Othello (1951, Orson Welles)

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations. I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting) stealing the movie in the last fifteen minutes. – Filming Othello (1978) Such a ponderous intro, it’s ten minutes before he gets into any details beyond the movie’s title, then it gets good as he shows scenes from the feature – photographed by Early Welles and re-edited in the fast Late Welles style. He quotes a critic speaking of the film’s “tortured compositions, grotesque shadows and insane distortions,” tells a hilarious story of winning a prize at Cannes with his “film without a country.”…