Reviews

Olivier's performance is astounding. He runs the gamut from sweet and playful to bloody rage. Best of all is his spot-on clarity in conveying the seventeenth-century language. For this viewer, the Moorish makeup is honorable and character-appropriate. Throughout, one can see Othello's heroic disregard of the racist comments lobbed at him by the white Venitians.

The DVD is completely remastered by Warners. Learmedia, an arts-oriented DVD vendor in Canada has a PAL standard DVD for sale. See my comment in the Message Boards here for more about the DVD.

Some trivia: The Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli said of Olivier's stage version: "I was told that this was the last flourish of the romantic tradition of acting. It's nothing of the sort. It's an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the last 3 centuries. It's grand and majestic, but it's also modern and realistic. I would call it a lesson for us all." John Steinbeck said that Olivier's performance on-stage was the greatest he had ever seen. Other critics, particularly Bosley Caruthers in the New York Times, trashed the performance as rubbish both on-stage and screen, accusing Olivier of making the noble Moor into a racist caricature. Sammy Davis Jr.' claimed that Olivier had come to see him perform multiple times and copied some of his mannerisms in his Othello. Olivier said that the play belongs to Iago, who could make the Moor look a credulous idiot. When Kenneth Tynan told Olivier that Orson Welles had described Othello as "a natural baritone", Olivier, a natural tenor, took voice lessons for several weeks. At the first read through, his voice was an octave lower than any one had heard it before. It was said that his vocal range was so immense that by a single new inflexion he could point the way to a whole new interpretation. Tynan wrote in his book "Profiles" (Nick Hern Books, 1989): "In the opening exchanges with Iago, Olivier displays the public mask of Othello: a Negro sophisticated enough to conform to the white myth about Negroes, pretending to be simple and not above rolling the eyes, but in fact concealing (like any other aristocrat) a highly developed sense of racial superiority... Olivier's was not a noble, 'civilised' Othello but a triumphant black despot, aflame with unadmitted self-regard. So far from letting Iago manipulate him, he seemed to manipulate Iago."