Pearl Throwing Free Style

...True, these people are no Bradleyan saints and devils...

...Trinian's...

...moreover, Clariond's schizophrenic voice, like a superb bell with a sinister crack in it, carried the split in Othello into his farthest-flung syllables...

...Much use is made of backlighting, presumably to create the illusion of sea and open skies around Cyprus without having to resort to backdrops, but the effect is only that of very theatrical backlighting...

...The supporting cast does well enough, with three reservations: Frank Finlay's Iago is very good, if you can accept the Ancient as a clever little Cockney snake in the grass...

...Soon thereafter...

...conflicts with the image of a regressive barbarian...

...First, they were influenced, as Dexter has declared, by F. R. Leavis' essay "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero, or The Sentimentalist's Othello,' one of the master's shriller pieces, which, considering his talent for shrillness, is no mean piece of stridency...

...Maggie Smith's Desdemona is fine, if you like your Othello with two Emilias in it, and can see this Venetian pearl as one of the horsier daughters of Albion, say, a field hockey coach at St...

...The makeup (it took Olivier two hours each day to get into it) gives us a handsome jet-black Jamaican with incarnadined lips, palms, soles, and with a melismatic Calypso accent: What he does with the vowels A and ?? alone introduces an exotic marimba into Shakespeare's orchestration...

...Again, he is the black man inconclusively converted to Christianity, and still prey to fetishistic impulses...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Pearl Throwing Free Style Not long ago, Sir Tyrone Guthrie deplored Sir Laurence Olivier's wasting his energies on the British National Theatre, work that "could be done equally well by several other people, none of whom could play Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Faustus which, at present, he has no time to think about...

...The third trap was the opportunity to capitalize rather meretriciously on contemporary racial problems, to make this Moor plus catholique que le pape, which is to say blacker than black, almost blue, so as to milk (if I may be allowed to mix my colors) Othello's n?©gritude for all it is worth-or, rather, for all that it isn't...

...around his neck hangs an oversize cross that he fondles or kisses on the slightest provocation-though he kisses with equal alacrity any number of tokens of the Doge's authority...

...When the stress finally becomes unbearable, he tears off the cross, and reverts to prostrations and abasements suggestive of Mohammedan ritual or voodoo...

...Which is not to say that Olivier's Othello is not impressive -as impressive as he is wrong...

...Thus, for example, after sanguinely referring to "'men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Olivier suddenly and unaccountably waxes skeptical and looks at the Venetians with amused complicity, as if to say, "We know that such creatures don't exist...

...Granted, Shakespeare makes Othello a Moor, to add some precariousness to his prominence and make his downfall more credible, but to forfeit the emphasis on the pitiful morality of love "were such perdition/ As nothing else could match...

...Othello is love, but, once its molecular structure has been disturbed, how like its opposite that is...

...There is value in the film's experimental poking around at the frontier where the realms of film, theater and television meet: Three Panavision cameras were used with television-style editing of shots, and the whole venture was filmed in three weeks, incorporating much of the original stage blocking...

...and Derek Jacobi's Cassio is just plain bad-priggish, doltish, and effete...

...Whenever remotely conceivable, the actor is barefoot, indulging in that swaying, lilting, almost prehensile walk of jungle-dwellerswhich, too, must be jettisoned in scenes of courtly or tragic splendor...

...the linking together of scenes was also facilitated...

...Even so, with talent such as Olivier's and the British National Theatre's, what a chance was here for a definitive version of this tautest, swiftest, most concentrated of Shakespeare's major tragedies...

...Before getting into the specifics of the movie version, let me discuss certain problems of the underlying stage production, which I caught two years ago at Chichester...

...Finlay, whose elocution is a bit moss-overgrown anyway, tended to disappear altogether...

...Let it be said that Olivier plays this misconceived Othello spectacularly, in a way that is always a perverse joy to behold...

...Clariond modeled himself on some archetypal Bedouin chieftain, a figure in whom prideful grace and cruel animality calmly cohabit...

...Overreacting to Bradley's established interpretation of a superhumanly noble Othello and an archfiendish Iago, Leavis tried to reduce the Moor to a forceful, valiant, but far from magnificent or even maturely loving fellow, and Iago to a verminous, but hardly especially inspired, villain...

...Incidentally, the dominant color of this Othello is a kind of purplish brown, to be found in Venetian painting from Gentile Bellini to Carpaccio, which creates an atmosphere of appositely somber foreboding...

...The production, however, is "one whose hand,/ Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/ Richer than all his tribe...

...Actually, the best Othello I remember seeing was the late Aim?© Clariond's at-of all places-the Com?©die Fran?§aise about 15 years ago...

...However, one does become aware of the somewhat limited range of shots for the film director, Stuart Burge, to choose from, and the entire mise en sc??ne seems, some of the time, to vacillate in a no-man'sland between stage and screen...

...All this is fascinating, but diverts our attention from what the play is about, when it does not downright clash with it: The Othello solicitous for Desdemona's salvation ("I would not kill thy soul...

...The thing is worth watching-not so much for the pearl as for the technique of the throwing hand...

...Olivier and John Dexter, the co-directors, fell into three traps...

...On stage, Olivier dominated the proceedings to an uncanny extent...

...Again, by transferring Jocelyn Herbert's sets to a movie studio, the production acquired a profitably increased acting area in which to stretch its legs...

...Still, it is throwing away in the grand style...

...Film, what with close-ups and recorded sound, acts as a leveler in this respect...

...Sir Laurence found time to think about Othello, at any rateto co-direct and play it at the National Theatre, without relinquishing the managerial reins...

...it also, regrettably, tends to make Olivier's face merge with the d?©cor...

...It is also not a little foolish...

...Here let us stop and state what ought to be a truism but-such is the power of capricious reinterpretation-may sound inflammatorily reactionary: Othello is a play about jealousy, about loving passion turned to hatred, about the ineffable fragility of goodness, intelligence, love...

...Sir Laurence seems actually to have had too much time to think: His Moor, though exceedingly black, is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

...Geoffrey Unsworth, the photographer, has brought a refined discretion to his color work, though I wish he could have found a way around the shadow-play effects the backlighting often elicited...

...But already he is in trouble: At moments when the poetry must swell, soar, or subtilize itself, Olivier is forced to abandon the accent...

...According to Leavis, it takes Iago a ludicrously short time to undermine a supposedly immortal love, and Othello, in his quick collapse, is revealed as more bloated than great...

...Indeed, as filmed Shakespeare, this Othello is surpassed only by Olivier's own Henry V and Richard III...

...Iago is intelligence, but how corruptible and corrupting that is...

...but not even a host of thundering Leavises or rampaging liberals can turn this tragedy of love gone bitter into a drama of gullibility or of a noble savage victimized by white Venetian cunning...

...Now there are, curiously, some ways in which this filmed version of a stage playusually anathema to sophisticated and demotic moviegoers aliketurns out to be superior to the stage production...

...Desdemona is goodness, but how weak that is...

...Certain features, like the crowd movements, seem too stagily conventionalized for film...

...Fortunately, John Holloway, in The Story of the Night, makes mincemeat of Leavis' arguments, even to the point of catching the master out in some quite unscholarly sleight-of-hand, and restores, without going all the way back to Bradley, the play's dignity and magnitude...

...others, like an unexpected and incongruous overhead shot, too cinematic for what is still largely photographed theater...

...But contradictions of all kinds are common to this Othello who combines in himself the psychic geographies of Barbados, Aleppo and Senegal...

...Or, upon discovering the bottomlessness of his tragic error, Othello, having jumped into bed with the dead Desdemona, passionately rocks back and forth with her body, and erotic overtones coupled with frenetic emphasis on blackness embracing blonde whiteness run riot -or should I say race riot...

...If Bradley's view was indeed swooningly sentimental, Leavis' corrective is nonetheless worse than the offense...

...It is an awesome sight, but unmoving...

...No doubt about it, this is the best filmed Othello so far, vastly preferable to such a previous version as Orson Welles's, despite the exquisite Desdemona of Suzanne Cloutier...

...The second trap, related to the first, was, I think, an attempt to play a classic in the modern way, that is, in the manner of Brecht or Beckett-if not, indeed, of Jan Kott-and, rather as in Peter Brook's recent Lear, to play down all heroic and romantic values...