When Orson Welles made his first feature movie, Citizen Kane, in 1941, he was working with a major studio (RKO, who gave the world King Kong), the top cinematographer in Hollywood, Gregg Tolland (The Long Voyage Home, The Best Years of Our Lives), the best sound crew in town and a subject (press baron William Randolph Hearst) guaranteed to raise eyebrows.
Welles didn't have beginners' luck with his later movies.
Nonetheless, the man who scared a nation of radio listeners into thinking that Martians were attacking America's eastern seaboard in 1938 managed to make gripping movies even when money was tight or nonexistent.
His adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice tied for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952 with Two Cents Worth of Hope.
That's doubly impressive considering that Welles' primary backer ran out of cash shortly before shooting began, forcing the filmmaker to pay for most of the film from his own pocket. Welles took roles in The Third Man and The Prince of Foxes to help finance the project. Now a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray includes the 1952 version and a 1955 cut of the film that eventually played in the U.S. and the U.K.
The new Blu-ray demonstrates how Welles managed to set up a nail-biting murder scene after costumes failed to arrive. He set the scene in a "Turkish bath" (actually a Moroccan fish market) and his actors wore towels to appear more vulnerable to unexpected swordplay. Curiously, thanks to misfortune, Welles' adaptation of a classic doesn't seem so, um, classical.
Shakespeare's delicate language accompanies a bone-chilling thriller. Real European and North African locations begin to look like M.C. Escher drawings as Othello falls deeper into madness.
If It Weren't For Bad Luck
According to Welles expert Joseph McBride, the filmmaker thrived when others would have "thrown in the towel." He has written the new collection of critical essays Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies, Orson Welles: Actor and Director and What Ever Happened to Orson Welles: A Portrait of an Independent Career.
He also collaborated with Welles, appearing in his unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, which is finally being completed by several of Welles' former proteges such as producer-director Frank Marshall (Alive) and actor-director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show).
"Many times things didn't work out as he planned, but he was able to change things at a moment's notice. It was really impressive," McBride says from Berkeley, Calif. "To give an example, on the first day of shooting in 1970, I was told we were going to Tijuana to shoot at the bullfights. I arrived that Sunday morning, and I was told we're not going to shoot in Tijuana because there was some kind of edict against bringing cameras across the border. So, we're just going to shoot it in Welles' house.
"An actor wouldn't show up, or he didn't have the right equipment, and he'd figure out a way to get around it. He was doing that all the time in Othello. In Filming Othello (included in the Criterion set), he shows somebody getting slapped, and it's filmed in locations that are 1,200 miles apart."
Welles and his collaborators managed to get a film together over a period of four years, even though his cast often wearied of his long periods of trying to get financing. Micheal MacLiammoir, the British-born Irish actor who played Othello's toxic manipulator Iago, later wrote an amusing account of the waiting titled Put Money in Thy Purse. Wherever he might be acting in Europe, from Venice to Morocco, Welles sneaked in any chance he could to make his own movie.
"Welles was acting in a Henry Hathaway movie called The Black Rose in Morocco. At night, he would get some of the crew people to go out into the desert to shoot Othello .... Henry Hathaway, the [Black Rose] director, he didn't like that at all," McBride says.
Playing With Fire
Hollywood studios didn't see Welles as a good commercial bet. His one hit as a director was The Stranger; The Lady From Shanghai and Macbeth, though now beloved, were flops that left him scrambling for patrons. Daryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox hired Welles for acting gigs and put up some money for Othello, but Welles left for Europe for more than financial reasons.
"It's quite clear to me that Welles was blacklisted," McBride says. "Hearst was a friend of (FBI director J. Edgar) Hoover. He clearly egged on Hoover to start a file on Welles. They investigated him and interviewed his colleagues and followed him around until 1956, which is interesting. He was never a Communist. He was never an ideologue. He didn't like the rigidity of the Communist Party, and they didn't trust him. They thought he was too individualistic, I guess."
Welles also loved dealing with subject matter that was forbidden under the Production Code of 1933. Despite being classical material, Shakespeare's play and Welles' movie deal with the doomed love between a white, Venetian heiress and a black, Moorish general. Welles had directed an influential stage production of Richard Wright's Native Son and an all-black production of Macbeth.
"Because it's a Shakespeare play and because it's so stylized, I guess it's easier to deal with," McBride says.
"Even though the Venice in the film is portrayed as relatively tolerant. The father, Barbantio (played by Welles' mentor Hilton Edwards), is very upset that his daughter (Desdemona) is marrying a black man. But the guys in the senate really admire him. They think he's a man of stature. He's kind of like Colin Powell is in our world today. He's kind of a military hero. He can do things other people can't do until he's brought down by jealousy to a base level by Iago."
McBride expresses reservations about Welles' turn as Othello because he thinks it's hard to believe the commanding Welles could be convincing as a dupe for Iago's mind games. Nonetheless, his more subtle makeup is easier to watch than the grotesque greasepaint Lawrence Olivier wore in a 1965 adaptation.
"[Olivier] really overdoes it. It's embarrassing," McBride says. "Welles had some very cruel remarks to make about Olivier. He was very jealous. He told me Olivier's Othello looked like Sammy Davis Jr.," McBride says.
Welles turned to another forbidden subject to explain why Iago is so hell bent on destroying Othello, Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) and others. For centuries, theatergoers and scholars have wondered why Iago hates his supervisor, Othello, so much. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lamented the "motiveless malignancy."
Through subtle, and not so subtle implicature Welles and MacLiammoir indicate that Iago is furious with Othello because he's emotionally and physically incapable of love. It partially explains why the villain rarely does his own killing but eggs others into carrying out his will. Watch closely how MacLiammoir uses canes and other objects to make up for Iago's shortcomings.
"That seems to fit the Welles world because it's a power issue: phallic power vs. phallic lack of power. Welles' films are almost always about a relationship between two men who are friends or more than friends. It's not quite homosexual, but there's a certain homoerotic quality in those relationships. One of the men always betrays the others," McBride says.
That said, in the 1955 version, Welles cut a line that spelled out more of Iago's hatred. "There's no real motive stated by Iago," McBride says. "It's more scary to think of a man whose motive you can't figure out."
Independence Day
The new Criterion Collection edition firmly demonstrates what McBride has been asserting for years: Welles was making worthwhile independent movies before the term was familiar to the filmgoing public.
"One of the points in my book is that people say that he was a failed studio filmmaker. It's better to look at him as an independent filmmaker before his time. He liked shooting in real locations. It's a quasi-documentary style of shooting," he says. "You could do it more easily today because the equipment is cheaper. He'd be shooting four or five films a year because you can do it faster and cheaper."
MovieStyle on 10/27/2017