Othello

Welles shot this over three years, from 1948 to 1951, stopping and restarting constantly. The reason was simple: the money kept running out. The Italian producer withdrew, the French backing withdrew, the costumiers and set engineers left. Welles took acting jobs in other people's films and poured the fees back into this one. Its most famous solution came out of that shortage. When the costumes failed to arrive, Welles decided to stage a murder in a Turkish bathhouse, where everyone is in towels and robes anyway and no period clothing is needed. That sequence is now considered the strongest thing in the film. The main location was Essaouira on the Moroccan coast, then called Mogador, where Welles worked with local craftsmen. The film screened at Cannes in 1952 and took the top prize. Who it is for: viewers who want to see constraint make cinema better, and Shakespeare built out of images rather than recorded from a stage. Who it is not for: anyone needing technical polish. The sound was added afterwards, lip sync drifts, and the cut is stitched from three years of fragments.