#Othello orson welles full#

With an awesome surge of creative energy and organizational genius, he came in on schedule, although he begged in vain for another two days in which to do some retakes. He had a slightly larger budget than he’d enjoyed on Kane, but his shooting schedule was staggering: a mere 21 days.

To be specific on production matters, Welles made Macbeth at Republic Studios, a company that specialized in westerns and action flicks.

#Othello orson welles full#

He had once considered Macbeth for his cinematic debut, remarking in 1940 that “ Macbeth and its gloomy moors might be grand” for the movies: “A perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and The Bride of Frankenstein.” But when he came to make the film some seven years later, he was to enjoy nothing like the production resources behind the Goldwyn–Wyler Wuthering Heights and-save for isolated passages that fairly leap out of the body of the film-he seemed curiously paralyzed, his style grown monotonously murky and overbearingly static, as though he had yet to grasp the full implications of The Lady from Shanghai: little of Macbeth is on a par with its predecessors in the Welles canon or, for that matter, with the extravagant cinematic imagination of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Welles’s last American film of the Forties was not a happy experience. In anticipation of that May 2-8 engagement, Parallax View presents… Othello The original text remains essentially unaltered, with references to earlier Welles films the series-goers would have seen and, at the outset, one they had not.

In anticipation of that, Parallax View presents a detailed program note written when Othello appeared in an autumn 1971 film series devoted to Welles on the University of Washington campus. Northwest Film Forum is about to showcase a new 4K restoration of Orson Welles’s Othello, one of the director’s greatest-and rarest-films.