One of the first projects Orson Welles undertook after moving to Europe was a film version of Othello. Despite Macbeth’s criticism, he was still confident he could produce a successful Shakespearean film.
However, filming was erratic. Its original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began pouring his own money into the project.
He took acting jobs to ensure continued production. He also raised money by going on the stage. In the summer of 1950 Welles appeared in Paris in his own play called The Blessed and The Damned, which consisted of a short film, called The Miracle of St. Anne, and two one-act plays. It received positive reviews.
In August he traveled to Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich, where he starred in An Evening With Orson Welles.
Filming of Othello stopped for months at a time to raise money. It took more than two years to complete and was shot in Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome.
Before the film’s release, Welles played the Shakespearean drama on stage to audiences in Newcastle and London.
A dubbed version of Othello premiered in Rome In November of 1951. Welles' original English-language version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1952. It won the Grand Prix and was released in Europe thereafter.
When David O’Selznick got word that Harry Alan Towers had distributed The Adventures of Harry Lime to MGM, he refused to air it, so Towers took the series elsewhere. He quickly found out that MGM was now contractually obligated to provide a series with Welles to the Mutual Broadcasting System.
So, in 1951 Towers went to Welles with another radio series. He’d already produced a series called The Secrets of Scotland Yard with Clive Brook.
The new series would be called The Black Museum. It was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard. Walking through the museum, Welles would pause at one of the exhibits, describing an artifact that led into a dramatized tale of a brutal murder or a vicious crime.
Towers visited Australia in the late 1940s and set up production facilities in Sydney. The Black Museum was produced there by Creswick Jenkinson. Ira Marion was scriptwriter and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch.
Orson Welles's introductions were recorded on tape in London, then flown to Australia to be added to the locally recorded performances. This was the first series to be produced in Australia in this way.
The program was transcribed in 1951. In the U.S. Mutual Broadcasting carried the series, with more than five-hundred stations airing it. In New York it began airing Tuesdays at 8PM on New Year’s Day, 1952. Episode twenty-seven was called “The Notes” or “Kilroy Was Here.”
“Kilroy Was Here” is a graffiti scrawl or meme of debated origin that became popular during World War II. It was associated with GIs stationed in Europe, depicting a bald-headed man with prominent nose clutching at and peeking over a wall. Next to him was the phrase.
Robert Rietti played leads and Keith Pyott was often in the cast. Beginning In May of 1953, The Black Museum was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991.
The Black Museum aired for the calendar year of 1952 over Mutual. It was rebroadcast on KABC, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1964, and on KUAC—FM in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1967.
In 2002, Harry Alan Towers produced The Black Museum for TV, hiring Gregory Mackenzie to be director and showrunner. The anthology series used Welles’ original narration.
The adaptation was shot on location in London in a film noir style and the pilot starred Michael York as Scotland Yard Inspector Russell.
view more