that "Othello" was to win the Golden Palm award for best film.

But the Golden Palm meant little to a moviegoing public uninterested in black-and-white Shakespearean adaptations, and "Othello" did its quick disappearing act. Over the years, however, the film acquired a lofty reputation, as the first (and possibly most) purely cinematic version of Shakespeare ever. In his critical study "The Films of Orson Welles," Charles Higham called it a work "of perfect unity, balance and order" and concluded, "Welles never made a more coherent and beautiful film."

Cut to 1989. Welles had died in 1985, leaving his daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith the rights to just one film -- "Othello." Talking with Michael Dawson, a Chicago film maker who was preparing a documentary on Welles, she said she had heard that a European company was planning to rerelease the film. What, she wondered, could she do to stop them from doing so?

Mr. Dawson replied that because any distributor would have to make new prints, she could prevent a rerelease by keeping the negative and soundtrack under lock and key.

Easier said than done, replied Mrs. Welles-Smith. Her father had always told her that the "Othello" negative had burned in a hotel fire in Paris in the 1950's. But "lost" negatives had been found before, and Mr. Dawson decided to look for "Othello." He found pay dirt early. Because of the film's release date and the fact that it was made outside the studio system, Mr. Dawson reasoned that Welles had used nitrate stock. He then contacted the film laboratories that specialized in nitrate during the period when "Othello" was made, including the Los Angeles-based Deluxe Laboratories.

A Deluxe employee did some checking and soon reported back that the elements of "Othello" were in the Deluxe vaults in Ogdensburg, N.J. Mr. Dawson screened a duplicate negative, satisfying himself that it was in excellent condition. For three weeks he kept the extremely fragile and flammable original negative in its can, under his dining room table, until he could find a bank with a vault large enough to hold it. There it stayed, unopened, from September 1989 until December 1990, when he and Mrs. Welles-Smith found backers willing to bankroll a $500,000 restoration of "Othello." Two months later, Julian Schlossberg, the president of Castle Hill Productions, agreed to distribute the film.

The reason for the hefty price of restoration was the cost of improving the soundtrack. Because of Welles's determination to shoot as much of the film as possible outdoors, the actors' voices had to be dubbed afterward. But microphones were kept running during the filming --"Orson didn't want to miss the opportunity of wind," says George Fanto, the principal cinematographer -- creating further aural havoc. The dubbing was done "wild" -- meaning that the actors weren't able to see the picture as they spoke their lines -- so sometimes they put in an extra word or two, resulting in major synchronization problems.

"It was like a Japanese science-fiction movie," Mr. Dawson says. The sound editor Lee Dichter sat down at an editing table with the dialogue track and painstakingly cut it to fit the actors' lip movements.

The rest of the soundtrack was in poor shape, too, and to fix it, the restoration producers, Mr. Dawson and Arnie Saks, made a more daring decision. They would recreate both the sound effects (Welles's beloved wind) and the distinctive, lush musical score, transcribing the latter and rerecording it with contemporary musicians in digital StereoSurround.

The addition to the soundtrack of new elements might seem to violate Welles's original work. "It certainly expands the definition of restoration," says Margaret Byrne, director of the National Moving Image Database of the American Film Institute.

Michael Dawson offers no apologies. "A note is a note," he says. "People can say Welles wanted it out of sync, scratchy, impossible to hear. I say that's bunk."

[Glenn Anders]

Larry, maybe after all the garbage we've thrown at this Restoration of OTHELLO, perhaps we should get out the Fresh Air. That's quite a story you've brought us. Perhaps, after the box office failure of the original, and the difficulties (and luck) with doing the restoration, we should be somewhat thankful that OTHELLO is with us at all.

"What does it matter . . . ."

Like most Welles' films, we seem to several versions. I know that there are marked differences between the original which I saw in Cleveland in 1956, the restoration theatrical release I saw in San Francisco, and the Laserdisc I have. Each, I suppose, has its virtues, but Mr. Dawson may be right after all.

At least, until someone here gets to take an editing table to it.

Thank you for bring all of this to us.

Glenn

[L French]

Glenn:

I agree that it's better to have the restored OTHELLO than none at all, but why not make both versions available...in one DVD package, like WB did recently for STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.

Actually, that would been a nice idea to do with TOUCH OF EVIL as well - include the three different versions of the film on one DVD, which you could access via seamless branching, like James Cameron did for TERMINATOR 2.

Anyway, since Beatrice owns the rights to OTHELLO, she could easily make more money now by re-issuing a new DVD of OTHELLO as a two disc set, with both the original 1955 release, and the restored version, and maybe even include some extras like FILMING OTHELLO.

One strange thing in the NY Times story. Beatrice says Welles told her the negative was lost in a fire, but Welles had UA send all the material to him since he owned it and needed to use it in FILMING OTHELLO. I'm guessing, but I'd bet that there's several good copies of OTHELLO stored in the vaults next to all the other material that Oja Kodar controls.

[Glenn Anders]

Granted, Larry.

We don't seem to be getting the full story about OTHELLO, or several other of his films, for that matter.

Glenn