Othello: a YouTube roundup

As Nicholas Hytner's revival opens at the National Theatre, we celebrate six notable screen Othellos, from Orson Welles' film noir approach to a US high-school version, via Laurence Olivier in the title role

Shakespeare's Othello attracted the attention of early film-makers and leading actors, including the German silent movie star Emil Jannings, who in 1922 starred opposite an Iago played by Werner Karauss, best known as the sinister carnival master in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The movie may be silent, yet the emotions are anything but, as you can see from this clip.

Orson Welles' 1952 The Tragedy of Othello: the Moor of Venice took four years to make and was beset by financial problems. But Welles turned adversity into a virtue, creating a brilliantly atmospheric film noir, as can be seen from this remarkable opening sequence which includes the scene Shakespeare never wrote: Othello and Desdemona's funeral.

Laurence Olivier's 1965 Othello is famed, but not always for the right reasons. Stuart Burge's attempt to translate an acclaimed stage performance (directed by John Dexter) to film is ill-conceived, and makes Olivier look less like one of the 20th century's greatest actors and more like a massive ham. You may disagree, but judge for yourself from this clip where he sets about killing Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess of Grantham with enormous relish.

Kenneth Branagh is a wonderfully poisonous malicious Iago opposite Laurence Fishburne's Othello in Oliver Parker's 1995 movie. Fishburne gets better and better as the movie progresses and he moves towards total psychological collapse. Well worth seeing in its entirety.

Othello is renamed Odin and becomes a basketball star in a private US school in Tim Blake's 2001's reimagining of Shakespeare. Josh Hartnett played the Iago figure (renamed Hugo) and Julia Stiles is Desi, daughter of the school's dean. I haven't seen the whole movie, but would like to know if the concept works if you have. Here's the trailer.

As the World Shakespeare Season and the Globe to Globe initiative proved, Shakespeare travels across international borders very well. Here's a brief clip from the 2006 Hindi movie, Omkara, made by Vishal Bhardwaj.

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