Welles's Othello raises basic questions about the nature of film adaptations of stage plays more incisively than his Macbeth. One reason for this is the fact that Welles's presentational concepts in the earlier film developed from his stage productions at Harlem and Utah. Another is that film's generic affinity with the ‘horror film’. Thirdly, Macbeth was so much better in concept than it was in execution, that its initial impact on being screened failed to elicit much serious response either as Shakespearean or cinematic drama. Only the French critics, especially Bazin and Beylie, recognized the thematic articulation in the film's spatial strategies.

The techniques of Othello are considerably more refined. The theatricality of constructed décor gives way to the realism of sea and sky, and to the architectural polarities of Venice and Mogador. For the first time in this examination of specific Shakespearean films, we are faced with a film which aims at reconciling theatrical drama with the realism of non-theatrical spatial elements. The sustained insistence with which the film achieves this reconciliation, and its integration of architectural realism not simply as a justification for cinema but as thematic statement, is the major distinction which distances Welles's Othello from every other major Shakespearean film. The film gains its special adaptive stature, too, from Welles's cinematic language, which is fused with the dramatic energy of the play.