Othello - 1965 Film Version

The DVD release of the film of Othello should not be called Othello; rather it should be Olivier. This was Stuart Burge's 1965 movie direction of John Dexter's 1964 Chichester stage direction of the play. As film, it was mediocre. In Olivier's skimpy and lackluster comments on the DVD, we hear it labeled neither filmed theater nor film, and it does rather fall into a crack in between. The film scholar David Thomson refers to it as "made in a careless rush," with Olivier in a praised stage performance looking on film like "a curry-colored show-off."

I saw this Othello at Chichester and was genuinely impressed by Olivier's performance, and pleased also with Billie Whitelaw (who had succeeded Maggie Smith) as Desdemona and Frank Finlay as Iago. According to Simon Trussler in The Cambridge Illustrated History: British Theatre, Olivier gave "a compulsively mimetic performance." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance called this Othello "a colossus, for which [Olivier] added lower octaves to his vocal range, the last great Othello by a white actor blacked up."

For Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright in Changing Stages, this performance was "the apotheosis of [Olivier's] acting process—working from the outside in, in an act of mimicry from an actor in love with making up [several hours daily here] and dressing up: he blackened his skin [like pitch—forget about Thomson's curry], lowered his voice, curled his lip, rolled his eyes and prowled the stage like a giant cat [mostly barefoot]." As Olivier put it: "I had to be black. I had to feel black down to my soul." The only thing E&W fail to mention is the frequent, ingenuously childlike laugh.

It was not an act of patronization. This Othello, as Olivier further said, was "quite beautiful" and "felt superior to the white man." Indeed, back to E&W, the performance "that to many seemed a risible caricature of a black man…endowed Othello with a heroic power, oscillating between heroism and self-abasement and reducing Iago...to a pale near-cipher." To me, Finlay was nowhere near a cipher, and as I look at the DVD, he seems almost as histrionic as Olivier, albeit in a different way.

This DVD is highly instructive in several ways. First, it corroborates the old adage that stage acting and movie acting are different ball games. Yet I have not even a ballpark figure on how many degrees cooler screen acting must be. Take only Olivier's eyeball-rolling. Effective onstage, in filmed close-ups it looks as if he had not so much been watching, as he said, Caribbean blacks as taking his cue from billiard balls.

But his entire demeanor was sheer extravagance, fluctuating between the glorious and the ludicrous. Merely the number of times that, for pathos, he stared pleadingly at the heavens suggested cue cards posted in the flies. On the other hand, the lithe slinking and springy leaping of a 57-year-old actor, and the easeful pitching of the voice octaves lower, like a gauntlet thrown down in defiance, attested to mastery. Eyre and Wright describe it as "a star performance: the triumph of the actor as tyro." (No star performance of theirs: "tyro" means novice, not, as they must think, cynosure.)

The next point of interest: Film scrutinizes pitilessly and exacts ruthless casting to type. Onstage, Cassio has to cut a dashing figure, and the gifted Derek Jacobi, at 26, despite a somewhat comically asymmetrical face, could pass muster. On film, up close, he looks too paltry for the part. Similarly, the able Robert Lang, only four years Jacobi's senior but looking even older, comes across on film as too mature for Rodrigo, whom Shakespeare intended as the archetype of youthful folly.

Nor does film take kindly to theatrical décor. In spite of what Olivier says on the DVD, the backgrounds throughout register as theater scenery. In the outdoors sections, a backdrop of streaky orange slashes interspersed with tan or ocher, meant to look magically Mediterranean, merely suggest daubs of orange paint from uncleaned brushes formerly dipped in brown.

And then there are those unyielding terrace steps in the background and the all-too calculatedly spaced pilasters that further spell monotony on an otherwise bare stage. It makes one wonder why the governor's palace of Cyprus could not afford a few sticks of furniture. Even the concluding bedroom scene was furnished only with a distant door and a draw curtain, with Desdemona strangled on what looks like a catafalque in the middle of a cathedral. The proscenium can handle this sort of thing; the camera is more exacting.

Olivier himself had doubts about his performance even onstage. On a triumphant night, he dashed into his dressing room and slammed the door shut. When one of his perplexed colleagues dared inquire through the door, "What's the matter, Larry? It was great," Olivier shouted back, "I know it was great, damn it, but I don't know how I did it, so how can I be sure I can do it again?"

The Othello DVD can be purchased on its own or in a quadruple-decker that comprises also the Branagh Hamlet, Max Reinhardt Midsummer Night's Dream and the rather geriatric Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer Romeo and Juliet. Think hard before investing.