Becket [1964] [DVD]

The film gets rid of some of Anouilh's stage directions and the grandiloquent sounding setting he had devised. The actors are great, the acting is very good, and the music is fascinating, though voluntarily anachronic: this is not a historical film. Same remark about the costumes that are of a fashion that will only appear in mid 13th century. But it retains the absurd historical vision Jean Anouilh imposed onto the subject, and this cannot be considered as creative art, as the composer Laurence Rosenthal says about the music. Becket was not a Saxon since both his parents were of Norman extract and his father was a London merchant. Luckily this film adaptation cuts off the Saracen mother, yet the music and the singing of Gwendolyn introduces another anachronism: the song is in Welsh, that is to say in a Celtic dialect and not in Saxon at all, though originally, historically it could only be in English (if English could already be considered as existing) or in French. There is an antagonistic situation in England at the time: the social antagonism between the merchants and the nobles. Thomas Becket was not a nobleman, nor a baron, but he was the son of a merchant. Anouilh replaced this social antagonism with an ethnic opposition: it is wrong though I do not pretend it is entirely false. Yet fifty years later the Saxon and Norman barons will unite with the church as a whole against the king (the younger brother John known as Landless of the eldest son of Henry II, presented as Henry III in the film) to impose the Magna Carta. The film has a tremendous advantage over the text of the play: it visualizes the meaning with real settings. The splendor of the situations and the court can be seen, though the director, and probably producer never insisted in doing an epic film. So things remain moderate and contain no battle whatsoever. Now the film explains the whole situation as a conflict between the Saxons and the Normans as basic for the conflict between the church and the crown. This is historically false. The conflict is between royal power and church power. The king is trying to impose royal justice and tax paying to the church. He will succeed as for tax paying thanks to Becket himself when Chancellor but he will fail as for justice, at least partly. The repentance and penance of the King is determined politically but not so much as a conflict between once again the Saxons and the Normans, but as the result of a conflict between Eleanor of Aquitania, the Queen, and her son Henry III, the eldest son who had been crowned before the death of his father by his father's decision. These two were trying to set up a rebellion against the king to seize power. But the film is also badly historically informed in the fact that the pilgrimage started before the king's penance (Friday July 12, 1174) and the sanctification was the Pope's decision and once again before the king's penance, on Ash Wednesday February 21, 1173. These mistakes are of course in the play and are Jean Anouilh's. In fact they are not mistakes. They are rewriting history by Anouilh in order in 1959 to satisfy his own personal desires in Paris. He was probably thinking of Poland, Hungary and even Algeria in the late 1950s more than of England in the twelfth century. These subtleties could easily go through in Broadway New York, 1962, but they could have been slightly modified for the film, and they were indeed by dropping the Saracen mother for example: they could have been more. Then the film insists on the love Henry feels for Thomas and here again Anouilh tricks everyone by making that love excessive, even in a way suspicious, and yet based on something historians are quite doubtful about: the real common interest in and sharing of good cheer, wine and women. The acting of Peter O'Toole makes that love become little by little hysterical which is a rather surprising mistake: it could be somber, inwardly contemplative, but not jealous and uncontrolled as it is shown here. It would have been frowned upon at the time, and a lot more than in the film from the Queen Mother and the Queen. The film though minimizes the austere life of the archbishop, though it could have rebalance this element that is definitely made minimal by Anouilh and this deprives us of an explanation as for the sudden change of attitudes of brother John. Note he is a Saxon monk and here Anouilh could have insisted on the fact that Becket was the first archbishop who opposed the Barons who recaptured their Saxon serfs when they escaped into some religious order or monastery. The film is very good indeed but it has all the defects of the play behind it, justly corrected of the most salient elements that were quite absurd at times.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

As the years roll by it's all too easy to forget just how good an actor Richard Burton actually was. In a sense his off-screen presence overshadows the work he did in-front of the camera and that's a shame - at his best, and 'Becket' shows him at the height of his powers, Richard Burton was a superb actor.The film focuses on that well-known medieval spat between Church and state. Frustrated at every turn by the Church's refusal to help fund his wars against France and by its insistance that criminal offences committed by the clergy should be tried by the church, and not by the state, King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) takes the opportunity presented by the timely death of the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint in his place his good friend Thomas Becket. Sadly, for the King, his youthful companion, so recently a willing participant in the traditional medieval kingly pursuits of drinking, hunting, eating to excess and ardently pursuing the attractive female portion of the peasantry, suddenly begins to take his duties to the Church far too seriously.The historical Becket, played by the charismatic and charming Burton, does rather well out of this. Historically Becket is often regarded as a rather pompous and self-important individual, more interested in his own reputation than in the health of the Church, but here he comes across as a noble, troubled and intelligent man. The King, admirably played by Peter O'Toole, is charming and dashing, but quick to temper and prone to violent outbursts. The scenes between the two great actors are electric: two forces of nature clashing and sparking against each other, both perfectly capable of seeing the other's point of view and yet neither willing to budge an inch. Splendid support is provided by John Gielgud as the charming and perfidious King of France - he's only on screen for a few minutes, but he steals every scene in which he appears. Also worth a mention are the hilarious scenes in which Henry castigates his long suffering wife and (in his own words) dismally uninspiring children. Peter O'Toole is best known for the dramatic and weighty qualities he brought to the roles he played, but he could do humour and in these brief scenes he displays a real gift for comic timing.I wish they still made costume dramas like this. It's powerful stuff, beautifully played by the two leads who really do spark off each other, and it is truly gorgeous to look at. The script, based on a stage play, is excellent, being beautifully paced and allowing the viewer to build up a real sense of knowing just what it is that makes the two protagonists tick. It's dramatic stuff and well worth a look. Medieval history has never been so interesting!

Naturally, a film with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton is entertaining and I would certainly watch it again. However, even the “facts” (that is, the bits one might assume the writer might have double-checked by looking up in something more authoritative than Arthur Mee’s children’s encyclopaedia ) are rather fictional. It is certainly rather satisfying to feel that Becket was not only a (beautifully Welsh-accented) Saxon but also a faithful servant of the church and the English people. I suspect little of it is true, so don’t hurry too quickly to Canterbury.

I can confirm that the MPI Home Video Region A Disk does not play on UK Panasonic DP-UB820 or DMR-BW880 using the normal Region-free hack. To-date, I've found no way to get around the Region Coding of this disk.For the film (irrespective of Region Coding), 4 out of 5. It isn't true to historical fact, but as a dram, it is really acted well.No comment on the Blue Ray presentation, since I can't get the Region A disk to play.