WHEN EXISTENTIALISTS WRITE WELL THEY REFUTE THEMSELVES:

Oh, That Meddlesome Priest (JAMES BOWMAN, January 26, 2007, NY Sun)

"Becket" is very much a movie of its time -- that is, 1964. Edward Anhalt's adaptation of Anouilh's play (directed by Peter Glenville) retains a lot of the playwright's sensibility, particularly his conception of the 1170 murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, by agents of King Henry II, in terms of the questions of morality and honor raised by the collaboration of a conquered people with their conquerors.

Though obviously an important subject for a Frenchman in the post-war years, this now appears slightly bizarre. To start with, it is doubtful that Becket was, as Anouilh imagined him, a Saxon who first became the best friend of the Norman King Henry and then turned against him, or that the English clergy were all-Saxon while the nobility were all-Norman, like rival football teams.

Without these assumptions, the carefully built-up but rather strained self-hatred of the film's Becket (Richard Burton) makes no sense. Also, its ideas of honor and duty are confused and confusing. And yet, at this distance of time, it comes as a shock that a movie should have concerned itself with such matters at all. [...]

Inspired partly by the postwar rage for psychotherapy, the intellectual spectacular derived a lot of its kick from the illusion that this or that historical figure had been "explained" in terms of what, a few years later, were to be described as his "hang-ups." Oh, so that's what the Reformation or the Renaissance -- or whatever large historical phenomenon you like -- was all about.

This is one, of many, works that we'd classify as accidentally good, the natural drama having usurped the author's intended ideological ends.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2007 1:25 PM