MOVIES : The Majesty of the Moor : Welles’ ‘Othello’ was snared in a web that Iago might have spun; now it can be seen and heard in a restoration superior to the original

Among the faithful in all disciplines, the most poignant question is always what might have been. What music might Mozart have written if he’d lived, what feats might Ted Williams have managed if world wars hadn’t intervened, and what films might Orson Welles have made if he’d ever had enough money to do things his way.

With but a dozen or so pictures to Welles’ credit, his place as one of the very greatest of directors--inventive, daring, possessed of an incomparable eye and a peerless sense of cinematic rhythm--is secure. Yet except for the deservedly celebrated “Citizen Kane,” his debut, Welles never commanded the full resources of his medium, never had access to all the tools even the most menial of Hollywood hirelings consider their due.

Though most of America may remember Welles as the oversize individual who refused to drink any wine before its time, the film community views with continual agony the fact that a man of his abilities had to nickel-and-dime his way through a career. Was Welles simply profligate and unreliable, doomed to flighty financing because he could not be counted on to get the job done on budget and on time? Or was he a misunderstood genius, punished for daring to buck the system, a filmmaker who couldn’t buy a break and had bad luck besides?

Currently adding flavor to the debate is the re-release Friday (at the AMC Century 14 and Edwards South Coast Village) of Welles’ “Othello,” selected as best feature at Cannes in 1952 and largely unseen since. Carefully restored with a newly minted soundtrack, it is a breathtaking piece of filmmaking that is all the more impressive in light of all the tribulations the director and his company endured to get it finished.

All of Welles’ films have mighty tales of woe attached to them, but the story of the four grueling years it took “Othello” to get made is so daunting that Frank Brady, the most evenhanded of Welles’ several biographers, labels it “prolonged, intricate, bewildering.” Every aspect of filming, from casting to shooting to editing, was laden with innumerable disputes and difficulties, so that even today sorting the truth from the legend is a formidable task.

What is indisputable is that a liking for Shakespeare marked Welles’ entire career, leading him to direct “Julius Caesar” on stage as well as three films (“Macbeth” and the historical pastiche “Chimes at Midnight” being the other two) based on the gentleman’s writings.

Yet Welles was hardly a textural purist. His attitude can be inferred from a famous comment John Houseman made when asked when Welles’ Mercury Theater production of “Julius Caesar” would open: “When Welles finishes writing it.” But the wonder of all his Shakespearean films, very much including “Othello,” is that no matter how far they depart from the plot, they are perfectly in sync with the spirit of the plays. As fellow director Leni Riefenstahl put it, Welles “draws marvelous pictures in the margin of Shakespeare. The films are like operas and ballets suggested by Shakespeare, not Shakespeare himself.”

Welles began working in earnest on his “Othello” in 1948. Casting himself as the brooding Moor did not require much legwork, but the other roles proved more intractable. He went through three serious and time-consuming Desdemonas before settling on French-Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier for the part. And after Everett Sloane decided against playing Iago, Welles had to use all his considerable persuasive powers to get Abbey Theater veteran Michael MacLiammoir to take the job.

In the end, though, the problems with casting proved to be child’s play compared to what it took to get the actual filming done. Welles never had enough cash to shoot more than a little bit of the picture at a time. Once the money ran out, he’d fly off to whatever acting job presented itself, earn some more, regroup the cast (MacLiammoir, who wrote a book about the experience, called the vagabond troupe “a chic but highly neurotic lumber camp”) and shoot some more film.

Welles hired himself out for three films while he made “Othello,” ranging from the generally unremembered “Prince of Foxes” and “The Black Rose” to the classic “The Third Man,” for which, so one story goes, he took his money upfront rather than hold out for a much more lucrative percentage because he was so desperate to finish his own film.

Even these assignments didn’t cover the project’s costs, and another story has Welles showing up at Darryl F. Zanuck’s French Riviera hotel room at 4 a.m. after having taken a $420 cab ride from Italy, which he promptly put on the mogul’s tab. When the two men met, the desperate Welles either--depending on the version--threw his arms around Zanuck or went down on his knees. Whatever he did apparently worked: The 20th Century Fox potentate coughed up $75,000 in exchange for part-ownership of the production.

Welles shot “Othello” in numerous sites in Italy as well as in an 18th-Century castle in Mogodor, Morocco, he discovered while acting in “The Black Rose.” But no matter where he shot, problems continued. Welles ran through five cinematographers, and since the whole cast could rarely reassemble at a moment’s notice, hooded stand-ins were often filmed from the back to take their place. In the film’s most famous improvisation, when elaborate costumes for Iago’s inciting Roderigo to the murder of Cassio failed to show up, Welles decided on the spur of the moment to set the scene in a Turkish bath, dressing his disbelieving cast in nothing but towels.

“Othello’s” editing, not surprisingly, proved equally sticky and took a full two years and the services of four editors to finish. With five or six different film stocks developed in several different countries, not to mention the different cameramen and the ever-changing locations (“Roderigo kicks Cassio in Massaga and gets punched back in Ortegea, more than a thousand miles away,” Frank Brady reports), post-production turned into an elaborate puzzle to which only Welles had the final key.

For a while it looked like the world would reward Welles’ perseverance. Entered as the Moroccan entry because parts of the film were shot there, the film won at Cannes (actually it shared its glory with a totally forgotten Italian film, “Two Cents Worth of Hope”), a victory Welles was tipped off to in advance when puzzled festival officials had to ask him if he knew what the Moroccan national anthem was. (He didn’t.)

However, bad reviews--one English paper ran the headline “The Boor of Venice”--focusing in part on the terrible technical quality of the sound (most of the dialogue having been recorded independently of the photography) doomed “Othello” to a kind of art-house oblivion. But a quest incited by the director’s daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, turned up the original nitrate negative in a warehouse in Ogdensburg, N.J., and a long process of repair began.

Unlike most restorations, which deal with footage excised by an unfeeling studio, almost all the work on “Othello” had to do with cleaning up that impenetrable soundtrack. The fine score was completely rerecorded by the Chicago Symphony and, according to Michael Dawson, one of the producers of the restoration, “the dialogue had to be carved out word for word from the original optical negative.” More than that, “the sections out of sync were digitally reprocessed so that syllables and vowels could literally be expanded or compressed to match lip movements,” Dawson said.

The result is a film that is undoubtedly closer to Welles’ original conception than anything the director himself ever lived to see. And an audacious conception it certainly is.

Right from the opening sequence, an unprecedented funeral procession for the Moor and his Desdemona filled with startling Sergei Eisenstein-influenced compositions, we are presented a no-holds barred “Othello” stripped down to a basic 91 minutes but enthralling every step of the way.

Except for the wily MacLiammoir, a perfect Iago, and perhaps Welles as well, the acting in “Othello” is nothing to write home about. But the director himself, effortlessly profligate with his abilities, constitutionally incapable of an uninteresting composition, was near the top of his form.

With his inventive use of space, his intuitive interplay of light and shadow, verticals and horizontals, movement and stillness, Welles almost casually overcame all those difficulties and turned out a film that remains fresh and alive 40 years after the fact. What could Orson Welles have done if he’d ever had enough money? Consider the possibilities, and weep.