Page 166 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Green-Eyed Monster / 155

picion in Othello's mind. In the view of Welles (particularly in the
early 1950s, when psychological cinema was at its height), the orig-
inal play justified his Freudian interpretation.
As MacLiammoir noted in his published diary of the filmmaking
process, Put Money in Thy Purse, Welles saw the essence of the
story thus: lago is impotent and a closet homosexual. He married
Emilia as his cover, needing to appear normal. lago has developed a
crush or hero fixation on Othello. He's stunned and as jealous as a
spurned lover when Othello bypasses him for promotion. Insult is
added to injury when Othello reportedly beds Iago's frustrated wife.
When he observes Othello and Cassio, second in command, bound
together as brothers, it is too much for lago. Welles insisted that
MacLiammoir appear (via makeup and performance) castrated.
Though the running time is a mere ninety-two minutes, Welles's
film plays as economical rather than abbreviated because potent
images so effectively take the place of words. Welles includes only
the dialogue that is absolutely necessary for our understanding of the
plot. Nor surprisingly, such a film received mixed notices, depend-
ing on one's preexisting point of view. Speaking for Shakespeare
Quarterly, a publication that holds the literary text as primary,
Margaret F. Thorp chastised the director "for the liberties he has
taken . . . wrenching Shakespeare's proportions all awry." As the pri-
mary voice of France's Cahiers du Cinema, the first magazine to pro-
pose an auteur theory, Andre Bazin marveled that Welles remained
"profoundly faithful" to the play, cinematically communicating the
essence of Shakespeare, if not necessarily adhering to the surface. In
retrospect, film historians Kenneth S. Rothwell and Annabelle
Henkin Melzer pointed out that Welles's Othello had been attacked
by "those who quantify the value of a Shakespearean film into a tex-
tual balance sheet," reducing the complex issue of "quality" to a
simple addition problem: How many lines were cut and how many
left intact? The more words included for such purposes, the merrier.
Welles constructed his raise en scene so that iron bars on the win-
dows suggest entrapment of Othello; Shakespeare, working in an
entirely different medium, had his characters articulate the very
same thing. "Othello is a tragedy about agony," Rothwell and Melzer
insisted, "and the Wellesian technique of skewed angles, funhouse
mirror effects, [and] surrealistic visions captures those kinds of emo-
tional destabilizations."
However faithful to or divergent from Shakespeare, Welles was
primarily, as always, making an Orson Welles film. His movie begins