The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1951, Orson Welles) (Patreon)

75/100

Second viewing, last seen 2004. That was apparently the 1955 U.S. cut (see Anal-Retentive Title Corner, below), whereas this time I watched the '52 Cannes version; what with nearly 19 years separating my sole experience of each, I can't honestly claim to have clocked many differences, apart from 1952's spoken-word credits and corresponding absence of introductory narration. Certainly it's a visual astonishment in both variants—as with all of the best Shakespeare adaptations (Throne of Blood, Polanski's Macbeth, what I dimly recall of Kosintsev's Lear), poetry, performance and even narrative are subordinate to what cinema can uniquely accomplish. In this instance, that means one starkly forbidding monochrome composition after another, shot on stunning locations that cumulatively suggest a fever dream of medieval Europe. (Othello technically takes place during the Renaissance, but you wouldn't know it from this movie.) Of Shakespeare's best-known plays, this is the one that's easiest to radically condense while still mostly preserving its dramatic essence, and Welles, shooting piecemeal over several years whenever he could afford to, wasn't in a position to finesse psychological details in any case; jagged angles and looming close-ups do most of the heavy lifting, which makes it easier to forgive how frequently the actors' words are out of sync with their mouths (something that normally drives me bonkers). Micheál Mac Liammóir manages to make Iago suitably devious despite that hindrance, and while you have to wince at Welles' makeup for 91 minutes, he does at least possess the wounded gravity that role demands. (Desdemona and the rest have been trimmed down almost to negligibility, which works for this vision—literally—of the text, but doesn't allow for much in the way of evaluation.) Not sure someone who's unfamiliar with the play would understand how Othello dies, as that's a bit murky...but, then, people shouldn't have their first encounters with Shakespeare's masterpieces via film adaptations. Also, everyone including myself noted this at the time, but man oh man did Joel Coen just plain try to duplicate this aesthetic on soundstages (to striking yet somehow middling effect). Wish I'd written anything at all about Welles' Macbeth when I saw that in 2004—I liked it much less than this (rating: 51), but can't for the life of me remember why. More conventional, maybe? 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: As noted above, I can feel confident that I previously saw a print of the 1955 U.S. version, because I logged the film as The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. And only that version has a title card.

IMDb calls it simply Othello, noting the "original title" as The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, adding a colon instead of a comma, which is nonsensical (though admittedly more in keeping with the capital 'T' on the second "the"). That's also incorrect, since the actual original title, heard in the '52 cut but I believe also in the '51 version, is spoken by Welles as The Tragedy of Othello, minus the Moor of Venice bit. Criterion threw up its hands and just called it Othello, and I confess that the Blu-ray is filed under 'O' on my shelf. However, I'm sticking with the eight-word title on my logs, since it's the one Welles used when he was required to put it in writing.