1951–55 Orson Welles Production

Directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles in the title role, this film, with its complex history and multiple releases in various versions, also featured Micheál MacLiammóir as Iago; Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona; Robert Coote as Roderigo; Hilton Edwards as Brabantio; Michael Laurence as Cassio; and Fay Compton as Emilia.

In an article from 1956 titled “Shakespeare Through the Camera’s Eye: III,” Alice Griffin argued that Welles in this production “attempts to use the setting symbolically, but he is excessively occupied with cinematic technique—odd angles of statuary, unusual shots of architecture, soaring seagulls, and a raging ocean, the latter to symbolize the troubled and raging emotions of Othello. The film’s chief fault,” Griffin thought, “is that there is no unity; it seems a chopped-up version of scenes from Othello. Yet this motion picture, which Welles titles an ‘adaptation from Shakespeare,’ is generally interesting” (237). According to Griffin, “Welles uses light and dark symbolically in his screen version, carrying out the contrast between Desdemona and Othello. The soliloquies are recited in close-up, with Welles’s face spotlighted in the darkness. These speeches, so simply done as far as cinema technique is concerned, are the most effective scenes in a motion picture which revels in unusual uses of the camera.” She added that “[i]n a text so ruthlessly cut and transposed, these soliloquies are among the film’s few examples of the true poetry and style of Shakespeare, and they make the viewer wish that Mr. Welles had seen fit to film Shakespeare’s scenario instead of his own. The other characters in the film,” she wrote, “are not too impressive: although Michael MacLiammoir is a fine actor, his Iago lacked substance; Suzanne Cloutier contributed little but beauty and frailty to Desdemona; but Fay Compton was quite effective as the earthy Emilia” (239).

In his pioneering 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (161–64), Roger Manvell praised this movie’s “visual flair” and “brilliant use of locations” and reported that it offered “no new or artificial interpretation” of the play, as Welles had earlier done with Macbeth. Manvell admired the opening scene, including its music and imagery (161); regretted that sometimes “the sound recording is so ill-balanced that the speech is often barely intelligible”; said this Desdemona “had little to offer but her looks”; but thought that Iago’s temptation scenes are effectively played. Noting an extensive use of dissolves to make transitions as well as skillful improvisation (162), Manvell considered the film “restless” and “difficult to enter into,” noting that often the “characters move rapidly” and finding too many shots “tilted upwards.” He considered the film best when its “restlessness is broken and a certain degree of concentration is allowed,” and although he thought the music sometimes excessive he considered the editing often skilled (163).

Jack Jorgens, in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film, called Welles’s Othello “one of the few Shakespeare films in which the images on the screen generate enough beauty, variety, and graphic power to stand comparison with Shakespeare’s poetic images,” adding that they “compensate for the inevitable loss of complexity and dramatic voltage accompanying heavy alterations in the text.” He praised the film’s “flamboyant cinematography,” its excellent composition and editing, and its stylistic combination of realism and expressionism but suggested that the film often “destroys the narrative continuity of the play,” although sometimes in ways appropriate to the fracturing of Othello’s world. Jorgens regretted the frequently “garbled and poorly synchronized sound” but praised the film’s “haunting music and marvellous aural collages,” adding that what it “lacks in acting, that is, subtle characterization and emotional range—it makes up in rich, thematically significant compositions. In short,” he asserted, “Welles’s Othello is an authentic flawed masterpiece” (175), adding that if its “grandeur, hyperbole, and simplicity are the Moor’s, its dizzying perspectives and camera movements, tortured compositions, grotesque shadows, and insane distortions are Iago’s, for he is the agent of chaos” (177). Offering detailed descriptions of particular scenes and effects, Jorgens admired the ways Welles used “setting to express theme as well as character,” stressed “symbolic geography” (179), and offered “visual equivalents for poetic images, as in the recurring opposition of dark and light” (182). Jorgens finally agreed with another commentator who had written that “Welles never made a more coherent and beautiful film; the lucid, dashing, vibrant style has seldom been so perfectly wedded to its subject” (190).

Anthony Davies, in his 1988 book Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, asserted that the “techniques of Welles’s Othello are ‘considerably more refined’ than those of his Macbeth” (100). He saw superficial similarities to Olivier’s Hamlet (103); praised the “camera’s [intelligent] selection and treatment of space” (105); noted “the dramatic opposition of light and darkness”; and observed that “[v]ariations of outdoor sunlight open and close the film” (108). Commenting that the “darkness of the film’s interior shots offers a great range of subtlety” and admiring the “ingenious use of mirrors and of occasional shifts from front-lighting to silhouette,” Davies also noted more obvious movement of the camera in this film than in Macbeth (111), asserting that such movement is used “to great effect from quite early in the film’s action” (112), as in “symmetrical camera movement to connect brief moments and so to give thematic force to montage” (113), with most movement “given to the character in whom the greatest degree of theatrical interest is invested, Iago” (115) in what Davies finally called a “formidably dense film” (118).

John Collick, in his 1989 book titled Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society, discussed the film’s use of “grotesque perspective”; the ways “coherent space is broken into a multi-faceted series of collages” reflecting Welles’s debt to Sergei “Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky”; and the ways the movie “interrogates and destroys any coherent and unified point of view, substituting a labyrinth of images” (95). Suggesting that here and in other films “Welles evokes the sense of a chaotic, absurdist and uncontrollable world,” Collick called the camera work in Othello “very stylized,” so that even “in the exterior shots, which offer the greatest potential depth, the lack of strong diagonals compress[es] space and volume into two dimensions” (96). He thought that “one of the most remarkable sources of Othello’s unrealistic and dream-like atmosphere is the quality of the soundtrack,” which seems “very poor,” especially in the bad dubbing, but whose very defects are effective, as when “disembodied voices and conversations that accompany the images are used to disrupt any sense of reality and to evoke the uncertain, shifting perspectives of a nightmarish Kafka novel” (97). According to Collick, “Ultimately Othello translates the social impotence of the intellectual and artists into an undefined sexual and psychological angst in the face of an absurd universe” (98).

Peter Donaldson’s 1990 volume Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors is an especially insightful book, full of detailed analysis and also brimming with many still photos from all the films Donaldson discusses. It offers very detailed discussions of individual scenes and motifs in Welles’s Othello, particularly emphasizing the importance of mirror imagery and the roles of mothers as well as the use of imagery of bars and the issues of American slavery. Adopting a psychological approach to the movie, Donaldson wrote that “Desdemona’s beauty, which seemed to hold the promise of a rich and reliable satisfaction, is experienced as cold and denying” (107), while the film in general, and relations between Othello and his world, might be explained using different psychological perspectives: “Erikson might speak of a failure of basic trust; Klein, of envy of the withholding breast; Lacan, Winnicott, or Kohut, different as they are in other ways, might speak of maternal mirroring; Mahler and her followers, of incomplete separation from the mother. Whatever the terms,” Donaldson suggested, “the issues are maternal and center not on guilt or conflict but on a basic insecurity in the unmirrored self” (107). Calling attention to “many barred or crossed images in the film” and suggesting that these “are closely related to the mirror motif” (112), Donaldson also suggested that “Othello’s murder of Desdemona manifests a violence already present in the social world of the film from the opening shots” (116). He thought that “Othello’s blackness does not count for much in Welles—at least not on the surface. He is played as very light-complexioned, not at all rude or exotic in speech or manner, and little emphasis is given to lines that evoke his strangeness or cultural alterity.” In fact, Donaldson suggested that “the film’s refusal of the text’s racial contrasts (which are often stark and vicious), though well-intentioned, is disabling” (118), a flaw in an otherwise compelling film. Summing up many of his opinions about this work, Donaldson wrote that “Orson Welles’s Othello offers a powerful and coherent interpretation of the play informed by a remarkably complex structure of visual imagery. This Othello is far more consistently bleak and despairing than is generally recognized, perhaps a good deal more than the play justifies,” and the “psychological affinities of the film are with theories that stress the importance of maternal ‘mirroring’ and the disastrous consequences of its failure” (121). According to Donaldson, “Society is a prison in Welles’s film because social life—like marriage—cannot be imagined except as a mirror of the self” (122).

Discussing the film in his 1991 book Still in Movement, Lorne Buchman asserted that “Welles’s presentation of Venice … reflects well the sense of order achieved—temporarily—in the first act of Shakespeare’s drama,” using the “Venetian world [to] serve as a harmonious complement to the [initial] nobility and stature of the hero.” In contrast, “Cyprus, with its jungles of arcades and pillars, its seamy underground, its narrow and winding streets, its stairways, its high and frightening cliffs and battlements, and its roaring ocean shore” is the world of Iago (126–27), whose ultimate grisly fate is foreshadowed at the very opening of the movie so that “the way the plot unravels takes precedence over the surprises of narrative” (127). According to Buchman, “[e]arly in the film the director shoots Othello in clear light, but as the film progresses we see him increasingly in shadow” as “[h]arsh, dissonant sounds eventually replace the regular and even sounds of the [film’s] first part” (129). Buchman noted that “Iago’s speeches are filled not only with many utterances of the word ‘time’ but with images of temporality as well,” adding that, “[c]uriously, Iago’s victims use this word and corresponding images with increased frequency as the villain gains control” (133). Noting the way Welles, on Cyprus, depicts “a wild and raucous celebration, whose disorder becomes an ideal environment for the manipulations of Iago” (139), Buchman also observed another significant use of sound later in the movie, so that “[w]hen Othello speaks his first words of revenge, a sudden boom of the crashing sea punctuates the wrath of his exclamation,” one of various ways that “Welles uses cinematic technique to emphasize a corresponding transition from order to chaos in the world outside” (142).

Commenting on Welles’s Othello in his 1992 book Shakespeare Observed (51–63), Samuel Crowl called this film Welles’s “most cinematically complex and baroque adaptation of Shakespeare” (54), adding that “one of the film’s great achievements is the development of camera styles to contrast Othello’s and Iago’s subjective psychological states” (54) and noting “a series of cage images” and “a startling use of chiaroscuro to frame … the racial issues” (55). Crowl praised “the care, organization, discipline and understanding [that Welles’s uses of his camera] reveal about … his cinematic intelligence” (57) and cited as just two examples “the film’s opening overhead shot of Othello’s face, created as if the camera shutter were gradually opening” and the “final overhead shot of Othello and Desdemona on their marriage-murder bed.” He thought that throughout the film “the key perspective of the camera is looking down, often peering into underground vaults and sewers” (58), adding that Welles “moves us from the top of the battlements and the triumphant reunion of Othello and Desdemona, to the very bottom of the Cypress world, where men slosh through a sewer-like environment, disturbing the general celebration [of their reunion] and, more importantly, bringing an abrupt end to Othello’s and Desdemona’s lovemaking” (59). Observing “Welles’s repeated use—in a wonderful variety of contexts—of barlike shadows to capture the way in which the Othello world closes in on itself and how the expanse of Othello’s vision gives way to the impasse of Iago’s” (61), Crowl concluded that “[b]y the end of the film the only light that remains is that reflected in the harbor’s water, a reflection which captures Iago’s suspended cage swinging over the mourners below” (63).

In an essay from 1994 titled “Filming Othello,” Amthony Davies noted that Yutkevich’s later film often echoes Welles’s (207); called Welles’s film darker and more complex; praised various effective shots (208); and celebrated the film as “unforgettable” (209).

Michael Anderegg, in his 1999 book Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, observed the variety of different versions that exist of the Welles Othello (98). Noting the “almost dizzying sequence of events” with which the movie opens, he commented that “Welles has [thus] robbed Iago of much of his expository function and in the process plunges the viewer far more directly and immediately than Shakespeare does into the narrative action,” adding that “we are forced to pay close attention to the primarily visual clues for the meaning of this verbal structure” because “Welles’s prologue radically alters the narrative structure of Shakespeare’s play” (102–3). Like many other analysts, he admired the film’s “manipulation of black and white, darkness and light”—appropriate to “a story primarily concerned with the relationship between a black man and a white woman”—while also observing “how freely [Welles] transforms much of Shakespeare’s verse and a good deal of his dramatic form into objects, symbols, and motifs, most notably the Cage, the Bed, the Mirror, the Pit, and the Maze” (106). On the other hand, at one point Anderegg helpfully summarized criticisms of the film alleging that “(1) Welles fails to capture the essence of Shakespeare s play; (2) the dialogue is difficult to understand; (3) the film is ‘technically gauche’ ([Eric] Bentley); (4) the performances are inadequate, especially Welles’s; (5) content is too often sacrificed to form; … [and] (6) humanity has been sacrificed to ‘art’” (113). Anderegg challenged the assumptions underlying such views, particularly those involving the sound track (114–15), finally arguing that “none of the issues listed, nor all of them taken together, justify a ‘restoration’ of Welles’s Othello” and suggesting that “[r]ather than lament the sound track, we might better attend to how Welles employs it” (116). He added that “we have no way of knowing that the version of Othello shown at the Cannes film festival in 1952 was regarded by Welles in any way as a final cut” (119) and cited this as one more reason to resist the temptation to concoct a revised, supposedly definitive restoration (119).

Deborah Cartmell, in her 2000 book Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, suggested that in responding to the Welles film, “[r]ather than feel Othello and Desdemona are mismatched because of the colour of their skin, it would be more appropriate to see the mismatch in terms of age, size and personal attractiveness.” She observed that “[p]hysical contact between the two is kept to the minimum, presumably to signal Desdemona’s sexual innocence” and thought that the “black-and-white film noir approach of Welles diminishes Othello’s blackness—Welles’s dark make-up is only just noticeable,” so that “the film is in keeping with the way the play was, on the whole, read” when the film was made—that is, “without much consideration of race, focusing instead, like Welles, on the individual” (72).

In her book from 2000 titled Framing Shakespeare on Film, Kathy Howlett saw, in Welles’s Othello, a “sense of fragmentation through the excessive use of point of view shots,” with scenes “broken up into shots from different perspectives, frequently offering the spectator a ‘narcissistic doubling’ of shot and reverse shot exchanges” and an “editing style” that “continually suggests to the viewer that he has missed something, has failed to glimpse all the action, much as Shakespeare’s play depicts Othello puzzling over events he too has missed” (52). Howlett not only suggested that the murderous “Turkish bath scene … frames the male body as spectacle” but also thought that “this scene is also haunted with sexual ambivalence and the threat of castration or feminization,” so that as Iago stabs Roderigo, the latter’s dead “body is literally fragmented by [Iago’s] sword thrusts through the floorboards, in a scene that illuminates the relationship between voyeuristic pleasures and the sadistic impulse” (63). Noting that Welles modelled his Venice to some degree on paintings by Carpaccio (63), Howlett discussed many similarities between Welles’s film and those paintings, especially The Martyrdom of the Pilgrims and Funeral of St. Ursula, arguing that the “circular structure of Welles’s film and Carpaccio’s narrative painting expresses the constant dialectic between stasis and perverse motion that is so central to Shakespeare’s play” (90).

Assessing the film in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (98–101), Daniel Rosenthal called it “a masterpiece”; praised “Welles’s genius for evoking moods through the stark contrasts of black-and-white photography”; and noted that “once Iago’s plot begins to take hold, darkness spreads into almost every frame.” He commented that “Othello’s black features are invariably concealed by shadows,” adding that “figures hurry down flooded passageways, or eavesdrop from behind pillars” and that “[s]ometimes the camera looks down on characters from a great height, then suddenly someone towers above us.” All these techniques, according to Rosenthal, “make for disorienting viewing—as though Welles wants our perspective to become as warped as Othello’s view of Desdemona” in “this extraordinary film” (99). Rosenthal considered it obvious that “the Othello-Iago relationship is the only one that really fascinated Welles,” with this Desdemona “as little more than a saintly, sacrificial victim, a woman of great beauty and scant personality” and other characters such as Emilia, Cassio, and Roderigo also depicted in ways that diminish their impact. Rosenthal surveyed the many negative reviews the film initially received and then its later positive revival after Welles’s death (100–101).

Douglas Brode, in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, agreed with earlier critics that in Welles’s Othello, “potent images so effectively take the place of words,” so that “Welles includes only the dialogue that is absolutely necessary for our understanding of the plot.” Mentioning the “mixed notices” the film initially received (155), Brode suggested that “[o]ne serious problem is the performance of MacLiammoir [as Iago] who lisps his way through the role,” looking like a “walking cadaver, dead in spirit, [but] still moving about.” Yet Brode cautioned that “Welles, not MacLiammoir, must be blamed for the fact that an audience cannot grasp why Othello would listen to such an obviously venomous person. We believe an intelligent Othello could be taken in by a man who appears honest, but only a fool would believe anything this reptilian Iago says” (158). Meanwhile, Stephen Buhler, in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema, was one of various critics who mentioned Welles’s command of imagery, such as images of “bars, pillars, gates, and slats” as well as “mirrors” (101).

Lois Potter, discussing Welles’s Othello in her 2002 book for the Shakespeare in Performance series (140–26) asserted that its “impression is largely … visual” but called it “hard to see as well as hear” as well as asserting that “the endlessly fascinating images of labyrinths, prison bars and water, though they may well tell the story of narcissism and bleakness that [Peter] Donaldson finds in them, provide visual beauty to counterpoint the claustrophobic reading of the text” (140–41). Potter found little focus on Emilia and mentioned that Welles considered Iago literally impotent (144).

In an essay from 2002 by James W. Stone titled “Black and White as Technique in Orson Welles’s Othello,” Stone wrote that “Orson Welles does much to strip Shakespeare’s play of its racial thematics. or at least to reduce racial difference to the fundamentally cinematic grid of black and white photography. The play of light and shadow achieves clarity, focus, and distinction without resorting to effects of high contrast. The editing is fast, at times dizzying. as one would expect from the director of Citizen Kane. But the quick cutting and splicing of the film, like the way it is lighted, serves to keep black and white separate.” Jones thought that a “firm geometry of vertical and horizontal axes reinforces the grid of black and white, though there is no fixed mapping of one color onto one axis of spatial orientation” (189). “Only in the credit sequence and in the impressionistic Venetian scenes,” Jones continued, “does Welles allow black and white to mingle, and then only in the register of an aesthetic effect of light, outside the context of race. Its cosmopolite waters and dissolving frame reflect Venice’s unmenacing urbanity. But Cyprus more accurately represents Welles’s vision of a disciplinary and repressive culture,” a culture “in which the camera captures its subjects framed in a cage, distorted in a mirror, or barred in shadow. The cinematic frame displaces the textual and characterological thematics of race” (190).

In his 2003 book Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies (134–38), Pascale Aebischer quoted Welles as saying that this Othello is “‘monumentally male and his story is monumentally a male tragedy,’” whereas Welles’s Desdemona, in Aebischer’s opinion, “is subject to voyeuristic inquiry and sadistic erasure, her part radically cut to accommodate a magnified Othello who remains heroic to the very end.” According to Aebischer, “With Welles’s status as both director and star unmistakably shaping the film’s conception of the central characters, Othello cannot but be a light-skinned man whose murder of his wife must seem somewhat justified” (134), so that even in the slapping scene “the camera adopts Othello’s sadistic/voyeuristic point of view to literally wipe Desdemona out of the frame” (135). Aebischer wrote that “Welles’s endorsement of the theatrical tradition that seeks to exonerate Othello in the last scene and give him a heroic death on which the play ends is obvious from the fact that he makes his Desdemona guilty of one last damning falsehood: she is only pretending to be asleep when Othello comes in to kill her” (137).

Nicholas Jones, in a 2005 essay titled “A Bogus Hero: Welles’s Othello and the Construction of Race,” suggested that Welles’s film “is deeply involved in and aware of questions of race, even though—or because—it problematizes the racial divide. In its difficulties, evasions, and erasures, Welles’s film articulates the gaps between the white actor and the black character, as well as the gaps between the black character and the white playwright, eventuating in a complex meditation on the insidious temptations of racial essentialism” (11).

In deliberately brief remarks on the film in his 2008 book Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (31–32, 153–55, 172–74), Samuel Crowl discussed the film’s genesis, its “stunning” use of black and white and of “sunlight and shadow” (31), its many “interesting devices, images, and landscapes” as well as effective sounds and “chiaroscuro” effects, and called it “demanding” for “novice” viewers (32).

In his 2008 work Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (176–96), Anthony Guneratne discussed such matters as the influence of Verdi’s operatic Otello (176); the ways the music of Welles’s film is influence by the music of Prokofiev (178); the two coronation scenes (189–90); and some reasons that this is Welles’s “most visually compelling contribution to cinema” (191). Arguing that Welles “tones down Othello, domesticating his demons into those that lurked in the psyche of many Renaissance courtiers” (such as jealousy [191]), Guneratne said that this Othello’s “psyche has been colonized” (192); that the film succeeds by “integrating virtuoso camerawork and technical finesse into a taut narrative” (193); and that the mirror imagery is important for numerous reasons (193–96). He recounted Welles’s own explanation of his use of imagery (193–94); compared the film’s mirror imagery to that of the artist Jan van Eyck (193–94); said the mirrors imply Othello’s “alienation and self-doubt” (194); and wrote that Welles sows “doubt about Cassio” and Desdemona in early scenes (195) and that mirrors are used again in later scenes (195–96). Guneratne concluded by commenting on the “encircling and enveloping blackness of the film,” especially in the bedchamber episode (196).

Anthony Davies, in an essay from 2011 titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” argued that “Welles’s film is essentially about Othello and Iago, with Desdemona there because her fate depends on what Iago manipulates Othello into believing about her. The less prominent characters including Brabantio are ill-served by Welles’s cinematic pace and are dismissed with unsubtle haste. They speak their lines and inhabit their roles with no time in which to establish memorable individuality.” Davies thought that the “restrained acting style alienates one from even the major characters, for Welles sets out to articulate the tragic fall of Othello through dramatic visual effects of light and shadow on faces, on stone fortress walls, in floor-flooded dark labyrinths, stairs leading up into the light from the sky, and down into sombre unlocalised interiors. What gives the film its acknowledged stature,” he wrote, “is Welles’s cinematic language, developing particular image compositions in the frame and associating these with the distinctive ways in which Othello and Iago respond to the world they live in” (13).

Discussing the Welles Othello in a 2013 book titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (24–34) edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and others, Marguerite H. Rippy called this film a “much freer, and therefore more cinematic, adaptation” than Welles’s earlier Macbeth (25); said the protagonist is “more recognizably Welles than Othello”; commented that “[f]ar from disappearing into his roles” Welles uses his Shakespeare films “to highlight himself as an actor and creator” (26); and reported that Welles was able to complete Othello, which took several years, “only by embracing aggressive editing” (27). Asserting that “the jarring quality of Welles’ dubbed voice for Roderigo (Robert Coote) can disorient the viewer” but that “it also creates an essential connection between the two characters,” Rippy referred to the film’s “pastiche effect,” called the plot “an innovative, if disjointed, narrative” (28); said that the occasional inclusion of Roderigo’s small white dog sometimes gives the movie “a burlesque feel”; and pointed to Welles’s Sergei-Einsteinian “expressionist use of image and montage” (29). Noting the “interplay of light and dark, and black and white” and debts to “the film noir tradition,” Rippy thought that “Welles’ ‘bronze’ Othello forms a contrast with the darkness that surrounds him” (34) and concluded that the film’s “overall effect is to deconstruct Shakespeare’s text into an experimental, avant-garde cinema rather than to adapt it to audience expectations” (34).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (14–18), responded to the Welles production by criticizing the way Emilia is introduced (14); objecting to how many of Desdemona’s lines are cut; praising the clarity of the speaking, especially by the actor playing Iago; admiring the setting and photography; commending Welles for sticking closely to the design of Shakespeare’s plot and for including the opening wordless episode; but regretting that Welles rushed the first three scenes (15). Cochran liked the way Welles performs and films Othello’s speech before the Venetian Court; thought that the voices of Desdemona, the Herald, and Bianca may have been dubbed; found both strengths and weaknesses in the ways of Othello’s arrival in Cyprus is filmed; and noted that Montano is not stabbed in the fight, thus making Cassio’s punishment seem excessive (16). Finally, he admired the temptation scene (17–18) and noted that many scenes are shot with one character higher than another (18).

In an essay from 2015 titled “‘Black’ Spaces: Othello and the Cinematic Language of Othering,” Sarah Jilani wrote of Welles’s film that it “may seem obvious that the juxtaposition of light/dark imagery would be inevitable, and thus easily dismissed, in a film shot in black and white, but Welles goes beyond the obvious by making this juxtaposition neither simplistic nor accidental in Othello. The visual vocabulary of light and dark follows the characters, the storyline, the settings of Venice and Cyprus, and even the emotional nuances of Shakespeare’s text” (106).

Sébastien Lefait, in another article from 2015 (“Othello Retold: Orson Welles’s Filming Othello”), mainly discussed a later film by Welles about the 1952 production, but it did comment briefly on that production itself. It suggested Welles’s various contributions to the film, remarking, for instance, that “the editing and camera angles exalt the discrepant nature of the shooting location’s geography. As a result, Iago seems constantly assisted by the director in his schemes. This impression,” according to Lefait, “prevails in the many scenes that exploit depth of field to make characters emerge from the background into hearing range. This association between Iago and the director, which is obtained by emphasizing the similarity of their directing techniques, follows an ascending pattern throughout the movie” (67).

Commenting on the film in passing in his 2016 book Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation of 100 Years of Adaptations, Peter E. S. Babiak observed that Welles’s Cypress is presented as a “virtually impenetrable maze” (63) and suggested that this effect is similar to the one used in a 1949 film by Roberto Rossellini (63).

Robert C. Evans, in a 2017 essay titled “Killing Desdemona: Possible Feminist Responses to the Death Scene in Shakespeare’s Othello,” wrote that “Welles was at the peak of his skill here, as both an actor and a director. The smothering of Desdemona is something that, once seen, is impossible to forget—especially because her face is visible beneath the pillow. Suzanne Cloutier’s performance seems, for the most part, surprisingly but effectively restrained; when she does briefly break into passion from time to time, the passion is emphasized by her general calm.” According to Evans, “She meets her death with courage, and … Cloutier seems less simply an innocent victim than a mature, levelheaded woman who knows she has been falsely accused and who is not taken completely by surprise when Othello announces his intent to kill her” (103).

1995 Yutkevich Production

This 1955 Russian adaptation, directed by Sergei Yutkevich, starred Sergei Bondarchuk as Othello; Andrei Popov as Iago; Irina Skobtseva as Desdemona; Vladimir Soshalsky as Cassio; Yevgeny Vesnik as Roderigo; Antonina Maksimova as Emilia; Yevgeny Teterin as Brabantio; Mikhail Troyanovsky as Duke of Venice; Aleksei Kelberer as Montano; Nikolai Briling as Lodovico; and Leila Ashrafova as Bianca.

Commenting on the film in his 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (72–77), Roger Manvell quoted Yutkevich’s views of the differences between his Othello and Welles’s, with Welles beginning with death and Yutkevich beginning with life. Manvell discussed such matters as the film’s use of Sovcolor (which is “especially sensitive to half-lights,” as at dusk and dawn); the way the film is “romanticized and highly pictorialized” (73); the specifics of locales and costumes (74); and the ways shots are often “elaborately composed” and involve “width of screen,” up-tilted angles, and many traveling shots (74). Noting that the film’s romanticism is often juxtaposed with “close-ups of the contorted face of Iago” (74), Manvell also explored the use of “panoramic scenic shots”; the way music often enhances “strong, emotional climaxes” (75); the details of individual scenes (75–76); and some uses of “huge close-ups” (76). He provided much commentary on imagery; stressed the importance of the theme of “misplaced trust” (76); quoted Yutkevich about the impact of that theme on Othello, especially when Iago’s deceit is revealed; suggested that this film’s Othello is better at conveying Othello’s nobility than his ferocity; and argued that therefore Othello’s eventual “sudden expression of violence seems somehow out of character” (77).

In an essay from 1994 titled “Filming Othello,” Anthony Davies noticed this version’s perhaps excessive emphasis on “blue skies, open sea and spaciousness” (201); found the contrast between outside and inside shots perhaps intentionally ironic; and commented on the opening emphasis on a spinning globe and then, later, on the moment of Othello’s and Desdemona’s reunion at Cypress (202). He noticed that Roderigo is often associated with “stone recesses” (203); suggested that the stone of the fortress suggests “power, decisiveness and certainty”; and said that barren, rocky backgrounds are often stressed (204). Davies commented on the episode in which Iago undermines Othello’s trust in Desdemona; further discussed the film’s storm imagery (206); and once more commented on Yutkevich’s use of landscapes (207).

In his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen, Daniel Rosenthal called this film an unsurpassed “spectacular screen treatment” of the play; stressed its emphasis on “[a]ction, spectacle and music”; said that these traits “take precedence over language”; and reported that Yutkevich used “a heavily edited version of Pasternak’s Russian translation.” Rosenthal felt that the film’s “colourful, holiday brochure beauty contrasts superbly with the darkness of the plot”; wrote that “Bondarchuk’s bombastic technique sets Othello up as a hero of mythic proportions” but “gives no hint of the man’s inner life”; called Andrei Popov “a handsome Iago who seems oddly roguish, rather than evil”; and saw this film’s Desdemona as a “one-dimensional victim.”

According to Rosenthal, Yutkevich in the murder scene “replaces tragedy with melodramatic horror” and generally “opts for broad effects.” He concluded that, “Without ever moving you as the play should, this Othello is constantly impressive” and won Yutkevich a major award (102).

Discussing the Yutkevich Othello in his 2001 book Shakespeare in the Movies, Douglas Brode noted its “grand scale”; its use of “lush Sovcolor”; and one prominent critic’s description of it as “a most beautiful, colorful, and motion-filled version.” Reporting that Yutkevich, as a filmmaker, generally “emphasized the relationship of film to graphic rather than theatrical arts,” Brode thought that in this adaptation “the acting seems overdone and is less impressive than the magnificent tableaus” (159), noting that “Yutkevich himself insisted that his version was not an alternative to Welles’s but its polar opposite.” Brode felt that Yutkevich, like Shakespeare himself, emphasizes “the free will of characters who determine their own fates rather than any sense of predestination” and noted the extensive use of “traveling and tracking shots” (160) in a movie that presented “the story baldly” as a contrast between “pure good and absolute evil,” with a suggestion that Iago might “be motivated by lust for Desdemona” (161).

In this 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema (19–25), Stephen Buhler praised Yutkevich’s “mastery of individual styles and his skillfully abrupt shifts from one to the other”; noted his “often aggressive cuts, his dramatic changes in camera angle and point of view, and his foregrounding of genre conventions in film”; and reported the odd but inevitable “survival of the original Russian for the songs” in the otherwise-dubbed English version (24).

Lois Potter, in her fine 2002 book on Othello in performance (100–103), called the Yutkevich film “undoubtedly beautiful”; said it “presents the Russian concept of the optimistic tragedy”; thought that it “gives Desdemona an unusual degree of interiority” (101); and noted the use of symbolism, such as one scene in which Othello is placed near enmeshing nets and Iago near blazing fire (101). Potter reported that, after this Othello murders his wife, “when he turns round, we see that his hair has turned grey”; regretted that the “dubbed text, sometimes rewritten in a feeble attempt to improve the lip-synchronization, is not only awful in itself but creates some weirdly comic effects” (as in the retention of songs sung in Russian); and noted some echoes of this film in the later Othello film directed by Oliver Parker (103).

In an essay from 2011 titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” Anthony Davies wrote that “Yutkevich’s film does not dissect the complex relationship of Othello with the Venetians. Rather it presents with impressive cinematography the fall from nobility of this Othello who had survived perilous ordeals, who had once stood proud and assisted with the defence of Venice’s prosperity, who had captivated the imagination of the Venetian senate and who had glowed in the vision that Desdemona held of him” (15).

Peter Cochran, discussing the Yutkevich production in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (263–65), admired the color; said Desdemona looks a bit too old; noted that one of Iago’s soliloquies is trimmed (263); described various scenes (263–64); praised the “skilfull photography”; but found the music sometimes overdone, especially when Desdemona is murdered (265).

In a 2017 essay titled “Killing Desdemona: Possible Feminist Responses to the Death Scene in Shakespeare’s Othello,” Robert C. Evans wrote that if “Skobtseva’s performance as Desdemona can seem, at first, far too passive to be credible, her reaction to her impending death is stunningly passionate. She does not try to resist Othello, but then none of the films discussed so far had featured a Desdemona who truly or even halfway successfully tried to fight back. Such presentations of Desdemona,” Evans continued, “would only come later, after feminism had begun to have a broad, deep cultural impact in the 1960s and 1970s. Skobtseva’s final embrace of Othello, just before he kills her, helps emphasize Desdemona’s deep compassion, and Skobtseva’s terror just before she dies is hauntingly memorable. Unlike Welles,” Evans reported, “who lingered over the details of the killing and showed Desdemona’s face being slowly smothered, Yutkevich abruptly and quite literally blurs the details of the murder, not allowing viewers to see it directly, or at least for any length of time. Both directorial decisions, it can be argued, are effective in their own ways. In Welles’s version, we see, almost longer than we can bear, Desdemona’s actual suffering. In Yutkevich’s version, the suffering is only implied” (105–6).

1965 Stuart Burge Production

This adaptation, directed by Stuart Burge and based on an earlier theatrical presentation, starred Laurence Olivier as Othello; Maggie Smith as Desdemona; Joyce Redman as Emilia; Frank Finlay as Iago; Derek Jacobi as Cassio; Robert Lang as Roderigo; Kenneth Mackintosh as Lodovico; Anthony Nicholls as Brabantio; Sheila Reid as Bianca; and Edward Hardwicke as Montano.

In a 1966 essay titled “Shakespeare through the Camera’s Eye: IV,” Alice V. Griffin wrote that “[a]s he did on the stage, Olivier, both in characterization and makeup, stressed the blackness of Othello, the exotic alien surrounded by respectful but potentially hostile whites. These he treats in the earlier scenes with an exaggerated courtesy and condescension which at times hints of contempt. Stressing the superstition … as well as the superiority, Olivier, with the tremendous vitality he injects into every role, created not only a credible but a gripping Othello.” According to Griffin, “[i]n delineating the change from the self-assured general to the tormented primitive who destroys the one he loves most, Olivier on screen is a consummate master of passion, and of the control of that passion.” Although Othello was emphasized in the stage play, and “although the characterization remained the same in the film, the camera, through the use of close-up, elevated Iago back to his usual co-starring position. As all of his soliloquies were in close-up, Iago seemed to dominate the screen at least half the time, and even though Mr. Finlay gave a most effective interpretation of the part—cold, realistic, unsympathetic—there was too much of a sameness about all these close-ups of one character.” Griffin reported that “[b]y about the tenth such appearance of Iago, at least one high-school audience, rapt and attentive throughout the rest of the film, broke into laughter.” Griffin felt that “Maggie Smith seemed a bit too strong in the more intimate medium. On the other hand, Derek Jacobi’s Cassio was too negative. Robert Lang was exactly right as Roderigo, giving to this character a rare intensity and depth. Joyce Redman was incisive as Emilia, and Anthony Nicholls a credible Brabantio” (384).

In his 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (117–19), Roger Manvell, noting the contemporary fame of this production and the fact that a book was immediately written about it (117), reported that it was simultaneously filmed by three cameras (117–18); called is color “not very pleasing”; disliked the sense of being so close to the actors; but thought this effect worked well for Iago. Quoting Olivier’s own comments about his role and the dangers of being too loud too often (118–19), Manvell found the project not entirely successful but was nonetheless glad it was undertaken since it preserved on film an important stage production.

James E. Fisher, in a 1973 essay titled “Olivier and the Realistic Othello,” wrote that at “first blush, the social pretentiousness of Jacobi’s Cassio and the sexual perversity of Finlay’s Iago would seem to have been intended to serve as nonheroic complements to Olivier’s realistic portrayal of Othello. Yet, upon reconsideration, they take on rather more significance than that. Instead of pulling Olivier’s Moor down to their own level of banality, the characterizations selflessly developed by both actors ultimately serve by contrast to throw the scale of the central portrait into imposing relief.” According to Fisher, “The worldly, petty qualities of these two main supporting characterizations sustain the counter-impression that Olivier’s Othello lives on a more lofty, more intense, more imaginative plane than ever the men of Florence and Venice could hope to do. Although the realistic reading of the play deprives Iago of the metaphysical stature visited upon him by the romantic approach to the play, it does not in this film at least reduce all of the persons of the play to the sum of genes, glands, and manners. Instead,” Fisher continued, “a remarkable achievement of the film is by the indirection of realism to have re-established on new terms an idealistic dimension of the central character. In the total interpretation, Othello’s outsize narcissism becomes a metaphor for the aspirant soul of man” (331).

Writing in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film, Jack Jorgens noted “the meticulous naturalistic details of [Olivier’s] performance”; mentioned its “realist texture”; praised the actors’ “supple, varied movements, wide-ranging, fluid speeches, pregnant silences, and physical interactions”; and commented again on a pervasive realism “despite Olivier’s moments of theatrical bravura.” Admiring “the downright un-American articulateness” of Olivier’s speaking, Jorgens reported that “Iago’s gestures are restrained, his costume nondescript, his diction clipped, his speech conversational, staccato, [and] improvisatory. The most intense close-ups,” he continued, “are reserved for him, and despite his direct address to the camera-audience, his acting is often close to conventional film acting. Othello, in contrast, is always larger than life, even in his quieter scenes, and in the big scenes Olivier reaches for a grand, breathtaking presence lost to audiences since the nineteenth century.” Jorgens continued: “His costumes and gestures arc flamboyant, his speeches lyrical and beautifully finished, and despite a West Indian veneer and notes of domestic playfulness and tenderness, the character’s performance (not merely Olivier’s) reeks of the magnificence of the stage.” Jorgens wrote that eventually Iago’s “dry, mundane, ‘modern’ style [of speaking] triumphs over Othello’s archaic, grand, heroic one,” so that “Iago shrinks the epic figure to human size,” while “Othello’s [ultimate] recovery in turn is measured in terms of his regaining a humbler, more mature version of his original style.” Asserting that Finlay’s Iago “blends modern cynicism with a sneering humor which is sometimes entertaining, sometimes merely sick,” Jorgens added that Iago’s “bland surface is broken by perverted lyricism, a need to spread his own disease like a rabid dog” in a “remarkably well-rounded portrait” of a man whose “hatred has many facets” and who also exhibits a “fathomless self-hatred and longing to be punished.” Finally, though, Jorgens felt that although “Burge could have made a great film, he only made a good one. Too often the camera is in the wrong place, the editing thoughtless, the lighting and makeup shoddy,” but Jorgens was glad that so “fine performances” were given a chance to survive (206).

Anthony Davies, in a 1994 essay titled “Filming Othello” (196–201), compared and contrasted the film with the stage production (196–98); found the film sometimes unsatisfying and restricted (198–99); considered this film in some ways less successful than the 1988 film directed by Janet Suzman; but did admire certain scenes, such as the one in which Othello strikes Desdemona and the one in which Iago decides on his evil plan (200). Davies did, moreover, praise some effective camera work (201).

Kenneth Rothwell, in his 1999 History of Shakespeare on Screen, wrote of the Burge production that “Olivier’s innate dignity transcends any attempts to make him look ‘word-spinning’ and ‘arrogant’” and that “Finlay’s insinuating lower-class accent endows him with an animal cunning more sinister than Machiavellian intrigue.” Calling the filming “hasty” but noting “multiple reaction shots and analytical close-ups” as well as “cutaways from one character to another that would be impossible on stage,” Rothwell thought that “Frank Finlay’s rugged ‘honest NCO’ profile [of Iago] benefits the most,” especially in “Othello’s Faustian ‘Now art thou my lieutenant,’ and Iago’s fervid ‘I am your own forever,’” lines that Rothwell called “the most ‘cinematic’ shot in [a] film” full of “striking performances” (68).

Deborah Cartmell, in her book from 2000 titled Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, was especially interested in this production’s treatment of race. She considered it extraordinary that Burge “leaves in the moment … when Othello’s make-up comes off over Desdemona’s face” and thought it unfortunate that on video “it is often difficult to see Olivier’s Othello as his blackness blends in with the background,” so that “at times, only his rolling eyes are visible” (73). According to Cartmell, Olivier plays a demeaning version of a black man, and his “frequent laughs at himself and his self-satisfied airs suggest he is not capable of the seriousness of his white associates” (74), opening the film to accusations of racism.

In his 2000 book titled Shakespeare on Screen, Daniel Rosenthal noted that Olivier had trained for six months to develop this Othello’s deep voice; that his speeches sometimes have a “haunting, West Indian lilt”; but that when consumed by jealousy he “roars and howls like a wild animal” in “a uniquely uninhibited portrayal of male hysteria.” Calling Finlay’s Iago “excessively restrained,” Rosenthal praised Smith for giving this Desdemona “great spontaneity” and this Emilia for seeming “affectingly desperate to win back her husband’s affections.” Terming this production an example of “filmed theatre,” Rosenthal wrote that the “static camerawork obliged the cast to move into view as they would on stage. In short, there is nothing to distract us from the fine acting (all four principals were nominated for Oscars) and the poetry” (103).

Douglas Brode, in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, commented on Burge’s many close-ups but noted that when “Othello falls into his most severe fit, Burge cuts to a striking crane shot, visually conveying the hero’s disorientation.” But Brode felt that as “the only such moment in the film … it draws attention to itself”; he suggested that “Burge would have done better to shoot the entire picture imaginatively or excise his one instance of improvisation so it would not serve as a foil and remind viewers of how noncinematic the rest of his film happens to be” (166).

In 2002, Stephen Buhler’s Shakespeare in the Cinema (39–41) commented that Finlay’s Iago “doesn’t always face us in soliloquy, but when he does it’s unnerving,” adding that “[d]irector of photography Geoffrey Unsworth shoots him in medium to extreme closeup from a low angle” so that “he always looks down at us” (40). Reporting that for “many viewers, [Olivier’s] Othello has bearing but not always dignity,” Buhler described how Olivier “trained physically for the performance in order to enhance the athletic grace and power of his character” so that his “sheer presence announces that Othello’s powers are desperately needed by a somewhat effete Venice.” But Buhler felt that at times “Olivier comes dangerously close to assuming racist stereotypes—suggesting parallels, for example, with 1960s black athletes” and noting that he “was criticized at the time (as well as subsequently) for doing so.” But Buhler admired in this performance not only an “operatic grandeur of a sort rarely seen on later stages but also a disarming self-referentiality in the performance. Olivier presents himself, as well as Othello, as a foolishly vain individual, easily led, powerfully trusting in appearances, indeed in makeup” (41).

Discussing the Burge film in her 2002 survey of other performances of Othello (146–53), Lois Potter wrote that “Olivier on film suffers from the absence of the aura that always accompanied him in the theatre” but suggested that “the contrast between the two acting styles [of Olivier and Finlay] becomes part of an exploration of ‘otherness’ that moves from Othello to include a re-examination of every major character.” She praised the “all-round excellence of the cast and the production,” saying they “offer a radically new reading” of the play (one influenced by the critic F.R. Leavis [148]) and noting the underlying assumption, in this production, that “Iago had been impotent for years, though no reviewer seems to have realized this.” Writing that “Maggie Smith, suppressing her famous comic skills, plays a mature Desdemona whose gentle graciousness and good breeding are finally shown to be limitations in a situation so far beyond her experience” (150), Potter also suggested that Burge’s actors were “attempting something extremely difficult, showing Iago’s success to be largely a result of his hitting on words that trigger already existing feelings in Othello” (151). She suggested that Finlay belongs, “like [Welles’s MacLiammoir], to a new tradition of subdued, ordinary Iagos” while also remarking that audiences admired Olivier’s “impersonation” of Othello without being particularly moved by it (152). Potter observed that this performance was undertaken at a time when it was still widely assumed that Othello could be played by a white man, but that this assumption was quickly being abandoned by the late 1960s (153).

Maurice Hindle, in his 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film suggested that “if we keep in mind that what we are seeing is a record of Olivier’s highly demonstrative style of acting put on for the entertainment of a large theatre audience, then it is possible to become highly engrossed” by his “sometimes overpowering” performance here, which is sometimes “too expansive and melodramatic for a movie-viewer” (71).

In his 2011 essay titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” Anthony Davies wrote that “Burge’s film is, as it was intended to be, the record of Olivier’s performance and there are only fleeting hints of how the Venetians accept Othello. Yet the film is all we have, and its capturing of Olivier’s Othello as an ‘extravagant stranger’ is magnetic.” Davies continued: “The intense blackness of his skin, which contrasts with the whiteness of his teeth and eyes, the immense versatility and range of his voice, the piercing gaze which he directs with a natural authority, the contrast of quick and slow physical reactions all give his personality a stature quite distinct from those around him. The range, too, of his externalised emotions puts him at a far remove from the convention-bound traditions of the Venetians or the remoteness of the Cypriots” (17).

Writing in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (266–69), Peter Cochran called this production “riveting”; praised the actors’ delivery, especially Olivier’s; found Othello’s make-up and behavior a bit overdone (267); said the idea for this Othello was influenced by the critic F.R. Leavis (268); and admired the production for being well filmed and well performed (269).

Peter Holland, in his 2015 essay titled “Rethinking Blackness: The Case of Olivier’s Othello,” noted that “Olivier’s is a performance that no longer seems to attract critical interest outside of work on Othello’s stage history and not much even then. Studies of Shakespeare on film,” he continued, “simply ignore it or have forgotten about it. Its moment seems to have passed and ‘the greatest Othello ever’ is apparently of no interest to those of us working in Shakespeare film studies and barely even to those working on the history of Othello in performance. Something is wrong in that,” Holland thought, “something that suggests a revisiting is required” (64). He admitted that one problem with the movie version of Olivier’s performance “is that the frequent failure of colour reconciliation in the film means that Olivier’s make-up blackness keeps changing colour, not least on different days of filming, so that the colour is marked by a new difference, an internal inconsistency that moves from shades of mahogany to an ebony with a blue tinge that is no skin colour known to humanity. And then there is that wig, of course” (70). But in general Holland made a case for the performance and for the movie, writing that the film’s “offensiveness is, then, part of its point, its magnificence as a statement of record of a white conception of blackness. Not to find it offensive is to mistake its achievement. To remain unsure whether the offence is contained within the structures of an intention that is not racist is central to the demands it makes of us. Its success lies precisely in our not knowing any longer quite what to make of it” (76).

In a 2017 essay titled “Killing Desdemona: Possible Feminist Responses to the Death Scene in Shakespeare’s Othello,” Robert Evans wrote that “Burge had the advantage, over previous and later filmmakers, of being able to film almost the entire play, with very few cuts. Thus, his is the first Othello discussed so far in which we see Desdemona momentarily revive. She lifts her arms slowly upward from the elbows as Emilia screams. As Emilia stares into her face and urges her to speak,” Evans continued, “Desdemona caresses Emilia’s hands—a striking contrast from her earlier efforts to use those hands to push Othello away. After Desdemona speaks gently to Emilia and caresses her servant’s shoulder, she finally does die as Emilia painfully weeps. These last few moments of Desdemona’s life, not presented in the three earlier films, only enhance our sense of the beauty and dignity of her character. The Burge film,” according to Evans, “presents a Desdemona who is rational when accused, willing to try to resist being murdered, and forgiving just before she actually dies. All in all, and especially because the brief ‘revival’ is actually filmed, she seems the least merely victimized Desdemona of the ones studied so far” (108).

1980 Liz White Production

Produced and directed by Liz White, this difficult-to-find adaptation starred Yaphet Kotto as Othello; Benjamin Ashburn as Montano; Olive Bowles as Emilia; Louis Chisholm, Jr. as Cassio; Audrey Branker as Desdemona; Richard Dixon as Iago; Douglas Gray as Roderigo; and Liz White as Bianca.

Peter Donaldson, in his 1990 book Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (an especially insightful book full of detailed analysis and also brimming with many still photos from all the films discussed) wrote that White’s production, “never commercially released,” was “entirely the work of black people—from director, cinematographer, and cast to technical crew” (127). He observed that in this film “Othello’s monstrous revenge is not avoided or euphemized, but his grace and nobility survive his tragic error, as does his capacity for remorse and self-knowledge.” Suggesting that the “film’s historical subtext” is “its concern with black ambivalence toward African heritage,” Donaldson added that “the fragility of self-esteem, the uneasy containment of masculine rage in marriage, and the consequences of inadequate connection between men” are all also important issues in a production that “implies that to withhold sympathy from Othello, even as he himself loses human feeling, is to repeat his tragic failure to recognize Iago” (142).

1981 BBC Production

Produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, this version starred Anthony Pedley as Roderigo; Bob Hoskins as Iago; Anthony Hopkins as Othello; David Yelland as Cassio; Penelope Wilton as Desdemona; and Rosemary Leach as Emilia.

Henry Fenwick, in his valuable report on “The Production” published in the 1981 BBC booklet that accompanied this adaptation’s first broadcast, noted that “[d]irector Jonathan Miller did not think that it was essential to cast a black actor” because he considered jealousy, not race, the play’s central theme (18–19). According to Fenwick, “Miller decided the design should be fairly realistic, unadorned and almost monochromatic,” feeling colors and costuming less important than the emotions the play explores. Although Miller moved most of the scenes indoors partly because he conceived of this work as a domestic play, set designer Colin Lowery explained various architectural influences on look of the production, especially influences from Italy (such as the city or Urbino) and from baroque artists such as de la Tour (19–20). Costumes (mainly black with touches of color, especially bits of red) were inspired by El Greco, Velasquez, Titian, and Bruegel, with courtly costumes juxtaposed with chaotic feelings to emphasize the contrast between the clothes and the emotions (20–21). Meanwhile, strong white light was used for Cyprus to help distinguish it from Venice (21). Anthony Hopkins, as Othello, saw television is a perfect way of dealing with this “‘domestic tragedy,’” partly because it could bring out the intimacy of this work. Asserting that Othello was the Shakespearean role he had always wanted to perform, he added how much he admired Miller as a director; said he found it shattering to play Othello; explained how and why he approached the role as he did (22); and said that he thought that Othello, as a Black person in Venice, tries to impose excessive self-control upon himself and he tries to suppress the strong emotions that Iago knows how to unleash (23). Miller, the director, saw the play not as about “the fall of the Great but the disintegration of the ordinary, of the representative character. It’s the very ordinariness of Othello,” he continued, “that makes the story intolerable. And Desdemona is not the fair-haired simpering victim. She has spark and gaiety and enough character to defy her father, to alienate herself from her own social group and undertake what was quite clearly a difficult, lonely marriage.” Playing Desdemona, Penelope Wilton, agreed that this play works particularly well on television (23); noted that it often involves scenes between just two characters and does not really have a subplot; said she saw Desdemona as a somewhat playful person who does not want to hurt her father but who has fallen genuinely in love with Othello (24); and agreed with Miller that the play is not primarily about racial difference but about any outsider coming into a rigid society. She saw Desdemona as an innocent young woman who can’t understand why she is being accused and who tends to blame herself (25). Speaking of Iago, Miller remarked that “The envious character is one that starts degraded in his own eyes and therefore must degrade everything else so that he does not appear, in his degradation, to be peculiar and isolated amidst a virtuous and contented world.” Miller said he “wanted to avoid at all costs … [a] melodramatic, sinuous, silky villain of the calculating Machiavellian schemer. Iago should have the character of a working-class sergeant, a mischievous gangster’s merriment,” and a touch of the “criminal psychopath.” Miller also saw Iago as an example of “the Mischief maker, the trickster, the practical joker, the mythical figure of the jocular upsetter of the world,” and both Hoskins and Miller agreed that Iago should be played, in miller’s words, like “the roaring-with-laughter Rumpelstiltskin character, so delighted by his own ingenuity that he almost undoes himself by trying to tell the victim what he’s up to” (26). Hoskins himself added that his Iago “is a very separate person: He has a sense of humour which he probably wouldn’t find funny”—humor involving “vicious fun. He has the same kind of disease as a gambler: He has to go on until he loses. What he actually wants to do is lose.” Stressing the friendship between Iago and Othello, Hoskins said that it is partly this friendship that “makes Iago’s behavior so perverse” (27).

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their pathbreaking 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, surveyed many early reviews. One, from the London Times, extolled the BBC production as “[m]agnificently conceived for television,” especially in its often quiet, intimate style of speech, while another, for Choice, strongly condemned it as second-rate, verbally uninteresting, unemotional, and insufficiently tragic or epic. This review considered Hopkins inappropriate as Othello; said Iago and Desdemona had been better performed at American regional theaters; warned teachers that this production would kill students’ interest in Shakespeare; and recommended the Welles and the Olivier versions instead. Another assessment in the London Times called this Iago a “a giggling psychopath” and Othello his mere victim, while a review in Britain’s The Listener found the production “[q]uite, quite ravishing to watch” (277). A writer for a scholarly journal found Hoskins consistently “magnetic” and called the production “often visually very beautiful and with some striking individual performances.” A reviewer for the New York Times wrote that Miller had deliberately toned down the verbal temperature of the play; called Hopkins’s Othello not a “booming … Noble Savage” but “almost conversational within the cramped confines of a television screen”; and termed Hoskins’s Iago “a hysterically giggling, crackling psychopath.” He considered the performances “distinctive, if not distinguished”; said that Hopkins’s “somewhat punchy phrases and momentary pauses” could “often produce a remarkable clarity of meaning”; compared Iago to a “sadistic gangster, an interpretation that works to a surprising degree”; admired the strong Desdemona; and greatly praised Rosemary Leach’s scene-stealing Emilia. In the Washington Post, a different reviewer disliked the quiet mode of speaking, finding it sometimes unintelligible; thought that Hopkins’s light complexion made a mockery of the play’s own description of Othello; called his anger merely “peevish and snarling”; termed Iago “the eighth dwarf—Nasty”; and found the whole pace sluggish (278).

Reviewing this adaptation shortly after it was first broadcast, R. Thomas Simone reported that “Miller discounts the importance of Othello’s blackness, which he terms the ‘myth of performance over the text’—this in spite of the repeated allusions in the text to Othello’s race.” In any case, Simone felt that “Iago dominates this production,” partly because “television plays to the intimate scurrilousness of Iago and against the rhetoric and passion of Othello.” Calling Hoskins “a virtuoso Iago,” Simone wrote that this Iago’s “close-up monologues, delivered with thought and incisiveness, are powerful in their effect, and the colloquial microphone and the intimate camera perfectly capture the slightly forbidden but deeply enjoyed oaths” of this character. Simone felt that “[o]nly in the last third of the production, where Othello’s suffering might be expected to dominate, does Hoskins overdo his Iago through the intrusive laughter.” Meanwhile Simone felt that “Anthony Hopkins … attempts in his Othello to overcome the rhetorical deafness of television through a continual softening of vocal delivery, which he wants to intensify with pregnant pauses. This strategy,” Simone asserted, “does not work well. Passages of verbal intensity and richness like the address to the Senate are robbed of fullness and power by a mannered delivery and the resort to a stage whisper. Only rarely, and then fitfully,” he continued, “does Hopkins rise to a passionate delivery, as in the speech on black vengeance. But the swings between the mild-mannered Othello and the one foaming with jealousy are so abrupt that Hopkins seems not to have a center for his characterization.” Commenting on the actresses, Simone thought that the “leading women are handled with sympathy and directness. Perhaps too prim and proper in the Venetian act, Penelope Wilton later shows great strength and nobility in her Desdemona,” while “Rosemary Leach likewise makes a good case for the women in her Emilia” (4). Overall, Simone concluded, the “BBC’s Othello shows flashes of brilliance, particularly in the acting of Bob Hoskins and in the support of Penelope Wilton and Rosemary Leach,” although he thought that “Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal and Jonathan Miller’s confining of Othello limit the achievement of the production. A valid debate about the relative weight and worth of the two main figures continues, but Miller so prejudices the argument that the dialectic of the play is lost. The largeness of the character of Othello is thrown away” (5).

In her 2002 overview of productions of Othello (153–56), Lois Potter, reporting that “Miller was, and still is, accused of racism precisely because he did not make race an issue” in his BBC version, also noted that he sought to create “believable ‘ordinary’ characters; low-key naturalistic (sometimes barely audible) speech; [and] a production set almost entirely indoors, with largely monochrome costumes which looked unquestionably seventeenth-century but without the gaudiness that suggests theatricality” (154). She wrote that “Miller and his cast took a firmly modern view of the story, in which they saw no metaphysical implications,” with all the major figures “middle-aged except Desdemona, and even she was surprisingly mature,” and with a “smallness of scale [that] worked particularly well for Desdemona and Emilia (Rosemary Leach), whose performances allow one to see every shade of thought” (155). Potter called Bob Hoskins a “cheerfully psychotic Iago” who “laughs, or rather giggles, a lot,” and who responds to Othello’s suicide “as if this action were the ultimate practical joke. Miller,” she observed “let the story end with the sound of Iago s laughter ringing down the now-empty corridors.” Finding this ending—as well as “the production’s elimination of the exotic and the unusual”—“disturbing” (155), Potter ended by finding its “absence of message … equally bleak,” saying that Miller had offered an interpretation “empty of moral significance” (156).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (269–72), saw this Othello as a “North African Arab” (269); admired the “long takes”; mocked some of the acting and thought Othello may at first be too understated and calculating (270); considered this Desdemona too old; said Othello sometimes seems credulous to the point of insanity; liked the way the epilepsy scene is acted and the way Othello eventually shifts from courteous to crazed (271); and thought this production plays against the Olivier version (272).

Robert C. Evans, in a 2017 essay titled “Killing Desdemona: Possible Feminist Responses to the Death Scene in Shakespeare’s Othello,” wrote that “[a]s in the Burge film starring Olivier and Smith, Miller had the luxury, in his BBC production, of being able to film almost the entire play, with very few cuts. Thus, in the Miller production, we also get to see Emilia’s reaction when Desdemona begins to revive. Interestingly,” Evans continued, “we first see her reaction in a mirror that reflects the image of her bending over her mistress’s body. This literally distanced view seems far less intimate than the one Burge had provided. Burge had shown Emilia doing everything possible to comfort Desdemona, including embracing her body; Miller shows an Emilia too stunned and shocked (at least at this point) to do much more than quietly weep. But if feminists might possibly be disappointed in Emilia here,” Evans thought, “they would surely take pride in the performance of Penelope Wilton. Sometimes calm and sometimes furious, Wilton presented a Desdemona who was finally willing to do anything she could to fight for her life. Her efforts were soon defeated, but she did not give up without a struggle. Wilton, one might argue, presented the first fully feminist Desdemona of the ones examined up till now” (112).

In an essay from 2021 titled “The BBC Hopkins–Hoskins Othello: A Survey of Responses,” Robert C. Evans noted the controversy this production first provoked because it cast a White actor as Othello. After surveying a range of reactions, from negative to positive, Evans wrote that the “fact that three of the most recent reviews of the BBC Othello have been so strongly positive is intriguing, to say the least. Perhaps the Miller production, seen from the perspective of four subsequent decades, is now less controversial, less insulting, than it once seemed. After all,” Evans continued, “most Othellos since the Hopkins performance have been portrayed by black actors. … Perhaps,” Evans suggested, “the Miller production can now be seen simply as part of theater history, to be judged as just another interpretation of the play among many other possible interpretations. But the Miller production can also, for all kinds of reasons, still provoke interesting and thoughtful discussion in the classroom. In a way, the very controversy that surrounded its initial appearance has made it an Othello that must still be seen and dealt with” (266).

1984 Frank Melton “Bard” Production

Directed by Frank Melton for the “Bard” company, this adaptation starred William Marshall as Othello; Jenny Agutter as Desdemona; Ron Moody as Iago; Leslie Paxton as Emilia; DeVeren Bookwalter as Cassio; and Joel Asher as Roderigo.

Reviewing this production for the 1988 Shakespeare on Television anthology he coedited with J. C. Bulman, H. R. Coursen was quite impressed, preferring it over both the Olivier film and the BBC effort and finding this a suitable play for television. He called Desdemona’s death-scene “very moving” (but thought the production lost some steam thereafter); said this staging generally “worked superbly within its various spaces”; admired the “rich costumes”; and thought Marshall, as Othello, spoke even more effectively than Paul Robeson and “brought anguish to the role as [James Earl] Jones had not.” According to Coursen, “Marshall’s was an understated performance, appropriate for TV,” if occasionally too “laid-back.” He found Marshall’s acting on the whole “restrained and quietly moving.” He considered Jenny Agutter bit too old to play Desdemona but called her “convincingly womanly and innocent”; found the “murder scene” so powerful that it “pretty well erased what was to follow”; thought “Moody’s Iago was not a non-com up from the ranks but a fallen aristocrat” (306); and said “Iago with Roderigo was splendid, but he was even more convincing with Othello.” On the other hand, he was unimpressed by Leslie Paxton’s Emilia and felt that “the editing left a lot to be desired” (308).

Assessing this production in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (272–73), Peter Cochran admired William Marshall’s Othello but variously faulted the director, “the sets and sound,” the monotony, the music, the glacial delivery, and the odd acting of this Desdemona (272), although he did find Emilia’s epiphany moving (273).

1988 Janet Suzman Production

Directed by Janet Suzman and performed and filmed in South Africa before the fall of apartheid, this adaptation starred John Kani as Othello; Richard Haddon Haines as Iago; Dorothy Ann Gould as Emilia; Joanna Weinberg as Desdemona; Frantz Dobrowsky as Roderigo; and Neil McCarthy as Michael Cassio.

Discussing this version in his 1993 book Watching Shakespeare on Television, Herbert R. Coursen, although noting that John Kani was “a black South African whose native tongue is not English and who had no prior experience with verse speaking,” called the choice “brilliant,” saying that he “underplays Othello and therefore avoids the histrionics” of white actors who have played “stereotypical ‘Africans’” (158). Mentioning this Othello’s “powerfully unstated” grief; suggesting that his “scenes with Desdemona from III.3 onward … tend to be perverse love scenes” (159); praising the way “Richard Haddon Haines plays Iago with dazzling skill” and the way even this version’s “Roderigo is a considerable figure”; and observing that the “raucous scenes between Iago and Roderigo contrast vividly with the muted Desdemona-Othello sequences,” Coursen suggested that “that is the problem with this Iago. … is the overplaying that could work on stage, but is more than the cool medium can absorb.” Calling Haines “far more of a racist than Olivier’s Frank Finlay,” Coursen argued that “I doubt that we believe that such a manic, obsessed, ‘beside himself’ Iago could be so cool in planning, so smooth in execution, or detached enough to recognize that his own strength lies in improvisation,” so that the “contrast between private and public Iagos is too great, too Hyde and Jekyllish.” Thus, Haines’s performance “overpowers the small screen” and “makes this production too much about race and [thereby] proves that ‘PC’ [political correctness] can distort performance” (161). Coursen concluded: “While I admire the production’s committed position, such a blatant racist as this Iago dictates our response rather than permitting us to formulate it. We believe in Othello’s foreignness and in his love for Desdemona and hers for him. We might find Iago more frightening if we believed him to be sane” (162).

In a 1997 essay titled “Race-ing Othello, Re-engendering White-Out,” Barbara Hodgdon wrote of this Othello that, “[c]ostumed in a Bowing white shirt which accentuates his color, black military trousers, polished black over-the-knee boots, and a magnificent red floor-length cloak, he is an exquisitely elegant Titian-esque figure.” She added that “a golden circlet, from which hangs a small case, surrounds his neck—a sign of national or tribal identity, of a mysterious otherness (what slavery was he sold into, and how redeemed from it?). But his gestures, as much as his color and attire, distinguish him from the rest.” Hodgdon reported that “in the Senate scene, for example, broad arm movements open his whole body to the gaze, marking his confidence, his exoticism, and his vulnerability, especially in contrast to Richard Haddon Haines’s stolidly built, exhibitionistic Iago, beside whom Kani’s presence pales, registering a subdued, even feminine ‘passivity.’” Hodgdon thought that Suzman’s film “rather precisely reveals how such an interpretive strategy masks the implications of race” (27).

Deborah Cartmell, in her book from 2000 titled Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen, wrote that “[u]nfortunately, Kani delivers the lines as if he is reading an autocue for the first time (unwittingly suggesting his inferiority), and although there is plenty of physical contact between himself and Desdemona[,] … emotional conviction is completely lacking. This is a physical rather than cerebral relationship; and it sends out well-meaning but ultimately racist signals in its emphasis on the body” (74).

In her 2002 volume surveying productions of Othello (174–79), Lois Potter reported that this was actress Suzman’s “first experience of directing”; that the text was sometimes cut or altered in “sometimes surprising” ways; but that “this is a powerful and at times almost unbearably harrowing version of the play.” Although a film of a stage production, with “several full views of the stage set,” Potter said it occasionally uses “cinematic devices such as the freeze-frame and slow motion” and has an “almost cinematic soundtrack” (176). She noted that this “Iago constantly stresses the animality of the Moor, usually by poking his fingers into places where they should not be,” as when Iago “picks his nose” and elsewhere assumes “a gorilla posture, scratching himself under his armpits.” Potter observed that “Kani. in contrast, is quiet and rather sad” and that “his manner and costume are different from anyone else’s; his vowel sounds are different; [so that] more than any other performance of Othello, this one is genuinely other,” as in the fact that “the most prominent feature of his costume is a collar of bone from which hangs the small curved weapon with which he will eventually cut his throat” (177). According to Potter, “This is the only screened version of the play in which anyone pays any attention to Emilia at her death. Iago’s two victims are able, though only in their last moments, to transcend racial difference and Emilia shows that it is possible to fight one’s way out of racism, though only at great cost” (179).

Writing in his book from 2003 titled Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies (138–42), and seeing potential racism in some of Suzman’s comments about the play, especially in her remarks about Kani the actor, Pascale Aebischer nonetheless admitted “to a feeling of discomfort about picking holes in Suzman’s approach when her production is so clearly a landmark in the play’s recent history and one of the frankest and bravest attempts to take up the racial challenge of the play” (142).

In an essay from 2011 titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” Anthony Davies wrote that “Kani, a black Xhosa actor whose performances in challenging roles on the South African stage had won him acclaim, is presented as a distinctly exotic presence among the Venetians (the South African white regime?). Like other Othellos,” Davies continued, “the freedom of his body movements and his loosely fitting upper costume distinguish him from the restrained uniformity of the bespectacled Venetian senators and from Iago. No cross hangs about his neck but, like Olivier, he savours the perfume of a rose at his first entrance. What does hang close to his throat,” Davies reported, “is a small brown sheath, not readily identifiable, and adding to his mystery. It hides the thin blade with which he ultimately severs his jugular” (17).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (273–74), noted this production’s unique “political resonance”; said that Othello seems especially alien here because English is Kani’s second language; felt this Iago seems especially racist and called the production “intimate and subtly lit,” with effective props (273); liked the way the handkerchief’s significance is foreshadowed; wondered if this production is a feminist reading; and ended by highly praising the actors and the director (274).

1990 Trevor Nunn Production

This adaptation, based on a stage production and directed by Trevor Nunn, starred Ian McKellen as Iago; Willard White as Othello; Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona; Zoë Wanamaker as Emilia; Michael Grandage as Roderigo; Sean Baker as Cassio; and Marsha Hunt as Bianca.

Discussing this version in his 1993 book Watching Shakespeare on Television, Herbert R. Coursen suggested that “Nunn seems to want to emphasize human agency, as opposed to any metaphysical possibilities, as motivating the action, and a lack of consideration in Othello, here a character lacking any inner points of reference against which to measure Iago’s suggestions” (100). Commenting that the production presents “a pell-mell rush of events” (100), Coursen asserted that Nunn’s alterations to the play “exclude aspects of the script that (a) complicate character, (b) moralize upon events, and (c) attribute what happens to causes beyond human motivation” (101), repeating that the “most obvious cuts involve the ‘cosmic’ dimension—references to the interaction between humanity and the supernatural, and to the interpenetration of religion and human life” (103). According to Coursen, “These deletions tend to scale the play down to a level below the emotion it will sustain, even on TV”; he wished that Nunn had “trusted the medium and his actors to let a bit more of the script be heard” (104). Later, noting contrasts in colors of skin and costumes (148), Coursen returned again to his argument that in the Nunn adaptation “culture,” rather than anything larger, is the “final cause” of events here, including the culture of “the television audience,” so that “[b]y limiting the [production’s] ‘worldview’ to very precise dimensions, Nunn accommodates a limited medium” (150), producing a “superbly” economical result (153).

Barbara Hodgdon, in a 1997 essay titled “Race-ing Othello, Re-engendering White-Out,” wrote that when this version’s “Othello first appears, he bursts open the doors and enters striding, his commanding figure filling the entire frame. Yet from this point forward, the film contains his body ever more closely, producing the illusion that Iago may be in cahoots with both cameraman and editing process—an illusion that carries over into costuming.” Hodgdon reported that a “Franco-Prussian black uniform and polished knee-high boots encases [sic] the black body, turning White’s avuncular figure from a (potential) Uncle Tom into a very English Othello whose exotic origins and sexuality are buttoned up and whose assimilation seems (comfortably) complete.” But she thought that “even though his still, compelling presence gives him the look of a complete Othello, his broadly sketched performance makes him prey to McKellen’s precise, transfixing Iago” (31).

In her 2002 book surveying various stagings of Othello, Lois Potter compared the Nunn production to “Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, a play about officers and men stationed in a remote place.” She wrote that Sean Baker’s Cassio here “is no glamorous Florentine but a hard-working, self-made man” and that in fact “Nunn establishes the basic decency of [all] the army officers and men”—except, of course, Iago. She thought that “[f]ew productions of Othello have been more concerned than Nunn’s to give full weight to the Othello-Desdemona relationship. Yet there was some justification,” she added, “for the complaint that the result, especially on the video, ended up being Iago-centred,” partly because in “a production full of props and detail, the close-ups favour Iago,” played here by Ian McKellen in a performance in which “[v]irtually every line is decorated with some bit of business, each one flowing so smoothly into the next that it is hard to tell whether the superb technique is McKellen’s or Iago’s.” She considered “Willard White’s relatively subdued manner [as Othello] … small-scale like the production,” so that his speech is often “rather muted,” as if he is praying rather than exploding in intense emotion. Moreover, Potter wrote, “On camera with McKellen he suffers from the contrast between his broad expansive face, which seems to have nothing to hide, and the mysterious folds and lines of McKellen’s, which invite the spectator to watch for the revelation of dark secrets in his not fully understood feelings” (192).

Discussing Nunn’s version in his 2003 book Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies (142–47), Pascale Aebischer, noting that in this production “Bianca is also black, so that Othello is no longer isolated in his racial Otherness” (143), also commented that this Desdemona shows a “disregard of the borders separating private from public as well as [a] careless usurpation of male privilege” (143–44), often exhibiting “unguarded speech and playfulness in her dealings with her husband” in ways that he misinterprets. She and Emilia both suffer, partly because “all the acts of silencing and of violence towards the two women happen within a framework which the play marks as domestic,” so that “the combination of Stubbs’s assertive, intelligent Desdemona with Nunn’s emphasis on gender relations and the disruption of marital relationships produces a very powerful murder scene” (145), in which Othello “enters wearing an exotic white robe and carrying a scimitar. This is the moment,” according to Aebischer, “that the entire play has been preparing us for, the moment when Othello casts off his social self-definition as white (as symbolised through his military uniform) and adopts his ‘native,’ and ‘black’ costume to commit the act that will prove to those in the audience who were looking to him rather than at him that they were correct in suspecting that he is ‘far more black than fair.’” Aebischer considered “White’s change of costume for the murder … a risky directorial choice” because “the possibility is opened up for a racist reading of the murder.” Aebischer thought that the “only way, apart from its visual effectiveness, the change of costume can be justified is in exposing the voyeuristic audience’s underlying desire to see [Othello] dressed as a racialised ‘Other’ for the murder” (146). Aebischer ultimately concluded that “[u]nder Trevor Nunn’s sensitive direction the murder is neither the result of race or racism. By allowing the company to explore the gender relations as scripted in Shakespeare’s play, Nunn’s staging shows that an emphasis on gender might be the solution to the problems of racism posed by the tragedy” (147). Meanwhile, mentioning the Nunn production briefly in his 2008 Norton Guide, Samuel Crowl discussed the setting, costumes, White’s performance, McKellen’s Iago as a “repressed psychopath,” and the “harrowing version” of Desdemona’s murder (77), with its sexual overtones (78).

Anthony Davies, in a 2011 essay titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” called Nunn’s Othello “a middle-aged man no longer drawn to the prospect of an erotically charged marriage; [Desdemona] a highly attractive but young and girlish wife, able to deploy her whims like a child manipulating her father. Indeed, the age difference makes more credible the resentment of Brabantio in being displaced and more disturbing to Othello the imagining of Desdemona’s attraction to Cassio” (18).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (274–80), Peter Cochran efficiently called Nunn’s direction well-informed (274); said his adaptation emphasizes “understatement” and realism; and explained how Nunn tries to deal with the play’s problematic time scheme but found some of it implausible (276–77). Nonetheless he called this one of the most disturbing productions he had ever seen, partly because of Willard White’s fine performance (277) but also because of the compelling Desdemona and superb Iago (278). He described various scenes featuring Iago and his interactions with Othello (279) and ultimately suggested that in fact this production may be too “horrible” because of its quiet intimacy (280).

1995 Oliver Parker Production

This big-budget film version, directed by Oliver Parker, and the first such movie in which the title character was played by a black man, starred Laurence Fishburne as Othello; Irène Jacob as Desdemona; Kenneth Branagh as Iago; Nathaniel Parker as Cassio; Michael Maloney as Roderigo; Anna Patrick as Emilia; Nicholas Farrell as Montano; Indra Ové as Bianca; and Michael Sheen as Lodovico.

Discussing this adaptation in his 1999 History of Shakespeare on Screen, Kenneth Rothwell wrote that while “Parker’s lighting and camera angles … [and] his mise-en-scene, seem cautiously theatrical, his editing shows a talent for telling a story visually” (235). He noted that despite Fishburne’s titular starring role, “[c]ritics nevertheless found the movie ‘Iago-centric,’ as if the talented Branagh had totally stolen the show, even though Fishburne,” in Rothwell’s opinion, “contributes a massive dignity and physical presence.” He felt, as well, that Parker’s Desdemona—whose speech and acting were often mocked—“projects a wonderful innocence and sweetness, which her slight Swiss accent makes all the more endearing.” He also thought that, “[i]n the movie’s boldest stroke”—but one that, again, other commentators often faulted—“it pries into the connubial activities of Othello and Desdemona, a topic that Shakespeare avoids and that scholars have mostly averted their eyes from” even though it answers a common question about the play: “When, if ever, the literal-minded have asked, did the happy pair consummate their marriage?” (236). Although praising two actors frequently disparaged for their acting here, Rothwell also asserted that “Fishburne’s and Jacob’s success by no means detracts from Branagh’s skilful Iago,” commending Branagh for being able to make Iago’s hypocrisy convincing “mainly by a knack for timing that suggests he is speaking very reluctantly even when he is actually falling all over himself to slander Cassio and Desdemona. He adds to that” knack, Rothwell thought, “a gift for facial expressions, often in collusion with the audience, that clearly signal his innate vileness.” Rothwell thought, in fact, that “Parker’s tight shots and deft camera movements support the acting talents of the principals by, for example, zooming in on Iago’s moving lips as they telegraph his perfidious intentions” (237).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen (103–5), asserted that “Parker goes further than previous versions to underline an intense physical bond” but faulted the production for offering “too many close-ups of talking heads” when “the dialogue is at its most intense” (104). Although he did credit Parker with having created “an audience-friendly two-hour running time without compromising the clear, briskly paced plotting that drives Othello on stage” he felt that the “script severely restricts the dialogue entrusted to Desdemona, which is a blessing, since Swiss-born Jacob struggles with complex, archaic verse in what is for her a foreign language. At the same time,” he felt, “Parker’s cuts leave her virtually no chance to build a Desdemona whose guiltless plight can really move us, which is a pity” (104). According to Rosenthal, “Language also handicaps Fishburne. Physically, he is very impressive, exuding hearty sexual swagger, but Shakespeare’s pentameters are alien to an actor who is more at home in the expletive-ridden worlds of 1990s thrillers like King of New York,” so that, “Speaking in a bass, almost Caribbean accent, he sometimes rushes over his lines as though he is trying to spit out something extremely indigestible” (104).

In his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, Douglas Brode called Parker’s film “a surprisingly traditional Othello. Trimming away more than a third of the words,” Parker “broke lengthy sequences into short scenes, playing them in varied interiors and exteriors to make crystal clear that his was a movie rather than a filmed play.” Brode added that “the actors were encouraged to take a naturalistic approach, making this an easily accessible Othello,” but he reported that “[n]umerous critics complained that Parker’s film aped the surface appeal while missing the artistic essence of Branagh’s and Zeffirelli’s [styles of] direction” (167). “Most critics,” Brode continued, “have written this film off as a handsome, respectable, but ultimately negligible Othello” whose “chief value is for high schools … as an acceptable means of introducing the uninitiated to the Bard.” But Brode countered that “[i]n fact, Parker’s film is far more worthy than anyone has yet acknowledged. It is truly cinematic, while offering a unique take on the play” (168). He was not, however, impressed by this version’s Othello, writing that “Fishburne appeared so intimidated by working with the Bard that he ceased doing what he does best, which is naturalistic method acting. Instead, he enunciated every word, and the final result was elocution, not acting.” According to Brode, “Fishburne simmered and projected surliness (his stock in trade) but never created any sense of a character who arcs during the course of the story,” with the result that “Parker has transformed Othello into the tragedy of Iago, making it work as that. Certainly this is a radical but satisfying approach. It’s not for nothing that in this version Iago has more screen time than Othello” and that this “Othello becomes a foil for Iago instead of the other way around” (168). Brode thought that “[n]ever, in a film version, has the contrast between Iago’s nasty reality (when confiding his bitterness to us) and his show of false affection (when speaking with anyone else) been so effectively communicated. In large part, this plays because Parker and Branagh worked out a series of visual transitions” that “allow us to see [Iago’s] essential dishonesty during wordless moments” (169). Brode called Branagh “so effective an actor and so charming a personality that it’s impossible for a viewer not to chuckle” at his evil, but the “moment we do, we are, like Othello, lost and complicit in his scheme.” Brode felt that this “approach allows Parker to communicate the essence of a key Shakespearean theme: Othello is ultimately about acting. Shakespeare used the theatrical form to comment on what he perceived as a nearly universal phoniness in the world.” What he and Parker achieve, then, is all the more impressive, suggesting that beneath “Iago’s surface of conventional manliness, a closet queen struggles to break out” (169). Brode felt that this “is the only filmed Othello to suggest a dynamic relationship between Iago and Othello,” so that as “Iago spins his web, Cassio is gradually physically distanced as Iago slips ever closer. The tone of [Othello’s and Iago’s] conversations change; Othello at first keeps a polite distance, then loosens up with Iago, and finally falls under his spell,” as can be seen in the “stunning … moment when Othello surrenders entirely” and the two men embrace (170). After so much praise, Brode added that the “major flaw in the film resulted from Parker’s decision to cut Desdemona’s final lines,” when she seems to come back to life and the murder scene is robbed of some of its potential complexity (171). Ultimately, however, Brode felt that Parker deserved far more praise than he had yet received (172).

Discussing the Parker version in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema (25–29), Stephen Buhler said that it “revels in the spectacular” and features a mostly “naturalistic presentation,” follows the “conventions of mass-market film production,” but also “includes elements that resist those conventions” (25). Buhler thought that Fishburne’s Othello “speaks mostly with his body,” partly because the actor “is given only a small portion of the character’s lines,” adding also that Fishburne “doesn’t speak with his own voice, opting instead for a vaguely ‘North African’ accent.” (26) while Branagh ingratiatingly uses some of “the same mannerisms” to play Iago that he had used several years earlier to play the charming Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (27).

Lois Potter, in her 2002 survey of performances of the play, noted that Parker’s film appeared in the same year as the famous trial of athlete O. J. Simpson for brutally murdering his wife, so that “the theme of wife-abuse,” already present in the play, received even more attention when people watched the film. In fact, Fishburne had already played a notorious wife-abuser in a recent movie about Ike and Tina Turner, making the theme even harder to ignore. According to Potter, by “[c]asting a popular black American actor as Othello and a well-known British Shakespearean actor as Iago, with a Swiss Desdemona,” Parker probably engaged in “a calculated attempt to make the film commercially viable for an international audience.” Potter called Irene Jacob’s Desdemona “movingly intelligent, frank and trusting” but also suggested that “the fact that she, her father and the Duke of Venice all spoke English as a second language meant that, instead of being the social norm against which Othello is set, they were themselves outside it” (193). Potter reported that the “film was not well reviewed initially” but said “its critical reception improved after it appeared on video, probably because, as with Welles’s Othello, its visual patterns are easier to appreciate with repeated viewing” (195). Calling Anna Patrick’s Emilia “an attractive and graceful woman with no touch of shrewishness (most of the lines suggesting this quality were cut) is a companion rather than servant to Desdemona,” so that the “two women are seen together more than in most other versions, as if to emphasize the parallelism in their stories. Cutting the text,” Potter explained, “avoids the problem of why Emilia does not speak up earlier about the handkerchief,” and although Potter felt that the final disposal of Emilia, by Iago, is a bit clichéd, otherwise “the poignant and sympathetic treatment of Emilia shows [this movie] … at its best” (196).

Samuel Crowl, in a lengthy and fairly sour analysis of Parker’s Othello in his 2003 book Shakespeare at the Cineplex (91–104), noted Parker’s stylistic debts to earlier films by Kenneth Branagh, such as a “bold, romantic approach,” the use of “ravishing Technicolor,” a “multinational cast,” and even a “lush score by Charlie Mole” (91). Crowl wrote that “[o]nly Zeffirelli, in Romeo and Juliet, had employed, before Parker’s film, such a ripe approach to a Shakespearean tragedy” (91). But Crowl thought that “the play’s bitter intimacy keeps rubbing up against the film’s romantic yearnings,” so that the movie “never finds an effective visual language to resolve those ingrained tensions” (92) or “a coherent pattern for [Parker’s] bright visual ideas”—perhaps not surprising as “Othello was his first film, and it reveals the work of an ambitious novice whose reach keeps exceeding his grasp” (93). Turning to an actor/director whose skills as a filmmaker Crowl had long admired, Crowl wrote that “Branagh never makes Iago a joker as a means of winning our indulgence and approval. [His Iago] wants us to admire him because he’s so clever, which turns out to be the greatest con of all. Branagh repeatedly makes it clear that his Iago is a creature of twisted and tangled emotions,” but his “biggest con is to convince us and not just us, himself, too—that he knows what he’s doing” (94). “Perhaps,” Crowl speculated, “it is inevitable on film that Iago’s cunning demeanor will work better than Othello’s explosive passion.” He noted that Parker allows Branagh’s Iago to “appropriate the camera,” so that he speaks “knowing soliloquies in tight close-up, often begun in profile so that Branagh can then draw us into Iago’s gutter imagination with just a slight turn of the head to stare unblinkingly into the lens and confide in us directly” (95). Turning to Fishburne and calling him “a young, powerful, sexy Othello,” Crowl did praise that actor’s skill at “giving us the warrior’s menace, which can be quickly wiped away by the flash of Fishburne’s dazzling, gap-toothed smile” (96), but he, like some other commentators, faulted Parker’s alleged “determination to displace language with image,” especially in the bedroom scene, where he is guilty of “racially eroticizing two figures whom Shakespeare treats with more circumspection and less voyeurism” (97). In fact, Crowl thought that “Parker’s screenplay and his camera seem often at a loss at how to best capture Othello,” who, in this film “smolders, but never erupts.” According to Crowl, “Parker and Fishburne just cannot capture Othello’s ‘poetry’: it is too big and dangerous for Parker’s camera and too unfamiliar to Fishburne’s training as an actor,” so that Fishburne “is unable to carry us deep into Othello’s tortured imagination through the images” of Shakespeare’s verse (101). Instead, “Parker’s camera … focuses exclusively on Iago,” even in the moments when Iago tries to escape after he stabs Emilia and even after the death of Othello himself, when “Parker’s camera does not focus on the lovers but rather on Iago” (102). In sentences that sum up many of Crowl’s responses to Parker’s work, he wrote that Parker’s “film is often handsome to look at, and it unfolds with a sure pace until its climax, where its tension, and the tale’s tragedy, unravels.” According to Crowl, “Some scenes, particularly those between Iago and Othello, are well conceived and executed. Branagh’s performance rivets our attention, but ultimately it contributes to the film’s decisive split in focus, allowing Iago, even in the film’s final moments, to dominate the camera’s attention, while the clash of Desdemona’s blithe innocence with Othello’s massive disintegration is allowed to fizzle, rather than reach a heart-rending climax.” Crowl concluded that “Fishburne had the potential (and film experience) to be a brilliant Othello, but actor and director failed to allow the character to realize his full energy and power. Fishburne’s performance is almost too sensitive and brooding, and Parker’s camera and screenplay abandon his actor after Desdemona’s murder, silencing the agony of his remorse and the fury of his retribution” (104).

Barbara Hodgdon, in an essay from 2003 titled “Race-ing Othello, Re-Engendering White-Out, II,” offering a kind of sequel to an earlier essay from another volume, here linked Oliver Parker’s Othello film to the notorious trial of O. J. Simpson for the alleged murder of his wife. Hodgdon argued that various “fugitive, phantom connections between O.J.’s and Othello’s history, of course, fade away in the film’s final narrative moves. After all,” she suggested, “one consequence of the shift from high trash [media coverage of the trial] to high tragedy is that, whereas the close of Simpson’s trial canonized him in the court of public opinion, canonical Shakespeare decrees that the ideal black male figure Fishburne has created—the one that ‘plays against the white man’s rules’ for the role—must murder and then kill himself” (93).

In his 2004 book titled Cinematic Shakespeare (135–38) Michael Anderegg wrote that Parker had “adapted Shakespeare’s play in a relatively straightforward, albeit compressed, manner, his naturalistic approach working against some of the more lurid aspects of the drama,” with important language cut from the early episodes (135). Anderegg called Fishburne’s Othello “strong without being dangerous, dignified but not fear-inspiring, hurt but insufficiently angry,” perhaps because of an “unwillingness on Parker’s (or is it Fishburne’s?) part to allow the nearly burlesque elements of the play to have any sway.” Like some other commentators, Anderegg thought that Parker “dangerously plays up the ‘black stud’ stereotype,” remarking that the “wedding night sequence, especially, has unfortunate overtones of a male predator and his (albeit willing) victim” (136). Commenting on Branagh, Anderegg wrote that he “does not, as some Iagos do, work very hard to charm or seduce those he wishes to manipulate,” nor is he “particularly respectful of the audience he appears to address” (136). Anderegg considered the “murder scene … awkwardly staged and edited, with Desdemona a passive victim who takes little care to save her life” (137), and in general he felt that the whole film is “always in danger of blaming the victim, of finding Desdemona at least potentially guilty—as a woman, as a Venetian—of what Iago intimates and Othello comes to believe of her,” especially thanks to various “inserts” that Anderegg considered “particularly bothersome” (138).

In her 2008 book Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema (74–76; 86–87; 94–95), Agnieszka Rasmus called the film conventional (74); said it aimed to thrill and that speaking the verse well was not a top priority (75); argued that Iago’s addresses to the camera are unconventional (75); and described how Branagh’s performance as Iago develops (75–76). Rasmus noted the film’s emphasis on various kinds of enclosure (76); observed Iago’s mobility and the ways he “escapes” the film by addressing the camera (76); but said he finally cannot escape (76). Suggesting that his final stare into the camera emphasizes his own imprisonment (76), she observed that Parker makes Iago seem almost omnipresent, noting that at first he is often just out of the frame. She wrote that Parker plays on our own roles as moviegoers rather than theatergoers (86–87) and commented that Iago resembles a director (87–88) and is both within and beyond the film (89). Observing that in this film Othello’s first two soliloquies are mostly eliminated, Rasmus asserted that when Othello speaks in voice-over when near Desdemona, their alienation from each other is thereby emphasized. She noted Iago’s malign influence on Othello when Othello, like Iago, begins speaking directly to the camera (94–95).

Anthony Davies, in a 2011 essay titled “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger of Here and Everywhere: Characterising Othello on Film: Exploring Seven Film Adaptations,” wrote that Parker “matched his cinematic technique well to Fishburne’s portrayal of an Othello whose self-poise is gradually undermined by his loss of certainty about his social position and about his adequacy as a husband. It is a film,” Davies thought, “that manages with powerful effect in its best sequences, to locate the most intensely painful aspect of Shakespeare’s drama in the psyche of Othello. Fishburne’s Othello is also the most strikingly distinguished on a purely visual level, from the Venetians among whom he is placed” (16).

Commenting briefly on Parker’s adaptation in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (280–82), Peter Cochran objected to its cuts and alterations, especially in the opening scenes (280); found Desdemona’s dance at a celebratory feast implausible; censured the allegedly mild-porn lovemaking (281); complained that this Othello seems too “sincere”; felt that too many of Iago’s soliloquies are trimmed; and asserted that this Desdemona is miscast as more alien than Othello (282).

Robert C. Evans, in a 2017 essay titled “Killing Desdemona: Possible Feminist Responses to the Death Scene in Shakespeare’s Othello,” wrote that “[a] lthough Jacob’s performance as Desdemona was frequently criticized by some early reviewers (an assessment I have always considered unfair), her performance in the death scene is hard to fault. It is full of emotional range and subtlety, and she is certainly the most defiant, most self-assertive, most physically powerful of all the Desdemonas discussed here.” According to Evans, “When Othello tries to kill her, she actively, quite literally hits back. Although she is no match for him in size or strength, she may, of all the Desdemonas considered here, be the one who most closely approximates a feminist ideal, at least in this scene. She is strong both physically and emotionally, and she is determined not to be killed without a fight.” Evans continued: “Her obvious youthfulness—she was less than thirty when the production was filmed—makes her fierceness seem all the more remarkable and impressive. In her violent struggle with Othello, she manages to convey both strength and tenderness. Her death, partly because she does fight so vigorously to live, is enduringly memorable and powerfully tragic” (115).

In an essay from 2017 titled “Oliver Parker’s Filmed Othello: Desdemona and Design,” Robert C. Evans argued that “Parker’s film is far better appreciated now than when it was first released. Even Irène Jacob’s Desdemona, which was often once excoriated, now wins increasing praise.” According to Evans, since “Jacob’s scenes have received the most criticism, these scenes, when examined closely, can help us best appreciate some of the real merits of this film” (268). He suggested that “Parker [chose] to structure his film … partly as a series of scenic echoes, in which a later episode reminds us of something earlier, either to illustrate a similarity or to point a contrast. The scenes in which Jacob appears often contribute to this pattern, so that her performance—both affecting and effective—helps contribute to the larger unity of the film” (282).

Bibliography