Oh he is, folks, it's show tied. People say, good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater.
They are cold sodas, hot popcorn in no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
God As.
From the Unforgettable Award winning play comes the Best Picture of the Year, starring the Best Actor of the Year. So, Thomas Moyle, you, having found guilty of high treason the sentence of the cause yours. When I was practicing law the man I was asked the prisoner before pronouncing sentence if he had anything to say, Have you anything to say?
Yes, I'm.
Honored by six Academy Awards. A Man for All Seasons.
So, Thomas Moore, have you anything to say to me?
Regarding the King's marriage with Queen Anne.
I understood I was not to be asked at again.
Benevident to me wonders to bring me these char I'll tell us for children, Master Secretary, not for me. A Man for All Seasons, winner of six Academy AWAR Awards, including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture of the Year.
Dangerous I mean as a friend, I am a friend. I wish I wasn't what I am.
Sir Thomas Thomas Paul Schofield hailed as Best Actor of the Year for his performance as Thomas Moore now Wenday Hillary as the woman behind the Man, Leo McKern as Cromwell, a conspirator, Robert Shaw as the lusty King Henry of the Eighth.
In you Know, are you?
Grace?
Spare meal discretion.
Mm hmm to play and mark.
Again orson Well says Cardinal Wolsey, and Susannah Yorke as the daughter torn between love and.
Mild Margaret What is it make?
Father?
Is a new act going through parliament?
Oh?
Why this actor going to administer an oath about the marriage?
And what concussion is the earth.
High treason?
Honor.
Welcome to the Project Booth. I'm your host, Mike White, join me once again as mister Spencer Parsons.
Hello.
Also back in the booth is mister Robert Bellissimo.
Hello, Mike and Spencer and everyone listening. Thanks for having me back on this episode.
We are taking a request from Patreon listener. Peter Rogers A Man for All Seasons directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by Robert Bolt, adapted from his own play. The film stars Paul Scholfield as Sir Thomas Moore, a statesman from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. That's the fourteen hundreds and the fifteen hundreds. I also have to say that to myself, because the whole the twentieth century
was the nineteen hundreds always threw me off. When he opposed the divorce and remarriage of Henry the Eighth, he was arrested and eventually spoilers put to death. We will be discussing more the film and its remake and other things, and spoiling things as we go along, not that I can really spoil it any more than I just did. So if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the
podcast and track down the film. We will still be here. So, Spencer, when was the first you saw this movie and what did you think?
My first memory of this movie, as it was one of those that played very popularly during those PBS fundraising marathons where they would interrupt every fifteen minutes or so and the movie would take about.
Four hours to watch. They did this a bunch of times, and I know I.
Saw it at least in pieces a couple of times. As a kid, and you know, just stuck with me as that kind of movie. Honestly, I've been meaning to rewatch it because I'm a big Orson Wells fan, is well known on this show, and felt like, oh I got to see the Orson Wells performance, and on that score, I was not disappointed. You know, Wells really brings it
absolutely best scene in the movie. I mean, it doesn't feel like an Orson Wells movie, but you definitely feel an influence in that scene that is very different in terms of it. It's like visualization, filmmaker, everything from.
The rest of the film and Robert, how about yourself.
This was the first time view it for me, spent for me Jowell's fan, so it had been on my watch list for a while. And as you've interviewed Mike Joseph Bride a few times, I know he's Well's historian and he's very fond of Wells in this film. So this was my first time seeing it. And then I loved this scene and then before you knew it, he's dead. I'm like, oh great, this movie just started in Wells with Denaud Kiss. So yeah, not enough Wells, not enough.
Robert Shaw I thought like I thoughts great too.
Robert Seohn's incredible, He's so good.
In it, and I was like, oh, we only see him in a couple of scenes. But I liked it, and I really loved I didn't love it, but I liked it. But I always love a persons the system, films or stories, and I thought, Okay, that's what this is, but yet, why is it not? Why do I not like it more than I do? And I think it
was because Thomas Moore. The way he's depicted anyways, is that he's just unshakable stone, just right from the beginning, you know, as right away they're asking him to compromise and he will not, and of course throughout that's what it is, and it obviously it gets worse and worse for him. So I like that. And then I thought, well, I love Surproco and he's not Surprogo. He's not so complicated in that either. But I think the difference with that is he starts he's a rookie cop. It gradually
builds to him seeing all this corruption. There's a lot more feelings involved we see as a gregarious side. We see him snap gradually. As I was furious and how anxious he gets throughout, so it has a lot more feelings to it, whereas this this guy is just like Nope, I am not gonna bend. And I mean I thought Schoolfield was fantastic in it, and there is some moments where he really snap, but only a couple of times.
He's just he's a steady rock so and everybody else is rather one dimensional as well, so it kind of felt a little flat to me, pretty predictable. I thought, Okay, I see where this is going. You know it's not gonna hand well for this guy. But after reading that there are certain things about him that they didn't include, I thought it was a shame, which I'm sure we'll get into as the review in folds, but that that's my initial impressions.
This was also a first time watch for me. This movie has just always been there. I mean, it won the Academy Award and won sixty six or for sixty six won a whole bunch of awards. It's always just been held up as like, oh, a man for all seasons, and I just never went there. Had we not gotten this request from Paul Rodgers, I don't think I would have checked it out, even though I had a great time with the next film that Cinnamon directed, which was
The Jackal. Had a wonderful discussion about that. But going back to this one in sixty six, I mean, yeah, you're kind of right as far as like, this is the guy against the system type of thing. The play was out in what sixty two? There was actually a sixty three version of it made for Australian television. I tried my best to find that was unable to And then of course there's a remake that we'll talk about a little bit later.
This film looks beautiful.
I like the use of the river throughout this whole thing, that we start on the river and just use the river to kind of go up and down from where more is at down the river to I guess it's London.
I guess.
I feel so lost in this. And I had to do so much fricking reading for this one because it was just like who is this guy? Because I always get him mixed up Thomas Moore, I get mixed up with Thomas A. Beckett and Thomas Aquinas all the time. So I'm just like, who is this guy? And then when you ask that question, depending on who you ask it of you're going to get a whole different answer. There is the man of unshakable faith, and then and
there's the guy who put heretics to death. And it feels like I would like a little bit of a blend of the two and see a more three sixty version of More because this, like you said, he's a very static character, and we're just talking earlier today about Return of the Jedi and like how characters can be active dynamic or they can be very static and more as a super static character.
I'm gonna jump in.
I think Schofield's performance it is the worst thing about the movie. I think the performance is bad because he's taken it in a direction that not different really from.
What Zinnama is doing with it.
Zinneman not one of my favorite directors, and there will be more shots fired about other Sacred Cow films. I rewatched high Noon because this is like, this is basically high Noon, but without shooting. It's a similar kind of I realized while I was watching it again, it's.
The same kind of movie. Both of these movies stink, they're bad.
They have the same kind of problem from Zimmerman, which is that Zennaman just assumes the goodness of these aracters. You know, Gary Cooper in the case of High Noon all the way through and assumes the goodness of Thomas Moore here and assumes too much for this to be a real drama of a.
Man against the system.
There is a system, and there's a person who's a kind of I think Gary Cooper's performance is way better in High Noon, but it's still the conception of the character is this unshakable block of wood all the way through.
And Schofield, this is.
A movie where I actually question the editing to get Schofield's performance In a couple of places. He is in such a low register through the whole thing. One of the only times that he raises his voice in any recognizable way is he probably should against this situation that he's in. Is a way long, wide shot looking at his back when he yells in the courtroom near the end, and I almost thought it was another character.
Because his voice was so different. It might even be dumped.
I ran it back a few times, and I saw this in the editing, and yeah, sure, I think you can look into his face and you can believe him moment to moment, But he has just made such a disastrous choice about this character over time that I think
the movie actually works very much against itself. You know, I come out on the side of corruption when I watched this movie because I see a character it's a kind of similar thing again to Hei Newon, and I might get into that a little bit more later, but I see this character who's mainly just what he is saying, what he's doing, how he is behaving. It just makes him kind of an asshole. And I think Thomas Moore is a fascinating interesting character. It could be an interesting asshole.
I mean, this is somebody who really took heretics to task, in particular Lutherans. He wrote flame notes to Luther that were full of profanity.
You know.
He wrote Utopia, which I actually read again for this because I had read it in college, and I was like, I don't think this guy is like a writer can be different from you know, in person, from how they are on the page. But there's no evidence of the writer that wrote Utopia. There's only this idea that he's never going to move and it starts to the very beginning and goes through the end. When I get a scene with Orson Wells, I'm convinced that actually the corruption in this case is necessary.
England has been through the Wars of Roses.
It's been thirty straight years of mayhem and murder and insanity. And the point here is to get an air who will be legitimate to the throne when the tutors are very weak in their.
Assumption of the throne. So there's a very serious kind of issue.
And I just start to wonder over the course of this version because I also, you know, dealt with the play, and I think the play is a different animal.
In this version. We have this dickhead who won't move.
At the cost, potentially at the cost of other people's deaths over a particular point of how to deal with the pope. And I actually think that the dealing with the pope can be dealt with very seriously, but.
The movie doesn't deal with it seriously.
It's self evident that this guy is right, and he's just going to quietly say no, no, no, and I am going to be silent, you know, the entire time, as there are other people dealing with a very serious, deadly situation for ordinary people, and he won't move. And this is especially difficult in terms of you know, there are a lot of current resonances with a story like this, not just man against the system, but the idea that a lot of people are allowing the system to go
out of control because they're afraid. And I really want, like I so in my core being want to sympathize with his position, and I don't know. I see Robert Shaw play Henry the Eighth, who is one of the monsters of history, and I'm all about Robert Shaw. I see Cardinal Wolseley at the beginning, played by Orson Wells in a brilliant scene, and as he brings up the salient points about recent history and what they need to do,
I cannot but side with Orson Wells. And then additionally, Vanessa Redgrave appears very briefly as Anne boleyn Oh my god, three minutes in the movie, maybe even less, has hardly a line, completely amazing, riveting, full of life.
And then everybody else in the movie Zenneman is toning them all.
John Hurt, also great actor Schofield, Hurt, lots of other people toned into this kind of lame register of history. It's not a living movie, and it makes precisely the opposite points because of those who actually live on screen in it.
Shaw was so riveting. Yeah, I mean his presence is certainly felt throughout because he's the one giving these orders. And I thought, well, why wouldn't you see him, you know, as they're hearing that Thomas More won't bend, as all his allies are the ones now dealing with him and not the king directly, I'm like, well, what do he do?
Cut back to him, Like, I would have loved to have seen the way he reacted to this, because he was so ferocious and he brought so much feeling to a film that was mostly flat, And I just thought that was very strange to have only had him in what two or three scenes. I think the wedding and when he comes and visit, well, in the wedding.
Doesn't appear to be in the play. And I love the wedding scene.
I mean I love not just because of those performances, but also because, like Zinnaman's camera comes to life in relationship to the performances, not just like he's plunked down the camera and Robert Shaw's taking over. It's like, all of a sudden, the camera really cares about a character and becomes part of their psychology, which just doesn't happen,
you know, much else in the film. There are some very pretty pictures, but it's really interesting the strongest actors do demand from Zennemon a different kind of approach to how the story is told visually. The two scenes with Orson Wells are also a lot more interesting.
You know, there's the one scene where he's.
In the very painterly They put him at a tiny, tiny desk and he looks enormous, and Wells has I'm sure Wells did his own makeup, so he's got this like really grotesque makeup with like red rings around his eyes.
He looks on death's door anyway.
And then there's that later scene where he's been taken to the Tower of London because you know, Henry, he's failed Henry the Eighth and all of that. He's playing it on his back and his face is like upside down on the screen, and it's just this doesn't happen
for anybody else in the movie. And I think it's in part because we have these two three obstreperous kind of actors who simply demand another kind of photography from Zennerman, and he's directed everybody else nicely, but they're just too they're too painterly, they're too solid, they're not dynamic presences.
That's a kind of tableau vivant movie. And I'm no big fan of the Oscars.
But this is like one of those movies that I would point to as like, yeah, and in nineteen sixty six they had this like Deadly Dull Man for All Seasons and they gave that a heap of Oscars.
Robert. The last time that you and I spoke, we talked about just that whole thing of that characters. Zay just having this promise he made and he is unshakable in his faith, and it's similar, but it's so different from what More is doing. It's just amazing that both of these movies have these characters whe they're like, no, this is what's right, and I have to do this.
It's a promise that he made to a saint and he feels that he has to do this, Whereas in this one, I know that Moore is struggling with his faith and is very Catholic in his faith, and he's just like, no, no, we can't do this. We really can't bend the rules. But it doesn't feel like it's like really down in his core. To me, it just feels like, no, that's the rule, that's all it is, and just I have to follow the rule. And obviously the rules of religion are just so fricking arbitrary. It's crazy.
You know.
I've talked before about, you know, how wars and people were murdered over silly little things or things that they thought were just incredibly massive when it came to like when was Jesus a human? When was he a god? Does transubstantiation is that literal blood or is that just
figurative blood? Like people are being thrown out of windows about this shit where it's just like no, no, and this whole thing where it's like, you know, the Anglican Church, I mean, from what I understand, it was basically like, hey, we need a church system so that the king can divorce and remarry and nobody's going to throw a fit.
Guess what.
The Pope is not very happy with that. And we have the Catholics, we have the Protestants, and we've had hundreds of years of bloodshed over Protestants versus Catholics. No offense, y'all, but I think you're really silly because I think it's very very small differences. As an atheist, I see very little difference between what you guys are doing and when it comes to Lutheranism. And yeah, I heard about those scatological letters that more would be writing to Luther. I mean,
Lutheranism is Catholic light lte. It's just basically the same thing with a few less stand up and sit down at the ceremonies. As far as me and Outsider see.
So, I hate to.
Be that guy who's just like you guys are all being a bunch of silly a holes, But comes down to that in this movie.
It's interesting what Spencer was saying about the schoolfield because I liked his performance, this sense of dignity he brought to it. But now Spencer's making me it's true that he's sort of I think he either him or ZI him and made a choice that like, this guy's just gonna put his nose up and not let anything get but he hangs on to his dignity. He chokes it. I mean, he just will not show. He shows very
little emotion. Intentionally interesting in a way. But now Spencer's making me think maybe that is part of what's kind of doll about it because maybe if he had allowed that to sort of build. I mean, people are betraying left, right and center. Like he's the one character who was a closer friend of his what was his name, They had more of a friendship, and you know, Thomas is bringing him to do it, even though he's understanding his position. But yeah, he just sort of like, no one's gonna
get to me. Even that scene, which I thought was quite good where he says goodbye to his family and everybody is getting so emotional except and you know, in a way it's interesting, but yeah, it's making me think, you know, perhaps he should have allowed these things to get to him and brought a lot more to it.
My most interesting character is the John Hurt character Richard rich and I can think of Richie Rich through the whole thing, but that he is there at the beginning and he's like, hey, I'm really looking for this position. He's striving for stuff. He's a little sneaky about things. And then we find out how sneak he is later on during some of the Leo McCarey stuff that he glombs onto that cup, that silver cup that Moore was given as a bribe and then takes that cup and
makes himself a man of the world. He buys himself a new robe. He's like, this is what I need. I need a new robe. I need to look like you. I need to do this. And then he just kind of parlays that into all of these things, and I'm surprised he didn't stab more in the back later on when it's like, oh, you got this coup, I'm expecting him to lie under oath just to keep his position and to really just throw under the bus, almost as if I could take over this spot that Moore has.
I really like this whole machiavellian things that are going on inside of this movie. I was like, Yeah, more of that, please like Meo McCarey. I fucking love Leo mccarrey.
I talk so much about him when we talked about the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as Smarter Brother and ironically and that it's him as the bad guy, him as Moriarty, and then who's a Roy Kinnear the guy that plays the common man in the remake, like that McCarry was the common man in the nineteen sixty two play and then gets cast in this role in the sixty sixth movie,
and he just plays it wonderfully. And the use of his glass eye to add to that performance where just one eye staring straight ahead and the other one's just kind of jumping back and forth. He looks so sinister, and he pulls it off wonderfully.
There was another thing with the Richard at Rigid that he's a complete opportunist right from the getting it. Maybe if they had made him much closer with Thomas Moore and more of an ally, and then if we had gradually seen him become corrupted, but that would have been much richer. But right away he's like, can I get a judge? Like you know that this guy's gonna the first chance he gets, he's gonna throw a clothes to
this guy. He's like a little dog again, another character who's just dealt with in a very one dimensional way. It just there was a real opportunity there.
I thought again, it felt so assumed that he's bad right from the get go. And yeah, he's a striver and whatnot, and this could be interesting drama, but it doesn't precisely mean.
To go in a particular direction with this either.
There could be something about how Thomas Mohr was an asshole to someone who was like a little person early on, and it isn't quite that, but if it plays as this mysterious thing of like instantly mar Is dismissing this young striver guy and then eventually that guy is gonna have his sort of long term petty revenge when we
get to committing perjury at the end. But the motivations of the characters, everything is so deliberately underplayed in this like that underplaying is some kind of key to depth that I just found the relationship with this character.
And I watched this movie twice this weekend.
Because I thought the first time, when I was really hating on it, that I was maybe being unfair and I had to check it out again. I found the relationship between these characters again a little bit mysterious.
Right from the get go, that that like there's something that's just assumed.
About the relationship that I'm supposed to know and it doesn't necessarily make sense. The script of the play is not that much different, but for instance, in the Charlton Heston version, the way that those characters play against each other early on, I'm like, ah, I got it, and it's so weird.
To say this, but I know you want to talk about the Charlton Heston at the end.
The Charlton Heston directed version where he's starring in it is so much better.
It's not like great filmmaking. It's a film to play.
It very much is a film to play, but as a film to play, it's also so much more itself. It's longer, there are passages of dialogue that helped to make more sense of what's going on with everybody, and also all the characters have like real emotions up and down throughout it. Charlton Heston's decision to play a melodramatic Thomas Moore makes so much more sense. And I think
it's so much better a performance. And this is like, you know, a nineties TBS version or something not that should necessarily be bad, but it's the kind of thing for anybody that's listening.
If you seek it.
Out, it's gonna look like a TV movie, you know, right out of the gate, but it's a TV movie that tells the story better, conveys character better. And I came away from the TV movie version with Charlton Heston, which also has a very interesting kind of thing with a sort of chorus character for it, who speaks directly to the audience, standing in for you know, it's one guy who stands in for common men throughout the story.
By having that device, it also sets the stakes better for what real people are put through.
The play version and the version that Charlon Heston did recognizes that Thomas Moore is standing on principle, and his principle makes more sense in that version. And also his standing on principle is likely to get other people killed. So it's a much more complicated version of history and much more satisfying.
I found the fact that he held on to his principles. I didn't really understand that was going to get people killed if he didn't go with what the king wanted. Like there was a reference to it at the beginning from Wells's character, so like old people will get killed. But I thought that was just a fear tactic to stand at the stake involve other than this is against my religious principles. I'm not going to support what you want to do. Like I had to read the plot
a few times, I had to go back. I mean, if you have to dig into a story that much outside of being interested something in this in the storytelling and not right. I don't know if that made sense for you guys, but.
You know, we often see the phrase that didn't age well about various movies, and it's always about like some kind of offensive joke or moment, and yeah, that.
Stuff doesn't necessarily age well.
But I actually feel like this is a bigger example of doesn't age well where there's just a lot that is assumed that the audience for this.
Movie must know. You know, that's not unfair in the time.
You know, it can be successful as artwork, but it doesn't last when there are really basic assumptions about what the audience knows or what they might really truly care about. Again, as to the principle involved here and the idea of the law, you know, that's like that is a thing that does really mean something to me. That like, what Henry the eighth is trying to do is to make the law to fit his purposes under this particular situation. And in a certain way it's played as like, oh,
it's his whims, but it isn't just his whims. He does really have to have an heir who can assume the throne. That there will be the succession or there will there could be more wars. So that's that's something that's really really big. But so he's involved in changing the laws in order to make things work. And I do understand, you know, wanting to not just make law or change law willy nilly, But Thomas Moore's point is about a perceived law of God. And this isn't even
an atheistic thing. I'm going to take atheism out of it philosophically. If you believe in God, how do you know what is God's law versus what is man's law?
The Pope is one of man's law, and Henry the.
Eighth is wielding man's law, where in this is God's law. And the longer version of the play and the Charlton Heston version do make more reference to like the kind of not knowing that is risky here, But in this one, it's just really hard for me to throw down for somebody who believes that he knows God's law at the expense of so many other people who could suffer, And people could suffer either way. It's not as if like Henry the Eighth, making a new church is going to
keep anyone from suffering. For instance, again in the longer version of the play and the Heston version, there is more discussion of how changing the church is about to you know, the way that Henry the eighth has wanted to is setting off problems.
In Scotland because the Scots are more Catholic.
The sixty sixth version of the movie just doesn't deal in that kind of complexity and expects for me to go with someone who.
Just seems pig headed. Oh yeah, you know God? Oh great, I don't know. I like a lot of other people here seem like they could know God.
The troubles started officially in sixty eight. This is sixty six. I mean that is all about Protestants versus Catholics. I'm just like, guys, we are right here, like, look at this stuff. And it's ironic that Heston back in sixty six was trying to get this role and everybody's like no, no, no. Schofield was him on Broadway and he won a Tony and all this, but we can't have Heston. So I think he really kept it with him for all those years, and that's why he ended up playing it and then
directing it. And I'll agree with you. I kind of like the Heston version better. And I especially like keeping the common man character, the Roy Kaneer character, where it's like Bolt was like, no, no, we have to get rid of that for the movies. This is the movies. That isn't a you know, it's not a play, And I'm like, why not? Why not have that there's one actor. It's the guy who plays like the guy who brings him the message at the very beginning of the film.
I guess it would be like his servant or his butler or something. I just like, yeah, use that guy. That guy is great. I love him whenever he shows up and everything. Nigel Davenport, and use this guy. He is great. Have him show up as the boatman, have him show up in this place, have him show up in that. And I'm fine with him speaking directly to the camera. I think that was way too out there for Zinneman, but I would have loved something like that.
It is hard to break the fourth wall, break through the screen and speak directly to the audience.
That is a kind of artifice.
But also feel like, well, then both, if you're gonna cut something like that, we deserve the information that comes through in those moments. And it's more than exposition, because it is the point of view or points of view put into one person of the characters who are making things possible for these wealthy people, and also at the
mercy of the wealthy. There's a line that comes up a couple of times that's cut out of the sixty six movie, which actually ends up in another form, and Jonathan Demi is Something Wild, the thing about better to be a live rat than a dead lion, which in Jonathan Demi's Something Wild comes up as better to be a live dog than a dead lion. I had to mention something while because I love it, and I love
that this carries over weirdly into that movie. This idea of the live rat, you know, making its way through speaks to of course, that Richard rich makes it all the way to the end and dies peacefully in his bed, spoken in relationship to him as a character, but it's also spoken in relationship to the problems of ordinary people living in this kind of system where these different points
of conscience would clash. For me, in the play, it makes Thomas Moore's conscience actually make a lot more sense that he's within such a system himself, and that he is trying, you know, he's trying his best to make it as good as it can be. And at a certain point, and he even says this in the sixty sixth version, you know something about like how if he doesn't follow his conscience, then you know that way lies chaos.
That's understandable, but it's like everybody's.
Steak makes so much more sense in the way that it's presented as a play.
And in the Heston version, real quick, before I forget, the guy who I was thinking of was Matthew that was his servant and is played by Colin Blakeley, who is just always phenomenal in what he's in and I mostly remember him from the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes when we were doing that Holmes series, so more Holmes stuff. I guess every British actor had to have shown up in these Sherlock Holmes movies at some point, except for
Robert Shaw as far as I know. In Robert Shaw, like you guys said, when he's on screen, he shines. It helps that he's covered in gold and you have that beautiful shot of the sun behind him. But just when he jumps off the boat and jumps right into the mud and all the people on the boat are like, oh, fuck, what's gonna happen? And then he just lets out with that huge cackle, and I'm just like, of course, I'm going right to Jaws, and I'm just thinking of him, you know.
Like, oh, don't forget your Rubber's Chief.
You know, all that kind of stuff, and I'm just like, oh, I love Robert Shaw.
When he's on he is great.
And then he's just off of the screen for so much of the movie.
Another great touch in the Heston version that Henry the Eighth, who's played pretty well. You know, he's no Robert Shaw, but he's really good. He appears during the courtroom scenes but behind a curtain.
And he peeks in, and this is also a great touch.
It's humanizing Henry the Eighth is there at the courtroom more is going to be executed, and as things are obviously going wrong, and we see these moments of Henry the Eighth like looking in and then closing the curtain and really becoming emotional and really registering a kind of human cost to his own actions behind the scenes. This is something that I think is in a very different approach that I wouldn't expect as much from Heston, to
be honest. I mean, you know, perhaps it's also coming from Robert Bolt and both's intentions getting played out through Heston through a more complete version of it.
As a play to a movie.
But Heston really does have a lot more attention to like all the people, and he seems to understand the high to low relationships, whereas Zennaman is just really straight up interested in the great men at the top.
I won't disagree with you at all. I think if Hessen's version suffers from anything, it's just that when you come to the Zinnamon thing, it feels like, and I know he didn't make this on that much money, but it feels like everybody is somebody. You've got super babyface, John Hurt as Richard Ritch, and you've got just all of these like oh, I know that guy, I know
that guy. And then you come to the Heston version and you're just like, Okay, Well, it's really cool that he went back in and cast Vanessa Redgrave, who had that small part in the sixty six. Is really cool that he's bringing in John Gilgood. That's great. Like I said, I love Roy Kinear can never think about him without thinking of Charlie and the chocolate factory, but then so many of the other actors. I'm like, I don't know
these faces. I don't know the guy that plays Henry the Eighth And I'm like, okay, I think that's because of the budget of the who is at CNT or TBS that put that out. I'm like, Okay, they probably didn't have all the money in the world. You probably spending that on Heston's salary, on Gilgood, on Redgrave, And I imagine that Heston this is probably a passion project for him, if he's both directing and starring in it.
Tried for the sixty six version, I kind of wish that there had been a few more recognizable faces, but that's a very minor complaint because of the actress that they do have do a really competent job. And I agree with you. Like I was loaded for Bear, thinking oh, Paston is just going to be so bombastic and he's not going to know how to direct this, And then
I'm sitting there going, Wow, this really feels good. I like this version a lot, and it does capture a Thomas Moore that I find a lot more interesting.
I didn't get a chance to watch the remake, but I'm going to because it seems like it makes a lot more sense just from this discussion. But even like I read that like in that he hated and we touched on this already, but More hated Protestants so much, you know that he called for their blood, And I thought, what a we do see that he'd liked the son in law for being from a different religion. Is alue Lutheran, Yeah,
Lutheran and can't raise my daughter. And but then like we're just assumed that he's okay with it later, like unless I missed it, like they seem to get they get married, and he does it, It's like, oh, I guess he just they skip over that or yeah.
Basically Roper recants, which I find to be a very odd. The Heston version makes the back and forth between them make a little bit more sense. One of the things that struck me as very odd is that if More is so implacable and is so much about his conscience, then can Ropert putitive son in law just change his conscience and flip back to being Catholic again so easily if he's really gone with Lutherism, if he really is the heathen, then what does it really matter?
In the end.
There's a line of dialogue that is in both versions that I find to be very troublesome. But it's troublesome in a good way in the play version and troublesome for me in a bad way in the version. It's late in the movie and when he's being interrogated, his friend Norfolk says, just come over to our side, just join us, and More says back, And when we die and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience and I am sent to hell.
For doing mine, will you come with me for fellowship?
And it's really interesting because there's a total blank in there by these rules. The Nazi who kills a bunch of people to his conscience goes to heaven. The Quaker who kills one Nazi to defend themselves goes to hell because they've gone against their conscience. And in this version it was really this where people's wives are at stake
over powerful men's consciousnesses. To have this zero at the center seems immensely dangerous and seems to me like Moore's stand is basically, well, this is what I think, and so that's how everything has to go, and that actually goes a little bit against his apparent view of the law.
Now again in the Haston version, this comes in a place where it's more allowed to be kind of a tendentious argument that then turns the corner and goes toward dealing with fact, because his very next argument is about whether the world is round or flat. And if the king says it's round, is it really round? If the king says it's flat, is it really flat? That's not for a king to decide. That's kind of the real that's the real argument. But the way that Schofield plays this, I don't see the turn.
It's all the same.
And this statement about conscience does not play as, for instance, the kind of scrum that we might get into where we might change our minds about something from the argument, whereas and when Haston plays it, he says it and it makes a similar kind of wrong note for me, But it's a wrong note that's in a context that both feels like he's an emotional person who's turning corners, and it's the playwright Robert Bolt kind of identifying the
kind of hollowness to the conscience that somebody is going to stand on and giving us a harder time about what it means to stand on conscience.
That's like one of the I guess that's the thing I really prefer about the play in the.
Heston movie is that it's not just easy to go with more on this, and Zenneman and Schofield treat it as an easy thing.
Well, yes, he's obviously right.
You said, these are powerful men, you know, And that's what it is. These are powerful men. If we were talking about the common man, if we were talking about people that weren't in these positions of power, this wouldn't be a thing like they would be tortured, They'd be tossed out on their ear. This would happen like there's no room for debate. When you are poor. You need to do what needs to be done. You have to go with the tide or else you're going to drown.
And when it comes to this, it's like the king versus the Chancellor, it's like, all right, these two are having a pissing match. It kind of reminds me of the CEO of X and the President of the United States kind of having their own public meltdown here, and it's just like, all right, guys, you're gonna go with the program. No, okay, well, off with your head. But it's like, yeah, this is the fucking King of England that you're having this pissing match with. You know you're
gonna lose. And even though the Charlton Heston version is longer at two and a half hours versus two hours for this, it moves quicker. This movie feels very long, but there's not a lot where I'd be like, oh, they need to chop this, they need to chop that. It just feels very languid in its pace. And maybe it's that kind of flow of the river thing that he's going for again, but he's definitely it's definitely aware
of the river. I mean, even to the point of having the credits bee across the river and length wise instead of vertical, you know, having it horizontal. I was like, well, that's a pretty smart thing to do. No matter what we think of this, I don't think anybody can disagree that this is a beautifully shot film. It just needed a little bit of a kick in the pants.
It is beautifully shot.
I think the lighting is gorgeous, especially for color film at the time. Some of the outdoor photography at night that they do is a little tricky, but for the most part, you know, it is in a good way. It is often very painterlly the way that it's shot, for me, feels too detached from its characters. Comparing the court case at the end, for instance, to Heston's version, which is certainly nowhere near as handsome.
I just feel like.
We get to see faces, We see faces in relationship to people. Heston is often framing one character's close up with a couple of people slightly out of focus, but that you can see reacting in the background at the same time, and we are closer and we're there, and we feel like, you know, we also get the beautiful wide shots of the courtroom. But Zinnaman frames this essential moment at the end as this really big spectacle where we can't see the faces of the judges, you know,
the way that they're arrayed. They have some lines of dialogue, but we can barely see their faces that are very far away. I have a good TV so I you know, I was watching this big and yeah, I know that it's intended for the big screen, but there's a real distancing that goes on in the approach that I just don't think is right for this drama. Like Heston getting both the wide that is beautiful and impressive, but also being able to go in for close ups following the characters.
There's a really beautifully covered bit in the Heston version where Cromwell is making his arguments and the camera is going with him as he snakes around with different people behind him at different moments for different pieces of his argument that just felt more dramatically grounded and better for getting the text across. You know, that's is extremely important.
It is a very talky thing. It's a talkie play, and both movies are very talky, but you have to film the talk in such a way that it's going to really land. And you know, Zennaman is kind of holding back and shooting for kind of grandiosity of event, when actually the pettiness of everything that these characters have been through with each other is quite intimate and deserves its intimacy. In the courtroom, Heston gives us grandiosity and
intimacy both. And Zinnamon is just into great men in big poses, in impressive shots of a.
Big room, and he's on a white set of the worst possible moment when we finally, guys, scream, freaking character is so far away. I mean, I like to an extent that he was making this guy really alone by cutting wide so often. But I agree there it just wasn't back and forth enough, because you're right, he is very intimate and it is very dialogue heavy, and it just didn't match well. It just did work, especially when he was three. We finally see this guys snap and
the camera is nowhere near him. Maybe they had to dub that line because he didn't do it or whatever, and they had to do that. I mean, who knows.
Yeah, maybe he played it quiet again and they realized in the editing, Oh, we made the wrong choice and gotta be yelled.
So let's let coscofield in. We'll dub it.
So I have to apologize that I didn't realize that this was first performed in sixty that it was actually a radio play in fifty four, a one hour live television event in fifty seven for the BBC, And then I mentioned the Australian version. There was also a German version under just the name Thomas Moore that was also for TV in nineteen sixty four. So this had been kicking around for a little over a decade by the time it came to the film version of it.
Oh but it wasn't they it's sixty two in the West End.
Well, it said that it had its premiere at the Globe Theater on one July nineteen sixty but yeah, I kept hearing sixty two as well, so maybe that was when it had its big run in the West End.
Yeah, this struck me as very much like a post McCarthy film.
I mean, there's so many of them, but.
This is like one of those responses to you know, the McCarthy era and you know what we went through in terms of anti communism, and there's there is a kind of allegory to follow there. And again that's actually a really big reason, you know why I want to be more on Thomas Moore's side in this case as a matter of conscience. You know, stories of conscience makes sense in relationship to the McCarthy area. But the specifics I think maybe it resonated a lot for people at
the time, which is why it was so popular. I mean, I do think, you know, part of the popularity of it as an artwork was at the time people were really thinking about a lot about this kind of thing. But beyond the issue of conscience, it doesn't make for the best allegory.
I had to I had to throw that away a fair bit.
And maybe they weren't thinking about that at all, and that's just more in the sort of cultural mix that made this important to people over time. But I'm just wondering from you guys, did you make any of those connections as you were watching.
I was thinking that as well. And like as you mentioned with high Noon, which so did, that's also an allegory for the blacklisting period, because you know, it's like, Okay, you're condemning this guy based on his lack of action and lack of supporting everyone. It's exactly what they did. Like if you didn't write on your friends, you were blacklisted.
And as you probably both know, SAG had allegiancy like you had to sign an oath that you were never a communist, that you hate communism, and unless you signed the oath, then you're blacklisted. And that's very much what happens here. He didn't sign the oath that he was killed for it. So yeah, I was thinking that too. I wasn't sure if that was intentional, but it must have been and again using Zinnaman when we y'all know Zinneman did High Noon and it was a very very
similar story and intense. Yeah. I don't know if Mike, if that popped off for you, but I certainly saw it.
I definitely was thinking of High Noon and the subsequent to that, the hearings of McCarthy hearings. But yeah, I was definitely thinking of like this guy standing by his principles, and with that one, I really can stand by Gary Cooper as far as like, hey, nobody's helping me out here with hell's going on. This is a community. It isn't all on my shoulders kind of thing, much more sympathetic, empathetic to me. And I know some people hate that movie,
and that's absolutely fine. I enjoy the stupid theme song, and I really enjoy the bad guys, and just I love how that movie has been twisted over the years. I mean, for me, the whole thing of these bad guys come into town on this train translates so well into the beginning of Once upon a Time in the West,
where I'm just like, here comes Harmonica. He's somewhere on this train and you have these three guys waiting for him, and these three Western legends was Jack Elam and Woody Strode, and then I can't remember the actress name who was in the Dollars movies. I'm just like, this is great. It's a tie to the Old West. It's a tie to these movies. It's a tie to the Italian Westerns, and it's also a tie to High Noon, and I appreciate that so much.
I remember not really taking to it. You know, of course it's well known the allegory connection, and this film is discussed in that context though from what I read, but it certainly it must have been intentional.
The idea of the silence also is interesting, you know, simply not ratting people out.
You know, that's interesting, that's compelling.
I think High Noon is a much better made film, but for it, I find it more troublesome. I love every performance in High Noon. Gary Cooper finds more levels for his stolid law man who's got to do the
same thing all the way through. I just find that it means as you describe it, Mike, you know, he can't get people in the community, and there's just a certain point where I'm just not believing that people are not going to join him, and this was Howard Hawks's big problem with the movie, which I you know, I love Howard Hawks, but I'm not necessarily going to follow
his opinions on stuff. But I guess I do have the same kind of analysis that at a certain point it just doesn't it doesn't quite make sense that nobody in town is going to go with Gary Cooper, and so they become a lot of really well acted.
NPCs in that film. They are not really playable characters. They're just people that.
Are not going to join him after a certain point, and the arguments don't necessarily make that much sense on their side for nobody to join him. And then he's surrounded by the townspeople I guess, who have somewhat learned the error of their ways after he and his Quaker
wife have shot the bad guys. At the end, there's another one of those moves that I revie, better be really good if you're gonna pull the like Quaker is going to kill people thing that comes up in a lot of war movies in Westerns or the not necessarily always the Quaker, but the Pacifist of a real problem
with that particular trope, and this movie. You know, HeiG Noon can't quite pull that off for me, because the end is like, oh, all the bad townspeople gather around them, and then he can just throw his badge in the dirt and ride away with his wife, who's now gotten the religion of violence. And I just find something utterly fascist about the ending of that movie that it's trying to present. It's a paternalistic liberalism, but it's providing a kind of paternalistic liberal idea of.
The law all the way through.
But then by the end he's like, he killed off the bad guys. He's the man of action, who did the thing that needed to be done, and.
Then fuck all you little people. And so it just makes it a very difficult movie for me.
And I only go on about it now because it registers as a very similar thing from Zennemon, with the basic attitude toward more as a person who can just go to.
The end assume to be totally right. He must be right.
He goes to his death absolutely right, no matter about all the other little people.
I know that Zenneman.
You know, as a director, Hei Noon is directed visually so beautifully.
I got no quarrels with that movie.
On the visual level, and man, when you finally arrive at the shootout at the end, it's great. I don't find man Van for all seasons to be nearly so visually engaged. But Zennaman's obviously, you know, very good. But for all the kind of liberal platitude andizing that comes through in his films, I just I'm not quite buying.
I find his work to actually.
Be really more conservative than some of the more conservative filmmakers who are around at his time, like Howard Hawks, who was pretty much straight up conservative and got to be really a toxic conservative in his old age.
And I love Rio Bravo, Rio, bravo, fantastic. I even like all the remakes that Hawks did of it. And had they had a shootout at the end of this one, I think I would have added a little bit of extra action. You know, it's Last Temptation of Christ. I'm like, I know how this story ends. Can you switch it
up a little? Can we have Jesus do some kung fu or something like, come on, let's let's do it up, you know, muskets at the end of this Yes, because I think we all you know, I'm ruined it at the beginning that Morgus has head chopped off at the end of this, and it's so final and such a there's no ceremony to that scene whatsoever. It's just like, Okay, now he's here and boom, and I'm like, wow, that happens so quickly, like no final words from Henry the Eighth or anybody else.
Or in the Heston version the play, the executioner takes off his hood and it's our narrator, which I expected. I knew as soon as I saw, you know, because he'd played a couple of different things.
I was like, he's going to be the executioner.
But by that point in the movie, that's not like getting ahead of it so much as just a satisfying way to deal with the rest of the points. And he narrates at the end, and he makes a point from the position of the common person, you know, to everything that's happened, and I, yeah, I just find that to bring it all around, you know, quite a bit. I'm back to Orson Welles really quickly because I want to encourage people. I don't know if you've done at
chimes at Midnight episode. If you haven't, let's do it. Seech times at midnight. Chimes to Midnight deals with so much of the same stuff. Obviously different story, different Henry's et cetera, but so much of the same stuff.
And it is a brilliant like kind of repositioning.
Of Shakespeare to follow a common man as the tragic hero. By Wells rewriting three plays, he can turn Falstaff into.
The tragic hero. And by repositioning.
That I love Shakespeare, and I love all the language from Shakespeare. But it's like Wells kind of rescues these Shakespeare plays from the you know, very regressive politics and even regressive politics of the time. Shakespeare was staying good with the court. He wasn't going to rock any boats. He's telling the story that you know, that the royalty, that the nobility wants to see. He's not telling stories that go against that you know at the time. He's
telling the version. So Richard the third, for instance, has to be a total villain. But the wonderful thing that Wells does is that he takes the beauty of Shakespeare's characterization and language and by rearranging these plays into one long kind of meditation on what is justice within this society?
How do people deal with power.
How does someone change when they have to take power? What are the stakes of having power and losing it? I mean it just does everything.
It's great.
I have not seen it yet really want to, and that makes me want to say it even more.
Oh, it's so good.
Isaka Wells that just direct this? But I doubt the studio wanted well I look at Beckett in relationship to this because I remembered really liking it in high.
School and I didn't watch the whole thing, but the first forty five minutes of Beckett, it's a very similar story to this. The biggest difference with Beckett is that you know, Thomas A. Beckett and King Henry were really close friends before they were on the outs. But it's a very similar thing of Beckett is going to follow through with the law even though the king wants something else, and this ultimately gets him executed, and so very very
similar stories, very similar thing about conscience. But just like the first forty five minutes of that, I was like, this is so much better movie about the same kind of story, the same kind of wrestling with conscience and religion.
What does all this mean?
Yeah, I'll throw that out is another I want to be more positive. I was so negative about for all seasons through. I want to add some positivity and recommend some other better movies.
Well, and apparently there's a TV show And first it was a book called wolf Hall, and that is basically for as much of a hero as Thomas Moore is in this, he's a villain in that. Yes, So it's amazing to see the difference between the ways that he's portrayed, all of the stuff about pursuing heretics and basically he's like the British Torquemada. Is how they portray him so different, and I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in the middle between that literal Catholic saint and the villain that
he is in wolf Hall. Thanks to friends of the show, Tim Madigan, he turned me on to this podcast called with It not just the Tutors, I think it is, and they had one episode unfortunately, like the second episode about Thomas coming out today to non subscribers, so I wasn't able to listen to that. And last week I listened to the first part and I was like, oh, okay,
this is pretty good. It was a good telling and that's where I learned more about him and Martin Luther exchanging some notes, just the scatological nature, and they're like, yeah, that was kind of the that people wrote back then. And it's like even these scholars were you know, they probably were insulting each other, and I know they were insulting each other in Latin, but it was pretty raunchy with the way that they were going back and forth. So yeah, I'd love to see kind of somewhere in
the middle what Thomas Moore really was. Like I was trying to listen to a biography of him and it was eighteen hours and after a while the narrator's voice just kind of ground me down. But yeah, fascinating historical figure. Just I don't believe that he was the guy that we saw here in A Man for All Seasons.
Now.
Read Utopia as well, if you've never read it. It's really really fun Utopia obviously, but it's you know, means sort of perfect society.
Thomas More coined the word utopia. It means it doesn't exist.
And part of the fun of reading it as a work a political satire that's definitely under the shadow of Machiavelli's The Prince is sort of seeing the way that there's a picture being of this perfect society that has no property and where people don't care about your religious beliefs.
Again, you know, kind of a strong element in.
Relationship to Thomas Moore as we see him in a Man for All Seasons. It's a satire and that no, he's not necessarily endorsing all these things, but what he's doing is he's taking all these ideas of an ideal society and kind of working through how contradictory and sort of crazy they can be. And so it makes for a really, really fun read. It's actually pretty funny and witty.
Like a lot of philosophical work at that time was like I'm going to come up with some weird ass story to play out these ideas, you know, kind of like you know the Symposium and you know those kinds of narratives where they're like dialogues among witty philosophers. So this is a similar thing, is philosophical, it's definitely about government. It takes about two and a half hours to read. I can't recommend that one highly enough if you're interested in Sir Thomas Moore or Saint Thomas Moore.
I was just gonna mention one bit of trivia that I thought was interesting because I was wondering, how did they get Vanessa Redgrave to just be in this so briefly, I think she barely had a line, even though I thought that scene was great and she was in it. But I read IMDb she was originally supposed to play Margaret, whose Susannah York played, but she couldn't do it, so she agreed to take this cameo just for the fun
of it, apparently. But I love Susannah York and yeah, and again, I did think that scene that we already talked about where they all say goodbye was very, very moving, and the mother as well when Wendy Hiller, who played I mean, that was really gut wrenching when they all have to say goodbye. But other than that, I think I like it less after this discussion, now that I know some of my what's rating will change.
I feel bad.
I have to apologize to our Patreon person, Peter Rogers. Now you hope you expecting a really glowing thing. I mean, as we're talking about this, I'm looking at other films that were released in sixty six and I'm just like I would have given that the Oscar like the good and the bad, the ugly or persona.
But that's how always how good it is with the Oscars, except in the nineteen seventies. It's like a really great film would win the Oscar, and then you look at the other nominees and they're also all great and could have won. So there's like only one decade when the Oscars were like, you know, worth the powder they would take to blow them up.
Who's afraid of Virginia wool Beatkins? Second, Oh my god.
This was the year of Face of Another, the Tchakahara film. Also Daisies was you know, the Vera hit Loova film. I mean, there's so many good films this year. Unfortunately most of them.
Are foreign so they probably wouldn't have done nominated anyways, but there were at least some really good American ones, and they really.
Influenced, you know, American cinema going into the seventies.
All right, guys, let's go ahead and take a break and play a preview for next week's show.
Right after these.
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We'll be back next week with a look at Metropolis as we kick off another Sci Fi July. Until then, I want to think my co host Spencer and Robert.
So, Robert, what's the latest with you, sir?
I just released and I've been doing very well on my YouTube channel with Joan Crawford. Anything Joan Crawford related people love, and I've come to really admire her as an actor. As a result of these videos doing well, I'm doing more and more of them. So I just did a video where I took some interviews with Crawford's scholars where we really discussed her acting. So I just took some of those clips, put it together and did a video about why you know, what what why? What
made her such a great actor? H from you know, from our point of view. Tomorrow, I'm interview interviewing Jonathan Rosenbaum, who I'm sure you know anyone listening or you also from Chicago, Like Spencer, his new book travels in the Cities of Cinema, so we're talking about that tomorrow. I've had him on a couple of times, so he's a very very, you know, really nice, great guest. And my show is called Robert Bellissimo at the Movies and we
do I do a new video every Sunday. Occasionally I'll put something out during the week if something comes up, but it's usually once a week, and you can go to YouTube dot com slash Robert Bellissimo at the Movies and all of the links all of my social media handles are on my link tree page, so if you want to follow me, go to linktree dot com slash
Robert Bellisimo at the Movies. I also do some written review use for a Toronto based website called Screenfish, and they're all on there, so subscribe, like the videos, comment, share and reach out. I'd love to hear from people.
And Spencer, how about yourself.
I want to know about any episodes you're going to do on trog or Straight Jacket. Those are obviously a sad point in her career, but they're actually like really fascinating movies and fascinating performances. He's so good and and Trog. I'll always throw down for trog Is. It's a weird, really strange, broken movie, but so so much fun. And she's she's really she's giving her all in it. That's what makes trog so remarkable. It's a real cruddy idea. And Joan Crawford is like here to work.
It's now, I guess officially summer for me.
My classes ended this week, so I go back to I'm going to finish.
Editing my movie that I've been editing forever.
But I can finally work on that at a regular clip and you know, hopefully we'll premiere in a sometime in the fall.
Thank you again, guys for being on the show. Thanks everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at Readingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over the world.
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