Peter Glenville (1964)
There’s no point my pretending that I approached Peter Glenville’s best-known film with unbridled enthusiasm. I think I’d twice tried watching it on television and given up – and it was on BBC2 earlier in the same day that I’d booked to see it at BFI. It still made sense to watch Becket in a cinema in order to stick it out – although, in the event, I recorded the last twenty minutes of the television screening and left NFT3 before the end so that I could get an earlier train home. Adapted by Edward Anhalt from Jean Anouilh’s stage play Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu (which Glenville had directed on Broadway), Becket was well received: it made money at the box office and was nominated for twelve Oscars (Anhalt’s screenplay was the only one that it won). Laurence Rosenthal, who wrote the film’s score and introduced the BFI screening, mentioned, however, that the film was criticised for having insufficient action. Rosenthal defended Becket as being full of ‘moral action’ but Glenville’s direction (very possibly influenced by the wishes of Paramount and the producer Hal Wallis) is more half-hearted than Rosenthal implied. Glenville keeps inserting bits of physical activity or, more often, spectacle; whenever he does so, he dilutes the drama. Laurence Rosenthal also praised the quality of the film’s production, especially John Bryan’s reconstruction of the interior of Canterbury Cathedral in a Shepperton hangar. This is a remarkable achievement but it swamps, and doesn’t connect with, what’s meant to be the heart of the picture. It has to be said that Rosenthal’s elaborate music has a similar effect.
The loyalty to king vs loyalty to God argument gives Becket an obviously similarity to A Man for All Seasons (staged as a full-length play for the first time in 1960 – the year after Anouilh’s Becket opened – although Robert Bolt had written Thomas More’s story as a radio and television play several years previously). The personal tensions within a dysfunctional royal family – and the presentation of these as if they were relationships de nos jours – anticipate James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. Perhaps the modernised family squabbles are meant to compensate for the difficulties that a late-twentieth-century audience is likely to have in relating to the protagonist’s religious dilemma. The play’s dialectic may be compelling in the theatre but it isn’t in Glenville’s movie. This is partly because he’s just not a good film director – although I don’t much care for A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann keeps it moving very crisply. In comparison, Becket, even with Geoffrey Unsworth as DoP, is visually rhythmless: Glenville seems merely to be photographing the lavish sets. A rather ludicrous example of his giving the audience a big-screen experience for the sake of it occurs when Thomas Becket and King Henry II, both on horseback, are seen from a God’s-eye view – tiny figures gradually approaching each other on a seashore in France (where Becket has been in hiding and Henry appears to have gone on a day trip). It’s like an equine parody of the cliché of long-separated lovers running towards each other from opposite ends of a field. (The sequence was more enjoyable in retrospect – after I’d read the BFI programme note, in which the editor Anne V Coates recalls that Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, both the worse for wear after a night’s heavy drinking, struggled to control their horses.) There are several sequences involving a crowd of extras and they always seem to react in the same, mechanical way – whether the multitude is expressing delight or despair, support or hostility.
There are other, major problems in the film of Becket which are not the fault – or not so explicitly the fault – of the director: there’s no real substance to what are meant to be crucial elements of the material. Once Henry has made him Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket’s allegiance to God arrives on cue for the moral dilemma to get underway but it comes out of nowhere and Richard Burton doesn’t suggest that it’s taken Becket by surprise. It’s impossible too to believe that Burton’s Becket was a libertine and a wencher alongside the young king; if this Becket did ever enjoy himself, it must have been long, long ago – his jadedness seems ingrained. The only thing that Burton sounds as if he means – except for Becket’s surprisingly passionate excommunication of the baron responsible for the death of a misbehaving priest – is his admission to Gwendolen (Sian Phillips), the long-term mistress he’s about to lose, that he’s never really cared for anyone. Does Henry really love Becket as the audience is repeatedly told? He clearly likes him (even though the charms of Burton’s Becket are elusive) but the monarch’s awareness that he’s in charge gives a manipulative, almost cruel edge to the intimacy between them. As Henry, Peter O’Toole shouts very entertainingly – he’s great at insulting Queen Eleanor (Pamela Brown) and the Queen Dowager Matilda (Martita Hunt). He excoriates his wife’s efforts at tapestry. In answer to his mother’s question ‘And I – have I too given you nothing?’ he replies, with weary acidity, ‘Life. Yes. Thank you’. O’Toole’s physical verve and unpredictability give his performance a charge – even if you sense sometimes that the actor is as impatient with the lines he has to get through as the character is with the people to whom they’re delivered. O’Toole is also impressive at the climax of the film – here you believe in Henry’s love for Becket and you begin to wonder if it includes a sexual element.
John Gielgud is enjoyable in his brief appearance as the French king – largely because he’s witty in such a modern way and his being dressed up in period costume makes it all the funnier. Apart from the eccentric Pamela Brown and Felix Aylmer (Becket’s predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, who kicks the bucket too early), few of the supporting cast are up to much. An actor called David Weston is very dull in the sizeable role of a monk who becomes Becket’s devoted assistant and after Donald Wolfit’s first couple of scenes I dreaded his every reappearance as the Bishop of London. There’s a sequence in Rome involving the pope and one of his cardinals; they are played by Italians (Paola Stoppa and Gino Cervi – and Stoppa has a great, foxy face) but, because Gielgud’s Louis VII is so beautifully spoken and makes no attempt to sound French, the effect of their accented Engleesh-a is ridiculous.
2 November 2013
