In addition to Orson Welles, the cast consisted of Micheál Mac Liammóir as Iago (one of his only starring film roles), Robert Coote as Roderigo, Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona, Michael Laurence as Cassio, Fay Compton as Emilia and Doris Dowling as Bianca.

The film found some imaginative solutions to a range of logistical problems; the scene in which Roderigo is murdered in a Turkish bath was shot in that form because the original costumes were impounded and using replacements would have meant a delay.

[6] Welles used the money from his acting roles, such as in The Third Man (1949), to help finance the film, but this often involved pausing filming for several months while he went off to raise money; and these pauses were further complicated by the shifting availability of different actors, which meant that some key parts (like Desdemona) had to be recast, and whole scenes then reshot.

When Welles acted in the 1950 film The Black Rose, he insisted that the coat his character, Bayan, wore be lined with mink, even though it would not be visible.

Welles supervised a different version of Othello for the American market, a 93-minute cut released on 12 September 1955 in New York City.

Suzanne Cloutier's entire performance was dubbed by Gudrun Ure, who had previously played Desdemona opposite Welles in a 1951 theatre production of Othello that was staged to raise funds to complete the film.

"[13] In 1992, Beatrice Welles-Smith, daughter of Orson Welles, supervised a restoration of the film, which saw over $1,000,000 spent on improving the picture quality, resynchronizing the audio, adding extra sound effects, and completely rerecording the music in stereo.

Although the restoration was greeted with positive reviews upon its release, it subsequently came under attack for numerous technical flaws and alterations.

Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that numerous changes were made against Welles's intent and that the restoration was incompetent, having used as its source an original distribution print with a flawed soundtrack.

In fact, the visual elements of the 1992 restoration utilized a fine-grain master positive — discovered in a storage facility in New Jersey — as its source, not a distribution print.

[citation needed] Rosenbaum makes several charges of incompetence on the restoration team's part, including that the restoration team were unaware of the European cut's existence, and instead based their work on the American cut which was farther from Welles's original vision.

Instead of consulting the papers of composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, where a full copy of the score survives, the restorers chose to transcribe the music from the poor-quality audio of the print they had, with numerous mistakes having been made — Lavagnino's son has gone so far as to argue the new score is so different it is no longer his father's work.

[17] Jonathan Rosenbaum has defended the out-of-synchronization dubbing of some lines in Welles's original version, pointing out it was typical of European films of the early 1950s, and likening modern attempts to resynchronize it to the proposed colorisation of Citizen Kane.

[18] This digital version premiered in Dallas at the 2014 USA Film Festival,[19] and subsequently played in other cities on the art-house circuit.

[20][21][22][23] The New Yorker reported that the monaural soundtrack was a great improvement on the previous version of the restoration — "much more appropriate for a low-budget, black-and-white 1952 release.

Special features include the short film Return to Glennascaul (1951); audio commentary by Peter Bogdanovich and Myron Meisel; and interviews with Simon Callow, Joseph McBride, François Thomas and Ayanna Thompson.