If you would seek some kind of perspective on the Motion Picture industry you could do worse than study the career of old Awesome; a string of masterpieces - Kane, Chimes At Midnight, Touch Of Evil - and nearasdammit masterpieces - Ambersons, Mr. Arkadin, Journey Into Fear -which he either wrote, directed and appeared in, sometimes all three, liberally laced with the trash in which he deigned to act - The Black Fox, Ferry To Hong Kong etc - in order to finance projects like this one, which belongs right up there with the masterpieces. I note that much verbiage has been spilled under this title on IMDb debating and disputing the pros and cons of the 'restored' version and whether or not it was indeed ever 'lost'. This is surely academic at best; what matters is that we now HAVE a close approximation of what Awesome intended and frankly if it were any closer I couldn't stand it. The pre-credit sequence alone is worthy of one of the great Silent masters, Gance, Dreyer and like that and the first shot proper is magisterial. Time and time again Welles uses the landscape to compose startling images only to contrast this with key speeches like 'farewell the tranquil mind ...' which he shoots more or less straight and who else but Awesome could make such a virtue out of necessity as in the scene slated for conventional filming until the costumes failed to turn up; his solution, stage it in a bath-house with the actors wearing towels which were themselves borrowed from their hotel. It was Welles himself who made the finest Shakespearean film of all time in Chimes At Midnight and with Othello he runs it a close second. Unmissable.
Review of Othello
