Othello (1951 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Orson Welles's Othello opens not with a battle or a wedding but with a funeral. Two bodies are carried in procession while Iago hangs in an iron cage above the crowd. It is a striking inversion of Shakespeare's play, which ends with those deaths rather than beginning with them. That decision tells you everything about how Welles approached the material: he was not making a filmed stage production. He was making a film on his own terms, at whatever cost.

  The cost turned out to be enormous. Not just in money, though the production bled Welles financially for years. The film was shot erratically across Morocco, Venice, Tuscany, Rome, and the Scalera Studios over three years. Funding collapsed on one of the first days of filming when the original Italian producer announced he was bankrupt. The shoot was halted at least three times. Costumes were impounded. Key roles were recast and entire scenes had to be redone. Welles funded stretches of production by taking acting jobs elsewhere, including a role in The Third Man in 1949.

  And yet the film won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. It went on to become one of the most contested artifacts in cinema history, not because of what Welles made, but because of what happened to it afterward. Three different versions have seen theatrical release. The battle over which version is the real one is still being fought.

• 2. The Production Ordeal

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  Shooting on Othello began in 1949. Within days, the project nearly died. The Italian producer who had agreed to finance the film declared bankruptcy, and Welles found himself on location with a cast, a crew, and no money. Rather than walk away, he began spending his own funds to keep filming.

  When his own reserves ran out, he left to act in other films, using his fees to replenish the production budget. This cycle repeated itself across three years. The shifting schedule created cascading logistical problems. Actors became unavailable. The role of Desdemona had to be recast, which meant whole scenes were shot again from scratch. The lack of costumes for one key scene forced a practical rewrite: the murder of Roderigo, originally conceived differently, was relocated to a Turkish bath because the production's costumes had been impounded and sourcing replacements would have caused yet another delay.

  One fight sequence illustrates the fragmentation of the shoot with particular clarity. It begins in Morocco and ends in Rome, filmed several months apart. The geography of the final cut is seamless; the production geography was anything but.

  Micheál Mac Liammóir, who played Iago, documented the entire ordeal in a book he titled Put Money in Thy Purse, borrowing the phrase from a line Iago delivers to Roderigo in the play itself. Mac Liammóir's account preserves the daily texture of a production held together largely by Welles's refusal to abandon it. A mink-lined coat that Welles had insisted upon for his role in the 1950 film The Black Rose vanished at the end of that shoot and turned up in Othello with the fur lining visible.

• 3. Three Versions, One Film

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  An Italian-language version of Othello premiered in Rome on the 29th of November 1951. That version was essentially a test run for what Welles considered his real statement: the English-language cut that premiered at Cannes on the 10th of May 1952. That version went into general release across Europe and, aside from some dubbing that was slightly out of sync, its soundtrack was largely intact. A print of it remains stored at the Paris Cinematheque.

  The American market received a different film entirely. United Artists, which distributed the picture in the United States, released a 93-minute cut on the 12th of September 1955 in New York City. The distributor required Welles to replace his spoken-word titles with written credits and to add a narration track spoken by Welles himself. Suzanne Cloutier's entire performance as Desdemona was redubbed by Gudrun Ure, who had played the same role opposite Welles in a 1951 stage production mounted to raise funds to finish the film. Paul Squitieri, in a 1993 doctoral study of the film's multiple versions, characterizes the American cut as a compromise and argues the European version reflects Welles's original intentions most closely.

  The third version arrived in 1992, when Beatrice Welles supervised a restoration. She spent over one million dollars on the project, improving the picture, resynchronizing the audio, adding sound effects, and completely rerecording the music in stereo. For a period it was the only version most audiences could find, because legal action by Beatrice Welles blocked the release of either version her father had personally supervised.

• 4. The Restoration Controversy

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  Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the most vocal critics of the 1992 restoration, leveled a series of specific charges at the project. He argued that the restoration team was unaware of the European cut's existence and built their work on the American cut, which was already farther from Welles's original vision. The restorers recut the order of entire scenes to make dialogue match the image. One scene was missing entirely from the theatrical release and had to be added back for the home video release. The Gregorian chanting in the opening scene, prominent in earlier versions, was absent from the cinema release and only restored for the DVD.

  The music drew the sharpest criticism. Angelo Francesco Lavagnino had composed the original score, and a complete copy survived in his papers. The restoration team chose not to consult those papers. Instead they transcribed the music by ear from the poor-quality audio of the print they were working from. Lavagnino's son argued that the resulting new score had diverged so far from his father's work that it could no longer be called the same piece. One telling detail: Welles had recorded the original score using 40 mandolins on a monaural track recorded with a single microphone. The new stereo version used three.

  Rosenbaum also took issue with statements made at the time of the restoration's release. Beatrice Welles described the film as a "lost film" that had been "never given a theatrical release." Rosenbaum and scholar Michael Anderegg both disputed that framing; Anderegg characterizes the film as simply seldom screened rather than lost. Rosenbaum extended the critique further, arguing that Beatrice Welles's legal suppression of her father's versions gave her a financial interest in keeping her own restoration in circulation, since she received royalties only on that version.

• 5. Legacy and Later Releases

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  In 2014, Carlotta Films U.S. released a 2K digital restoration of the 1992 version. It premiered in Dallas at the USA Film Festival that year and circulated through art-house venues. The New Yorker noted that the monaural soundtrack on this version was a significant improvement, describing it as far more appropriate for a low-budget, black-and-white film from 1952.

  The Criterion Collection finally made both Welles-supervised cuts available on the 26th of September 2017, releasing the European version and the 1955 American version together on Blu-ray and DVD. That release came with audio commentary from Peter Bogdanovich and Myron Meisel, interviews with Simon Callow, Joseph McBride, Francois Thomas, and Ayanna Thompson, and the 1951 short film Return to Glennascaul.

  Welles himself returned to the material in 1978 with a documentary called Filming Othello. He reedited clips from the film entirely for that project, so none of the original footage appears in the documentary in its original form. His voiceover accompanied every clip, meaning no part of the original Othello soundtrack was heard in Filming Othello at all. Welles's composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino went on to score his next two Shakespearean films as well: Chimes at Midnight in 1965, and The Merchant of Venice in 1969.