Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/042092/04209936.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5KB | 113 lines

                                                                                REVIEW, Page 91

CINEMA

Superbly in Synch with Shakespeare


By RICHARD CORLISS

    TITLE: Othello
    DIRECTOR AND ADAPTER: Orson Welles

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Eccentric and wonderful, like its
creator, this 1952 work ought to trigger further restorations
of neglected Welles films


     The 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.

    How right he was. More than any other great director,
Welles suffered a career of fits and starts: he would start a
film, and then his niggly investors would give him fits. (The
ill feeling was mutual.) In Hollywood, Welles was effectively
banished by his early 30s. RKO Radio Pictures chopped The
Magnificent Ambersons, Welles' brilliant follow-up to Kane, by
a third (from 131 min. to 88), ordered a new ending shot by a
different director and even sent Ambersons out as the bottom
half of a double feature, in support of Mexican Spitfire Sees
a Ghost. Republic Pictures cut 20 min., which has since been
restored, from his Macbeth in 1948. And so, that year, Welles
set off on a European tour that would last nearly four decades.
His first stop was Italy, where he would begin Othello.

    Alas, Welles' first independent production gave him, for
his pains, a world of sighs. Backers kept promising funds, then
withdrawing them. Suzanne Cloutier, who played Desdemona, would
act as seductress to Welles' potential patrons. "He would dress
me in full costume," she recalls, "and we'd visit the King of
the Berbers. I'd lie on a couch, and we'd try to convince this
king to give us his army for extras."

    For three years and more, the star-director and his ragtag
band of actors hopscotched the Mediterranean, shooting a
sequence whenever a few Euro dollars turned up. Notes Welles
biographer Frank Brady: "A Tuscan stairway and a Moorish
battlement are in the film, both appearing as parts of a single
room. Roderigo kicks Cassio in Massaga and gets punched back in
Orgete, a thousand miles away."

    Othello shared the top prize at the 1952 Cannes Film
Festival, but another three years elapsed before it opened in
the U.S. Welles had a lingering fondness for the movie; in 1978
he directed a documentary about its making, Filming Othello. It
was his last picture. "He always talked about Othello with great
love," says his daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith. "Yet he was
under the impression that it was not a good movie. `If only I'd
had the money and not had to work under those conditions,' he
said, `I'd have made a much better movie.' "

    As it was, 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 to texture in vintage film-noir
style. Othello: the postwar man who feels betrayed by his wife.
Desdemona: the innocent woman brutalized by her suspicious
spouse.

    The film was brutalized too; in the U.S., at least, it was
rarely shown. Then in 1989 Intermission Productions, at the
request of Welles-Smith, launched a search for the film's
original elements. They turned up in a New Jersey warehouse, and
a restoration team set about polishing the visuals, re-creating
the score and synchronizing, to the extent possible, words with
lip movements. Restoration supervisor Phillip Schopper sees the
new Othello as a revival supplemented by modern technology: "We
did things that Welles wished he'd been able to do, but
couldn't."

    Othello should be just the beginning of a true
restoration. Welles made only 18 films, and at least five
might-be masterpieces remain to be seen. It's All True, a
three-part Technicolor film Welles shot in Brazil in 1942, ran
afoul of censors and studio executives, and the film was
aborted. In the late '60s Welles shot part of The Deep (Dead
Calm), with Lau rence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau. Around the same
time he completed a 40-min., stripped-down (no Portia) version
of The Merchant of Venice, but somebody stole the sound track.
The Other Side of the Wind, a made-in-Hollywood story starring
John Huston, reached the stage of a 2 1/2-hr. work print. But
in 1979 the film, partly financed by an Iranian company, was
seized by the Ayatullah Khomeini's Islamic revolution. Don
Quixote, which Welles shot in spare moments over three decades,
has been edited by director Jesus Franco and will be shown next
week at Seville's Expo '92.