Word: iago
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...Iago: And nothing can or shall content my soul...
...completely destructive of his own personality. Walter Huston has not, as some lesser man might do, keyed himself up to the heights of affected stiffness, in order to play Shakespeare. In the opening scenes he is the reserved, resolute soldier, quietly affable, that Othello is meant to be. As Iago progresses in his corrosive work, Othello is made by the master actor, through the episodes of the fictitious night in the camp and the handkerchief show and so forth, imperceptibly to advance his jealous disintegration, until at the end he is raving so furiously that Mr. Huston is forced...
...recasting of the scenes into two acts is a necessary expedient. But there is also an annoying amount of expurgation of certain crudities which it might be thought that over three centuries had succeeded in mellowing. And in the crucial scene where Cassio is forced by the craft of Iago to convict himself before Othello in a completely misleading way, the clinching evidence of the handkerchief is in this performance somehow strangely omitted...
...support is as good as one is accustomed to fine under a master. Robert Keith is in general quite satisfactory as Iago, although his appearance is more suggestive of a mischievous schoolboy than of a malignant traitor, and in spite of the somewhat excessive faces and eyes he makes. Nan Sunderland (Mrs. Huston) is as vivacious and as sweet as Desdemona should be, but she can't help looking a little mature. Euqal praise might be extended to Natalie Hall as Emilia and G. P. Huntley, Jr. as Cassio...
When Scotti announced his retirement from the Metropolitan Opera Company three years ago, Manhattan newspapers devoted columns to his proud career, his intelligent use of a voice that was never booming, his subtle impersonations of such villains as Iago in Otello, Chim-Fen in L'Oracolo, Scarpia in Tosca (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933). When he sang his farewell performance a great audience cheered, wept, sang For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. When he died in Naples last week there were only four mourners to follow him to his grave...