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NEXT TIME AN OPERA In A Man For All Seasons writer Robert Bolt used some of the transcribed words of Thomas More with the intent to satisfy an audience hungry for the melodious sounds of righteousness in his futile battle over not sanctioning Henry VIII’s intended marriage to Anne Boleyn. Starting out minor, the combat escalated to monumental schism—Henry splitting from the Roman Catholic Church when it excommunicated him for marrying Anne anyway and he then created and installed himself head of the Church of England. If Bolt’s small moral ariettas are fundamentally ungratifying—just as Paul Scofield’s More starts to soar the lofty ethics, he gets cut short by excessive indignation from Henry’s coterie headed by Cromwell—they’re also puny compared to the non-Anne issues left wanting. But the abridgement may be built in: the distinction between the intent of Bolt’s rigged libretto and what many others feel about More’s intransigence, in regard to pacifying Henry, is the Exchequer’s commitment to the chopping block without confessing his stand as an act of extreme egocentricity; with his fate not just sealed but accepted, he sacrifices his powerful thorniness to Henry for a guarantee of immortality, both for history and the sake of hypocritical Church sanctimony. If amusement in the omniscience, it comes to a halt when hearing him tell his wife and daughter to do what he won’t—sell their souls as, in effect, they are less important than his. While some historians posit More’s humanist scholasticism forbade him to consider deliberate martyrdom, there are those who believe his persistent unwillingness to compromise created opportunity for the Vatican to exploit his fate while downplaying its own long-established corruption. (Bolt manages to obligatorily infer a bit of the latter.) Moreover, when Henry sent him to the Tower, breaking a publicized promise never to “molest” More’s conscience, it wasn’t his death Rome initially and vehemently responded to, it was the beheading of one of its princes—John Cardinal Fisher, who also rejected Henry’s claim as supreme head of the Church of England. He’s absent in the movie. (Twin martyrs Fisher and More would be beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized in 1935 by Pius XI.) Scofield earned a slew of awards—honors more rightly belonging to Richard Burton for WAOVW. On the whole it’s a smuggy performance; listening to his protestations against ever-expanding violations of decency and ignore his self-imposed conundrums, he’s More as the pharisaic don in perpetuity. Wendy Hiller as Lady Alice is quite moving, making her farewell to More the movie’s one laudable sequence. Robert Shaw as Henry and Nigel Davenport as Duke of Norfolk are respectively deafening and bulging-eyed. Fred Zinnemann directs with an overload of simple-mindedness. No greater proof of this than Leo McKern as Cromwell. Imagine the kind of aria he’d get at the Met. In Spherical, further cramping the economic production values. (Opening 2/15/1967 at the Esquire, running 28 weeks.) Oscar wins: best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, color cinematography and costumes. Oscar nominations for best supporting actor (Robert Shaw) and supporting actress (Hiller). ROLL OVER IMAGE
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
