Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Man for All Seasons,’ on Men and Angels)

Sir Thomas More [played by Paul Scofield]: “God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.”—A Man for All Seasons (1966), screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play, directed by Fred Zinnemann

This Day in Film History (Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—and History’s)

December 16, 1962—Lawrence of Arabia, an unconventional epic that would go on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, premiered in New York City. 

Fittingly for a biopic about the British intelligence officer in WWI that consistently asked questions about his essential identity, archaeologist A.W. Lawrence, after watching the masterpiece, remarked that he did not recognize in it his older brother, T.E. Lawrence.

The younger Lawrence was nonplussed for reasons besides the fact that the actor embodying his brother, Peter O’Toole, stood eight inches taller than the short military hero who aided the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. 

(Nor would A.W. recognize his brother’s frequently dirty, desert-coarsened face in O’Toole’s well-lit, cosmetically enhanced visage. “If he were any prettier, they’d have to call it Florence of Arabia,” Noel Coward famously cracked.)

As the blogger “Groggee Dundee” wrote in a fine post on the blog Nothing Is Written, the film “is handicapped because historians do not agree on Lawrence’s importance, motivations or personality”—disputes that have abated little in the half-century since the movie’s premiere, even after the release of official military records not available up to 1962. Some difficulties arise from a personality that, even Lawrence himself admitted in a 1927 letter, was complicated.

Yet the process of giving a focus to a figure with so many different facets resulted in distortions that should lead the film to be thought of as historical fiction rather than biopic or docudrama. 

To embody particular points of view, for instance, composite characters were created, such as Claude Rains’ wily Arab Bureau diplomat Dryden, or Anthony Quayle’s Colonel Brighton, a representative for elements in the British Army who moved from disgust to admiration of Lawrence. 

The American journalist who transforms Lawrence into a figure of worldwide renown, Jackson Bentley, was strongly suggested by Lowell Thomas.

The family of General Edmund Allenby, Lawrence’s commander in the pivotal months of the Arab Revolt, lodged a formal protest over his representation in the Columbia release. The descendants of Auda abu Tayi and Sherif Ali pressed a lawsuit against the studio before finally dropping it 10 years later. Moreover, the film’s account of Lawrence's alleged capture and rape by guards under the control of the Turkish governor, Hajim Bey, remains hugely controversial.

Most accounts of Lawrence of Arabia treat it as an example of pure cinema—a perfectly valid approach that rightly celebrates the achievement of director David Lean. But seldom in cinema analysis is it more helpful, and even necessary, to consider the importance of the screenplay to a film’s success. 

This, after all, is a film about one man’s attempt to change and rewrite history—or, in its hero’s protest against the Arab status quo, “Nothing is written.” The movie itself is, in a sense, a revision of history.

For awhile, there was a serious question whether it would be made at all, given that so many players did not appreciate this version of history. Independent producer Alexander Korda secured the rights to Lawrence's memoir Revolt in the Desert all the way back in the 1930s, with Leslie Howard in mind for the soldier-scholar. 

Yet even the death of Lawrence in a motorcycle accident in 1935 did not give real creative freedom to Korda, who was told by the British government that a movie on this subject would not be helpful at that time. (The Turks didn’t like any implications that they had tortured prisoners; the Arabs hated the thought that they needed British aid to win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire; and British diplomats balefully eyed the prospect of unrest in what is now called “the Arab street.”) 

Korda sold the rights eventually to producer Sam Spiegel, as freewheeling a character in his way as Lawrence. More actors would see their names peddled in connection with the project—including Olivier, Brando and Albert Finney—before Spiegel and Lean turned to the young stage actor Peter O’Toole.

The screenplay, itself nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, flew in the face of other historical epics of the time because it was an anti-war satire about a military genius. 

Making possible the filming of a similar Hollywood treatment of a war hero, the 1970 film Patton, its creation, in turn, was facilitated by the success of Lean’s prior film, another Best Picture winner, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The two movies have more in common than a single man at the creative helm. In a sense, Lawrence is a brother under the skin to Colonel Nicholson, the protagonist of Bridge. Eccentric, flawed heroes, they perform their tasks far better than anyone can reasonably expect, only to come a cropper in a changed military/political environment.

(Those similarities must have been too pointed to ignore by Bridge’s Alec Guinness, who expressed a desire to play Lawrence for Lean, too—a wish the actor might have felt perfectly appropriate, considering he had played the hero in Terrence Rattigan’s play Ross. Told bluntly that he was too old to play the legend of Arabia, Guinness took another significant role in the production—Prince Feisal.)

Spiegel got much for his money out of the services of screenwriter Michael Wilson in Bridge: a WWII intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps who understood in his bones the frequent absurdity of the military’s command structure and objectives, as well as a scribe who could be bought cheaply because his blacklisting left him desperate for work. 

(Wilson and co-screenwriter Carl Foreman, unable to accept their Oscars because of the blacklist, watched as the prize was awarded to Francophone novelist Pierre Boulle, who delivered what is believed to be the shortest acceptance speech in the history of the award ceremony: “Merci.”) 

The producer was hoping for similar magic with the story of Lawrence.

But, after two years and a massive script, Wilson disappointed Lean and Spiegel. The director found dialogue that was not as sharp as he liked it; Spiegel, on the other hand, was concerned that the script was too anti-military, or so it is said. 

In truth, however, the producer had nobody to blame but himself for the latter: Not only had Wilson’s original screenplay for Friendly Persuasion looked sympathetically on the Quaker characters’ pacifism, but Bridge on the River Kwai was absolutely scathing about the folly of war, and the writer’s prepared testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee had lambasted that body for its threat to the world's well-being (“I am not surprised to be hauled before a Committee that is trying to make peace a dirty subversive word”).

By Wilson’s own estimate, no more than 10% of the dialogue in the finished film was in his screenplay. But, if Spiegel was hoping for a script with a more benign view of the military from replacement Robert Bolt, he was terribly mistaken. 

The playwright of A Man for All Seasons possessed inclinations every bit as strong as Wilson’s against armed force. In fact, production in Spain had to be halted on the second half of the film when Bolt was arrested for participating in an antinuclear demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square. 

Bolt refused, More-like, to renounce his conscience, and languished in jail for several weeks without access to his typewriter. Nobody knows what combination of threats and blandishments Spiegel used to get Bolt to back down and get released early, but the screenwriter was so disgusted that he never spoke to the producer again.

If the first half of the film could be almost wickedly satirical about the military brass’s attitude toward the “balmy” Lawrence (General Murray: “I can't make out whether you're bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted”; Lawrence: “I have the same problem, sir”), the second half was dispiriting in tracing how the stress of fighting led to Lawrence’s terrifying recognition of his egomania and sadomasochism.

In a sense, it reflected not just the preoccupations of Wilson and Bolt, but also the vision of Lawrence presented by George Bernard Shaw’s 1932 play, Too True to be Good.

I first saw this play at the Shaw Festival in Canada in 1994. Though the first act was fine, the play truly snaps to attention (so to speak) with the introduction of the puckishly named “Private Meek” in Act 2. Shaw’s physical description of the character left little doubt about who was being depicted:

“He is an insignificant looking private soldier, dusty as to his clothes and a bit gritty as to his windbeaten face. Otherwise there is nothing to find fault with: his tunic and puttees are smart and correct, and his speech ready and rapid. Yet the colonel, already irritated by the racket of the bicycle and the interruption to his newspaper, contemplates him with stern disfavor; for there is something exasperatingly and inexplicably wrong about him. He wears a pith helmet with a pagri; and in profile this pagri suggests a shirt which he has forgotten to tuck in behind, whilst its front view as it falls on his shoulders gives a feminine air of having ringlets and a veil which is in the last degree unsoldierly. His figure is that of a boy of seventeen; but he seems to have borrowed a long head and Wellingtonian nose and chin from somebody else for the express purpose of annoying the colonel.”

And annoy the colonel, Meek promptly does, in much the way that the Lawrence of film does with Generals Murray and Allenby: “If I could get hold of the recruiting officer who enlisted you, I’d have his stripes off.” 

By the time that the soldier is revealed as a quartermaster’s clerk, interpreter, and intelligence officer—not to mention a colonel who prefers the ranks, where he has a “freer hand”—the playwright has described unmistakable terms the longtime friend who, when he entered the Royal Air Force, did so under the assumed name “T.E. Shaw.”

Whatever its pretenses as history, Lawrence of America has also become, in another sense, prophecy. Instead of Britain, another world superpower has found itself in the Middle East, sure that, under its guidance, ancient prejudices can be erased because “nothing is written.” 

Ironically, like Lawrence at the film’s end, the United States now can’t wait to extricate itself from this cat’s cradle, finding that geopolitical gamesmanship which might have begun with the best intentions only ends in moral ambiguity.

 

 

Theater Review: "A Man for All Seasons," by Robert Bolt, at the Roundabout Theater Co.

Like many New York theatergoers, I suspect, I found it hard to efface the memory of Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons when I heard that Frank Langella would be tackling the role.

Don't get me wrong: I'd admired Langella's command of the stage all the way back to Dracula when I was in high school – or, over 10 years ago, his great comic turn as Noel Coward's alter ego Gary Essenden in Present Laughter.

But when I headed to one of the last previews before opening night a few weeks ago in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of the Robert Bolt historical drama, I didn't know how he might measure up. Perhaps my uncertainty stemmed from those roles' generous, unapologetic slabs of ham, whereas More requires a martyr’s self-abnegation.

I needn't have worried. Langella allows us to see this hero of conscience with fresh eyes. From the moment he appeared onstage at the Roundabout's flagship venue, American Airlines Theater, he presented a character who, oddly enough, had something in common with his more flamboyant roles.

A Character Who Fills the Room…An Actor Who Fills the Stage
At his full 6-ft.-4-in. frame, Langella fills a room, making it easy to understand how the statesman and intellectual he plays has become accustomed to the best of everything—the best books, the best wines, the best house, the best family, the best society, and the best perquisites of power. Like the "wise men" of recent Washington vintage, he gets called on whenever a head of state desperately needs a calm, experienced counselor. (And, in truth, the only unconvincing note in this astute performance comes when his More enters the living room just after having performed daily vespers.)

But the way of the cross that England's most powerful statesman must undergo forces More to lose everything but what he grasps most stubbornly: the autonomy of his own soul.

At one point or another, that assertion of will drives to distraction everyone in his orbit: the wife, daughter, son-in-law, best friend, and Archbishop of Canterbury, all of whom try to convince him to go along with Henry VIII’s demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

But More will not be yield. An Atticus Finch of Renaissance England, this lawyer-hero might appear almost insufferably decent, but for this fact: his stand is so lonely that it exposes to danger not only himself, but also his family.

In a thousand natural ways, director Fred Zinnemann "opened up" the film (which I saw again, one week after the Roundabout production, for the fourth or fifth time, with my friends Brian and Wilhelmine, at Suffern, NY's wondrous Lafayette Theater).

For example, in the final courtroom scene, he began with More stepping through a narrow passageway into a wider frame—like an ancient Christian entering the Coliseum before being tossed to the lions—before concluding with a master synchronization of Scofield's magnificent voice and body movements. (I discussed this in a prior post.)

The 1966 movie became one of the most deserving Best Picture winners in Oscar history with its expert direction by Zinnemann, a sterling cast, and a screenplay by Bolt that often flashes with Shavian wit.

Reworking Familiar Material
But Zinnemann also, by necessity, reshaped and narrowed this play that depends heavily on words – not just those its playwright gives his protagonist, but the words that More is forced to weigh.

Hughes' stage production restores much of this material (notably, the seriocomic appearances of Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys) while accepting one of the film's major departures: the disappearance of the "Common Man" character who popped up periodically, a la Bertolt Brecht, to comment sardonically on events.

Fortunately, Hughes figures out stage counterparts for some of the notable scenes in the film. On screen, Henry’s vast entourage and More’s family realize the two friends’ growing estrangement on the divorce issue when the voice of the monarch (a scene-stealing turn by Robert Shaw) comes carrying all the way across the grand lawn of More’s estate and into the house.

On stage, the unequal power dynamic between the two men is suggested by the constantly shifting commands of Henry (played by Patrick Page, who looks like a younger version of Tim Curry) about when and how more should sit. As we watch, we become acutely aware what’s dawning on More: the royal is utterly unable to contain enthusiasm, ego or anger, and is all the more dangerous for this capriciousness.

In addition to Langella and Page, several other actors acquitted themselves with unusual skill:

* Zach Grenier brought a growling menace to More’s Machiavellian successor as Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell.
* Jeremy Strong adeptly handled Richard Rich, the kind of small man who rises to the top during political upheavals—as long as they don’t scruple about conscience. He demonstrated how painful—literally—Richard’s political education in Cromwell’s service could be during the act-ender in which he screamed as Cromwell turned his hand for a long period under a candle.
* Hannah Cabell, as Margaret More, the daughter who, centuries ahead of her time, made her father proud with her learning—and endured the anguish of watching him caught up in the viper’s nest of the Tudor court.

A Controversial Production
Reviewers have divided sharply on the need for the revival at all. The naysayers have several issues, the two most common being the lack of a dramatic arc (i.e., we know just what will happen) and the play’s exaggeration of More’s virtue. This hero acted in the name of an absolutist institution, the Roman Catholic Church, they say, and in a supreme irony this politician who hounded Protestants himself became a martyr. Bolt seems to be anticipating their objections right in the play, when he has the all-too-worldly Cardinal Wolsey sniping at More for the latter’s “moral squint.”

I’ll dispose of the “no dramatic arc” objection first. We know what happened to Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, but that has never stopped countless actors from tackling these parts.

As for the second charge: 1) The critics are seeking the kind of impossible goody-two-shoes they blame Bolt for foisting on the world; 2) Protestants of the 16th century persecuted Catholics with a vigor that equaled Catholics’ harassment of themselves; and 3) In judging historical figures, one must assess not just whether they measured up to the standards of our time but if an alternative ethical standard existed in their own to which they could look. As Jason Kuznicki on the "Positive Liberty" blog has convincingly argued, “Until the Enlightenment, wherever an official tolerance existed, it was almost always a particular and revocable license to practice one specific minority religion, and to do so only under highly restrictive conditions.” Unlike late 18th-century America, say, where Thomas Jefferson could have looked to a significant abolitionist strain if he wanted to free his slaves, no tradition of tolerance existed in early 16th century England or the continent that might make him question his pursuit of heretics.

The concern for the rule of law that Bolt’s More enunciated in A Man for All Seasons was something he practiced in his own life. As Peter Ackroyd relates in The Life of Thomas More, the author of Utopia was far more careful, objective and worldly-wise in reviewing cases, for instance, than his predecessor as Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey.

In an excellent post-show discussion, Anne Prescott, a Renaissance literature professor at Columbia University, pointed out the ways that the show diverged from history. Some were amusing (the real-life More preferred beer to wine and grew a beard in the Tower of London), some involved poetic license (four children were reduced to one—More's scholarly daughter Margaret), and some took substantial liberties with characters (in real life, the martyr referred to Protestants with excremental imagery).

For all of that, she noted, Bolt’s play, unlike many others, got the essentials of his life right. I couldn’t agree more. Listen to the trial scene in either the play or move, then compare it to the actual transcript of the proceedings. Tell me if he doesn’t adhere to it with an extraordinary level of fidelity.

The audience seems far more attuned to many reviewers to the value of Bolt’s message. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the critic-blogger Terry Teachout pointed out the continuing relevance and universal of More’s great response when his son-in-law William Roper says he’d “cut a great road through the law” to eliminate one of Henry’s spies: “"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"

“Bolt didn't write ‘A Man for All Seasons’ in order to persuade those who saw it to go out and vote Labour,” Teachout observes. “His purpose was to make viewers of all political persuasions reflect on the dangerous consequences of using extralegal means to pursue desirable short-term ends. The result is a deeply political play that is neither liberal nor conservative -- and one that succeeds as a work of art.”

Or, as I overheard a middle-aged female moviegoer say to her friend the day I saw the film at the Lafayette: “I wish our leaders in Washington could see this.” While not the kind of incubator for totalitarianism that Henry’s England was (Prescott noted that one of the king’s contemporaries pointed out that he possessed the dangerous desire to “make windows into men’s souls”), contemporary Washington is filled with opportunists of all political stripes—a metropolis of Richard Riches rather than Thomas Mores.