The New York Film Forum’s revival of the film version of Jean
Anouilh’s Becket is to be welcomed not just for its own
sake but as a window into an interesting period in the history of
popular culture: the transition from the earnest — usually
over-earnest — “problem” films that dominated the more serious
sorts of popular movie-making between the end of World War II and
the mid-1960s to the youth- and countercultural-oriented pictures
that came after that. For Becket is very much a movie of
its time — that is, 1964. Edward Anhalt’s adaptation of Anouilh
(directed by Peter Glenville) retains a lot of the playwright’s
sensibility, and particularly his conception of the murder in 1170
by agents of Henry II of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury,
in terms of the questions of morality and honor involved 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. And
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.
In Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of the king’s coarseness and
stupidity there is also more than a hint, I think, of Harold
Macmillan’s line about the British becoming the Greeks to the Rome
of the new American empire. Henry remains charming because he knows
his own limitations and always defers to his friend’s learning and
intelligence, but we know that the king’s assertion of his power is
always going to trump his attachment to culture — or
friendship.
Like Mr. O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia or Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons, the film belongs to the genre of
what Judith Crist described as “the ‘intellectual’ spectacular.”
The quotation marks around “intellectual” are meant to suggest (I
think) a certain falseness about these films’ intellectual
pretensions, and the glibness with which they supplied a popular
audience, hungry for “culture,” with potted versions of history.
Inspired partly by the post-war 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.
Now this fad survives chiefly among such bedraggled leftovers
from the heroic liberationists of the 1960s as Norman Mailer who,
having explained the psychology of Jesus Christ to his own
satisfaction in The Gospel According to the Son (1997),
last week came out with the Mailerian explanation of Adolf Hitler
in The Castle in the Forest. What a laugh!
Becket is also of its time in its portrayal of the
boozing and whoring of its dos amigos as good clean fun and a
charmingly humanizing trait for the saintly Thomas — though it is
also careful to limit the latter’s visible contribution to the
revels to the rescue of a peasant lass from the king’s lascivious
appetites. At one point Henry apostrophizes his absent friend by
saying of their drinking and wenching that “You were even better at
that than I was.” You couldn’t prove it by anything we see of him
in this film — which is, moreover, able to hold at bay its own
homoerotic subtext in a way that no contemporary film would ever
do, even if it could
Yet Becket also retains a certain dignity that
transcends its period. Partly this is because of the unusually
restrained performance of Burton in the title role. For some
reason, before I saw the film again, I had remembered him as the
king and Peter O’Toole as the saint — perhaps because of the
latter’s saintly T.E. Lawrence two years before. But our memories
of the drunken brawler and serial marry-er of a few years later act
retrospectively to add a certain authenticity to his portrayal here
of a man whose living for his appetites is only the product of
spiritual disappointment approaching despair. It’s this idea of
someone who reaches for martyrdom as a hopeful escape from the
freedoms that the Hollywood of the last 40 years or so only knows
how to worship that makes this a film to be cherished as well as a
monument to its times.
