Speaker 1: Oh he is, folks, it's show tied. People say, good
Speaker 1: money to see this movie. When they go out to
Speaker 1: a theater.
Speaker 2: They are cold sodas, hot popcorn in no monsters in
Speaker 2: the protection booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3: God As.
Speaker 4: From the Unforgettable Award winning play comes the Best Picture
Speaker 4: of the Year, starring the Best Actor of the Year. So,
Speaker 4: Thomas Moyle, you, having found guilty of high treason the
Speaker 4: sentence of the cause yours. When I was practicing law
Speaker 4: the man I was asked the prisoner before pronouncing sentence
Speaker 4: if he had anything to say, Have you anything to say?
Speaker 5: Yes, I'm.
Speaker 4: Honored by six Academy Awards. A Man for All Seasons.
Speaker 6: So, Thomas Moore, have you anything to say to me?
Speaker 7: Regarding the King's marriage with Queen Anne.
Speaker 3: I understood I was not to be asked at again.
Speaker 4: Benevident to me wonders to bring me these char I'll
Speaker 4: tell us for children, Master Secretary, not for me. A
Speaker 4: Man for All Seasons, winner of six Academy AWAR Awards,
Speaker 4: including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture
Speaker 4: of the Year.
Speaker 5: Dangerous I mean as a friend, I am a friend.
Speaker 5: I wish I wasn't what I am.
Speaker 4: Sir Thomas Thomas Paul Schofield hailed as Best Actor of
Speaker 4: the Year for his performance as Thomas Moore now Wenday
Speaker 4: Hillary as the woman behind the Man, Leo McKern as Cromwell,
Speaker 4: a conspirator, Robert Shaw as the lusty King Henry of
Speaker 4: the Eighth.
Speaker 6: In you Know, are you?
Speaker 8: Grace?
Speaker 5: Spare meal discretion.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm to play and mark.
Speaker 4: Again orson Well says Cardinal Wolsey, and Susannah Yorke as
Speaker 4: the daughter torn between love and.
Speaker 9: Mild Margaret What is it make?
Speaker 8: Father?
Speaker 2: Is a new act going through parliament?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Why this actor going to administer an oath about the marriage?
Speaker 6: And what concussion is the earth.
Speaker 5: High treason?
Speaker 8: Honor.
Speaker 7: Welcome to the Project Booth. I'm your host, Mike White,
Speaker 7: join me once again as mister Spencer Parsons.
Speaker 1: Hello.
Speaker 7: Also back in the booth is mister Robert Bellissimo.
Speaker 8: Hello, Mike and Spencer and everyone listening. Thanks for having
Speaker 8: me back on this episode.
Speaker 7: We are taking a request from Patreon listener. Peter Rogers
Speaker 7: A Man for All Seasons directed by Fred Zinnemann and
Speaker 7: written by Robert Bolt, adapted from his own play. The
Speaker 7: film stars Paul Scholfield as Sir Thomas Moore, a statesman
Speaker 7: from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. That's the
Speaker 7: fourteen hundreds and the fifteen hundreds. I also have to
Speaker 7: say that to myself, because the whole the twentieth century
Speaker 7: was the nineteen hundreds always threw me off. When he
Speaker 7: opposed the divorce and remarriage of Henry the Eighth, he
Speaker 7: was arrested and eventually spoilers put to death. We will
Speaker 7: be discussing more the film and its remake and other things,
Speaker 7: and spoiling things as we go along, not that I
Speaker 7: can really spoil it any more than I just did.
Speaker 7: So if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the
Speaker 7: podcast and track down the film. We will still be here. So, Spencer,
Speaker 7: when was the first you saw this movie and what
Speaker 7: did you think?
Speaker 2: My first memory of this movie, as it was one
Speaker 2: of those that played very popularly during those PBS fundraising
Speaker 2: marathons where they would interrupt every fifteen minutes or so
Speaker 2: and the movie would take about.
Speaker 1: Four hours to watch. They did this a bunch of times,
Speaker 1: and I know I.
Speaker 2: Saw it at least in pieces a couple of times.
Speaker 2: As a kid, and you know, just stuck with me
Speaker 2: as that kind of movie. Honestly, I've been meaning to
Speaker 2: rewatch it because I'm a big Orson Wells fan, is
Speaker 2: well known on this show, and felt like, oh I
Speaker 2: got to see the Orson Wells performance, and on that score,
Speaker 2: I was not disappointed. You know, Wells really brings it
Speaker 2: absolutely best scene in the movie. I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 2: feel like an Orson Wells movie, but you definitely feel
Speaker 2: an influence in that scene that is very different in
Speaker 2: terms of it. It's like visualization, filmmaker, everything from.
Speaker 7: The rest of the film and Robert, how about yourself.
Speaker 8: This was the first time view it for me, spent
Speaker 8: for me Jowell's fan, so it had been on my
Speaker 8: watch list for a while. And as you've interviewed Mike
Speaker 8: Joseph Bride a few times, I know he's Well's historian
Speaker 8: and he's very fond of Wells in this film. So
Speaker 8: this was my first time seeing it. And then I
Speaker 8: loved this scene and then before you knew it, he's dead.
Speaker 8: I'm like, oh great, this movie just started in Wells
Speaker 8: with Denaud Kiss. So yeah, not enough Wells, not enough.
Speaker 8: Robert Shaw I thought like I thoughts great too.
Speaker 1: Robert Seohn's incredible, He's so good.
Speaker 8: In it, and I was like, oh, we only see
Speaker 8: him in a couple of scenes. But I liked it,
Speaker 8: and I really loved I didn't love it, but I
Speaker 8: liked it. But I always love a persons the system,
Speaker 8: films or stories, and I thought, Okay, that's what this is,
Speaker 8: but yet, why is it not? Why do I not
Speaker 8: like it more than I do? And I think it
Speaker 8: was because Thomas Moore. The way he's depicted anyways, is
Speaker 8: that he's just unshakable stone, just right from the beginning,
Speaker 8: you know, as right away they're asking him to compromise
Speaker 8: and he will not, and of course throughout that's what
Speaker 8: it is, and it obviously it gets worse and worse
Speaker 8: for him. So I like that. And then I thought, well,
Speaker 8: I love Surproco and he's not Surprogo. He's not so
Speaker 8: complicated in that either. But I think the difference with
Speaker 8: that is he starts he's a rookie cop. It gradually
Speaker 8: builds to him seeing all this corruption. There's a lot
Speaker 8: more feelings involved we see as a gregarious side. We
Speaker 8: see him snap gradually. As I was furious and how
Speaker 8: anxious he gets throughout, so it has a lot more
Speaker 8: feelings to it, whereas this this guy is just like Nope,
Speaker 8: I am not gonna bend. And I mean I thought
Speaker 8: Schoolfield was fantastic in it, and there is some moments
Speaker 8: where he really snap, but only a couple of times.
Speaker 8: He's just he's a steady rock so and everybody else
Speaker 8: is rather one dimensional as well, so it kind of
Speaker 8: felt a little flat to me, pretty predictable. I thought, Okay,
Speaker 8: I see where this is going. You know it's not
Speaker 8: gonna hand well for this guy. But after reading that
Speaker 8: there are certain things about him that they didn't include,
Speaker 8: I thought it was a shame, which I'm sure we'll
Speaker 8: get into as the review in folds, but that that's
Speaker 8: my initial impressions.
Speaker 7: This was also a first time watch for me. This
Speaker 7: movie has just always been there. I mean, it won
Speaker 7: the Academy Award and won sixty six or for sixty
Speaker 7: six won a whole bunch of awards. It's always just
Speaker 7: been held up as like, oh, a man for all seasons,
Speaker 7: and I just never went there. Had we not gotten
Speaker 7: this request from Paul Rodgers, I don't think I would
Speaker 7: have checked it out, even though I had a great
Speaker 7: time with the next film that Cinnamon directed, which was
Speaker 7: The Jackal. Had a wonderful discussion about that. But going
Speaker 7: back to this one in sixty six, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 7: you're kind of right as far as like, this is
Speaker 7: the guy against the system type of thing. The play
Speaker 7: was out in what sixty two? There was actually a
Speaker 7: sixty three version of it made for Australian television. I
Speaker 7: tried my best to find that was unable to And
Speaker 7: then of course there's a remake that we'll talk about
Speaker 7: a little bit later.
Speaker 1: This film looks beautiful.
Speaker 7: I like the use of the river throughout this whole thing,
Speaker 7: that we start on the river and just use the
Speaker 7: river to kind of go up and down from where
Speaker 7: more is at down the river to I guess it's London.
Speaker 8: I guess.
Speaker 7: I feel so lost in this. And I had to
Speaker 7: do so much fricking reading for this one because it
Speaker 7: was just like who is this guy? Because I always
Speaker 7: get him mixed up Thomas Moore, I get mixed up
Speaker 7: with Thomas A. Beckett and Thomas Aquinas all the time.
Speaker 7: So I'm just like, who is this guy? And then
Speaker 7: when you ask that question, depending on who you ask
Speaker 7: it of you're going to get a whole different answer.
Speaker 7: There is the man of unshakable faith, and then and
Speaker 7: there's the guy who put heretics to death. And it
Speaker 7: feels like I would like a little bit of a
Speaker 7: blend of the two and see a more three sixty
Speaker 7: version of More because this, like you said, he's a
Speaker 7: very static character, and we're just talking earlier today about
Speaker 7: Return of the Jedi and like how characters can be
Speaker 7: active dynamic or they can be very static and more
Speaker 7: as a super static character.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna jump in.
Speaker 2: I think Schofield's performance it is the worst thing about
Speaker 2: the movie. I think the performance is bad because he's
Speaker 2: taken it in a direction that not different really from.
Speaker 1: What Zinnama is doing with it.
Speaker 2: Zinneman not one of my favorite directors, and there will
Speaker 2: be more shots fired about other Sacred Cow films. I
Speaker 2: rewatched high Noon because this is like, this is basically
Speaker 2: high Noon, but without shooting. It's a similar kind of
Speaker 2: I realized while I was watching it again, it's.
Speaker 1: The same kind of movie. Both of these movies stink,
Speaker 1: they're bad.
Speaker 2: They have the same kind of problem from Zimmerman, which
Speaker 2: is that Zennaman just assumes the goodness of these aracters.
Speaker 2: You know, Gary Cooper in the case of High Noon
Speaker 2: all the way through and assumes the goodness of Thomas
Speaker 2: Moore here and assumes too much for this to be
Speaker 2: a real drama of a.
Speaker 1: Man against the system.
Speaker 2: There is a system, and there's a person who's a
Speaker 2: kind of I think Gary Cooper's performance is way better
Speaker 2: in High Noon, but it's still the conception of the
Speaker 2: character is this unshakable block of wood all the way through.
Speaker 1: And Schofield, this is.
Speaker 2: A movie where I actually question the editing to get
Speaker 2: Schofield's performance In a couple of places. He is in
Speaker 2: such a low register through the whole thing. One of
Speaker 2: the only times that he raises his voice in any
Speaker 2: recognizable way is he probably should against this situation that
Speaker 2: he's in. Is a way long, wide shot looking at
Speaker 2: his back when he yells in the courtroom near the end,
Speaker 2: and I almost thought it was another character.
Speaker 1: Because his voice was so different. It might even be dumped.
Speaker 2: I ran it back a few times, and I saw
Speaker 2: this in the editing, and yeah, sure, I think you
Speaker 2: can look into his face and you can believe him
Speaker 2: moment to moment, But he has just made such a
Speaker 2: disastrous choice about this character over time that I think
Speaker 2: the movie actually works very much against itself. You know,
Speaker 2: I come out on the side of corruption when I
Speaker 2: watched this movie because I see a character it's a
Speaker 2: kind of similar thing again to Hei Newon, and I
Speaker 2: might get into that a little bit more later, but
Speaker 2: I see this character who's mainly just what he is saying,
Speaker 2: what he's doing, how he is behaving. It just makes
Speaker 2: him kind of an asshole. And I think Thomas Moore
Speaker 2: is a fascinating interesting character. It could be an interesting asshole.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is somebody who really took heretics to task,
Speaker 2: in particular Lutherans. He wrote flame notes to Luther that
Speaker 2: were full of profanity.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He wrote Utopia, which I actually read again for this
Speaker 2: because I had read it in college, and I was like,
Speaker 2: I don't think this guy is like a writer can
Speaker 2: be different from you know, in person, from how they
Speaker 2: are on the page. But there's no evidence of the
Speaker 2: writer that wrote Utopia. There's only this idea that he's
Speaker 2: never going to move and it starts to the very
Speaker 2: beginning and goes through the end. When I get a
Speaker 2: scene with Orson Wells, I'm convinced that actually the corruption
Speaker 2: in this case is necessary.
Speaker 1: England has been through the Wars of Roses.
Speaker 2: It's been thirty straight years of mayhem and murder and insanity.
Speaker 2: And the point here is to get an air who
Speaker 2: will be legitimate to the throne when the tutors are
Speaker 2: very weak in their.
Speaker 1: Assumption of the throne. So there's a very serious kind
Speaker 1: of issue.
Speaker 2: And I just start to wonder over the course of
Speaker 2: this version because I also, you know, dealt with the play,
Speaker 2: and I think the play is a different animal.
Speaker 1: In this version. We have this dickhead who won't move.
Speaker 2: At the cost, potentially at the cost of other people's
Speaker 2: deaths over a particular point of how to deal with
Speaker 2: the pope. And I actually think that the dealing with
Speaker 2: the pope can be dealt with very seriously, but.
Speaker 1: The movie doesn't deal with it seriously.
Speaker 2: It's self evident that this guy is right, and he's
Speaker 2: just going to quietly say no, no, no, and I
Speaker 2: am going to be silent, you know, the entire time,
Speaker 2: as there are other people dealing with a very serious,
Speaker 2: deadly situation for ordinary people, and he won't move. And
Speaker 2: this is especially difficult in terms of you know, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of current resonances with a story like this,
Speaker 2: not just man against the system, but the idea that
Speaker 2: a lot of people are allowing the system to go
Speaker 2: out of control because they're afraid. And I really want,
Speaker 2: like I so in my core being want to sympathize
Speaker 2: with his position, and I don't know. I see Robert
Speaker 2: Shaw play Henry the Eighth, who is one of the
Speaker 2: monsters of history, and I'm all about Robert Shaw. I
Speaker 2: see Cardinal Wolseley at the beginning, played by Orson Wells
Speaker 2: in a brilliant scene, and as he brings up the
Speaker 2: salient points about recent history and what they need to do,
Speaker 2: I cannot but side with Orson Wells. And then additionally,
Speaker 2: Vanessa Redgrave appears very briefly as Anne boleyn Oh my god,
Speaker 2: three minutes in the movie, maybe even less, has hardly
Speaker 2: a line, completely amazing, riveting, full of life.
Speaker 1: And then everybody else in the movie Zenneman is toning
Speaker 1: them all.
Speaker 2: John Hurt, also great actor Schofield, Hurt, lots of other
Speaker 2: people toned into this kind of lame register of history.
Speaker 2: It's not a living movie, and it makes precisely the
Speaker 2: opposite points because of those who actually live on screen
Speaker 2: in it.
Speaker 8: Shaw was so riveting. Yeah, I mean his presence is
Speaker 8: certainly felt throughout because he's the one giving these orders.
Speaker 8: And I thought, well, why wouldn't you see him, you know,
Speaker 8: as they're hearing that Thomas More won't bend, as all
Speaker 8: his allies are the ones now dealing with him and
Speaker 8: not the king directly, I'm like, well, what do he do?
Speaker 8: Cut back to him, Like, I would have loved to
Speaker 8: have seen the way he reacted to this, because he
Speaker 8: was so ferocious and he brought so much feeling to
Speaker 8: a film that was mostly flat, And I just thought
Speaker 8: that was very strange to have only had him in
Speaker 8: what two or three scenes. I think the wedding and
Speaker 8: when he comes and visit, well, in the wedding.
Speaker 1: Doesn't appear to be in the play. And I love
Speaker 1: the wedding scene.
Speaker 2: I mean I love not just because of those performances,
Speaker 2: but also because, like Zinnaman's camera comes to life in
Speaker 2: relationship to the performances, not just like he's plunked down
Speaker 2: the camera and Robert Shaw's taking over. It's like, all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, the camera really cares about a character
Speaker 2: and becomes part of their psychology, which just doesn't happen,
Speaker 2: you know, much else in the film. There are some
Speaker 2: very pretty pictures, but it's really interesting the strongest actors
Speaker 2: do demand from Zennemon a different kind of approach to
Speaker 2: how the story is told visually. The two scenes with
Speaker 2: Orson Wells are also a lot more interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, there's the one scene where he's.
Speaker 2: In the very painterly They put him at a tiny,
Speaker 2: tiny desk and he looks enormous, and Wells has I'm
Speaker 2: sure Wells did his own makeup, so he's got this
Speaker 2: like really grotesque makeup with like red rings around his eyes.
Speaker 1: He looks on death's door anyway.
Speaker 2: And then there's that later scene where he's been taken
Speaker 2: to the Tower of London because you know, Henry, he's
Speaker 2: failed Henry the Eighth and all of that. He's playing
Speaker 2: it on his back and his face is like upside
Speaker 2: down on the screen, and it's just this doesn't happen
Speaker 2: for anybody else in the movie. And I think it's
Speaker 2: in part because we have these two three obstreperous kind
Speaker 2: of actors who simply demand another kind of photography from Zennerman,
Speaker 2: and he's directed everybody else nicely, but they're just too
Speaker 2: they're too painterly, they're too solid, they're not dynamic presences.
Speaker 1: That's a kind of tableau vivant movie. And I'm no
Speaker 1: big fan of the Oscars.
Speaker 2: But this is like one of those movies that I
Speaker 2: would point to as like, yeah, and in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: six they had this like Deadly Dull Man for All
Speaker 2: Seasons and they gave that a heap of Oscars.
Speaker 7: Robert. The last time that you and I spoke, we
Speaker 7: talked about just that whole thing of that characters. Zay
Speaker 7: just having this promise he made and he is unshakable
Speaker 7: in his faith, and it's similar, but it's so different
Speaker 7: from what More is doing. It's just amazing that both
Speaker 7: of these movies have these characters whe they're like, no,
Speaker 7: this is what's right, and I have to do this.
Speaker 7: It's a promise that he made to a saint and
Speaker 7: he feels that he has to do this, Whereas in
Speaker 7: this one, I know that Moore is struggling with his
Speaker 7: faith and is very Catholic in his faith, and he's
Speaker 7: just like, no, no, we can't do this. We really
Speaker 7: can't bend the rules. But it doesn't feel like it's
Speaker 7: like really down in his core. To me, it just
Speaker 7: feels like, no, that's the rule, that's all it is,
Speaker 7: and just I have to follow the rule. And obviously
Speaker 7: the rules of religion are just so fricking arbitrary. It's crazy.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 7: I've talked before about, you know, how wars and people
Speaker 7: were murdered over silly little things or things that they
Speaker 7: thought were just incredibly massive when it came to like
Speaker 7: when was Jesus a human? When was he a god?
Speaker 7: Does transubstantiation is that literal blood or is that just
Speaker 7: figurative blood? Like people are being thrown out of windows
Speaker 7: about this shit where it's just like no, no, and this
Speaker 7: whole thing where it's like, you know, the Anglican Church,
Speaker 7: I mean, from what I understand, it was basically like, hey,
Speaker 7: we need a church system so that the king can
Speaker 7: divorce and remarry and nobody's going to throw a fit.
Speaker 1: Guess what.
Speaker 7: The Pope is not very happy with that. And we
Speaker 7: have the Catholics, we have the Protestants, and we've had
Speaker 7: hundreds of years of bloodshed over Protestants versus Catholics. No offense, y'all,
Speaker 7: but I think you're really silly because I think it's
Speaker 7: very very small differences. As an atheist, I see very
Speaker 7: little difference between what you guys are doing and when
Speaker 7: it comes to Lutheranism. And yeah, I heard about those
Speaker 7: scatological letters that more would be writing to Luther. I mean,
Speaker 7: Lutheranism is Catholic light lte. It's just basically the same
Speaker 7: thing with a few less stand up and sit down
Speaker 7: at the ceremonies. As far as me and Outsider see.
Speaker 1: So, I hate to.
Speaker 7: Be that guy who's just like you guys are all
Speaker 7: being a bunch of silly a holes, But comes down
Speaker 7: to that in this movie.
Speaker 8: It's interesting what Spencer was saying about the schoolfield because
Speaker 8: I liked his performance, this sense of dignity he brought
Speaker 8: to it. But now Spencer's making me it's true that
Speaker 8: he's sort of I think he either him or ZI
Speaker 8: him and made a choice that like, this guy's just
Speaker 8: gonna put his nose up and not let anything get
Speaker 8: but he hangs on to his dignity. He chokes it.
Speaker 8: I mean, he just will not show. He shows very
Speaker 8: little emotion. Intentionally interesting in a way. But now Spencer's
Speaker 8: making me think maybe that is part of what's kind
Speaker 8: of doll about it because maybe if he had allowed
Speaker 8: that to sort of build. I mean, people are betraying left,
Speaker 8: right and center. Like he's the one character who was
Speaker 8: a closer friend of his what was his name, They
Speaker 8: had more of a friendship, and you know, Thomas is
Speaker 8: bringing him to do it, even though he's understanding his position.
Speaker 8: But yeah, he just sort of like, no one's gonna
Speaker 8: get to me. Even that scene, which I thought was
Speaker 8: quite good where he says goodbye to his family and
Speaker 8: everybody is getting so emotional except and you know, in
Speaker 8: a way it's interesting, but yeah, it's making me think,
Speaker 8: you know, perhaps he should have allowed these things to
Speaker 8: get to him and brought a lot more to it.
Speaker 7: My most interesting character is the John Hurt character Richard
Speaker 7: rich and I can think of Richie Rich through the
Speaker 7: whole thing, but that he is there at the beginning
Speaker 7: and he's like, hey, I'm really looking for this position.
Speaker 7: He's striving for stuff. He's a little sneaky about things.
Speaker 7: And then we find out how sneak he is later
Speaker 7: on during some of the Leo McCarey stuff that he
Speaker 7: glombs onto that cup, that silver cup that Moore was
Speaker 7: given as a bribe and then takes that cup and
Speaker 7: makes himself a man of the world. He buys himself
Speaker 7: a new robe. He's like, this is what I need.
Speaker 7: I need a new robe. I need to look like you.
Speaker 7: I need to do this. And then he just kind
Speaker 7: of parlays that into all of these things, and I'm
Speaker 7: surprised he didn't stab more in the back later on
Speaker 7: when it's like, oh, you got this coup, I'm expecting
Speaker 7: him to lie under oath just to keep his position
Speaker 7: and to really just throw under the bus, almost as
Speaker 7: if I could take over this spot that Moore has.
Speaker 7: I really like this whole machiavellian things that are going
Speaker 7: on inside of this movie. I was like, Yeah, more
Speaker 7: of that, please like Meo McCarey. I fucking love Leo mccarrey.
Speaker 7: I talk so much about him when we talked about
Speaker 7: the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as Smarter Brother and ironically
Speaker 7: and that it's him as the bad guy, him as Moriarty,
Speaker 7: and then who's a Roy Kinnear the guy that plays
Speaker 7: the common man in the remake, like that McCarry was
Speaker 7: the common man in the nineteen sixty two play and
Speaker 7: then gets cast in this role in the sixty sixth movie,
Speaker 7: and he just plays it wonderfully. And the use of
Speaker 7: his glass eye to add to that performance where just
Speaker 7: one eye staring straight ahead and the other one's just
Speaker 7: kind of jumping back and forth. He looks so sinister,
Speaker 7: and he pulls it off wonderfully.
Speaker 8: There was another thing with the Richard at Rigid that
Speaker 8: he's a complete opportunist right from the getting it. Maybe
Speaker 8: if they had made him much closer with Thomas Moore
Speaker 8: and more of an ally, and then if we had
Speaker 8: gradually seen him become corrupted, but that would have been
Speaker 8: much richer. But right away he's like, can I get
Speaker 8: a judge? Like you know that this guy's gonna the
Speaker 8: first chance he gets, he's gonna throw a clothes to
Speaker 8: this guy. He's like a little dog again, another character
Speaker 8: who's just dealt with in a very one dimensional way.
Speaker 8: It just there was a real opportunity there.
Speaker 2: I thought again, it felt so assumed that he's bad
Speaker 2: right from the get go. And yeah, he's a striver
Speaker 2: and whatnot, and this could be interesting drama, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't precisely mean.
Speaker 1: To go in a particular direction with this either.
Speaker 2: There could be something about how Thomas Mohr was an
Speaker 2: asshole to someone who was like a little person early on,
Speaker 2: and it isn't quite that, but if it plays as
Speaker 2: this mysterious thing of like instantly mar Is dismissing this
Speaker 2: young striver guy and then eventually that guy is gonna
Speaker 2: have his sort of long term petty revenge when we
Speaker 2: get to committing perjury at the end. But the motivations
Speaker 2: of the characters, everything is so deliberately underplayed in this
Speaker 2: like that underplaying is some kind of key to depth
Speaker 2: that I just found the relationship with this character.
Speaker 1: And I watched this movie twice this weekend.
Speaker 2: Because I thought the first time, when I was really
Speaker 2: hating on it, that I was maybe being unfair and
Speaker 2: I had to check it out again. I found the
Speaker 2: relationship between these characters again a little bit mysterious.
Speaker 1: Right from the get go, that that like there's something
Speaker 1: that's just assumed.
Speaker 2: About the relationship that I'm supposed to know and it
Speaker 2: doesn't necessarily make sense. The script of the play is
Speaker 2: not that much different, but for instance, in the Charlton
Speaker 2: Heston version, the way that those characters play against each
Speaker 2: other early on, I'm like, ah, I got it, and
Speaker 2: it's so weird.
Speaker 1: To say this, but I know you want to talk
Speaker 1: about the Charlton Heston at the end.
Speaker 2: The Charlton Heston directed version where he's starring in it
Speaker 2: is so much better.
Speaker 1: It's not like great filmmaking. It's a film to play.
Speaker 2: It very much is a film to play, but as
Speaker 2: a film to play, it's also so much more itself.
Speaker 2: It's longer, there are passages of dialogue that helped to
Speaker 2: make more sense of what's going on with everybody, and
Speaker 2: also all the characters have like real emotions up and
Speaker 2: down throughout it. Charlton Heston's decision to play a melodramatic
Speaker 2: Thomas Moore makes so much more sense. And I think
Speaker 2: it's so much better a performance. And this is like,
Speaker 2: you know, a nineties TBS version or something not that
Speaker 2: should necessarily be bad, but it's the kind of thing
Speaker 2: for anybody that's listening.
Speaker 1: If you seek it.
Speaker 2: Out, it's gonna look like a TV movie, you know,
Speaker 2: right out of the gate, but it's a TV movie
Speaker 2: that tells the story better, conveys character better. And I
Speaker 2: came away from the TV movie version with Charlton Heston,
Speaker 2: which also has a very interesting kind of thing with
Speaker 2: a sort of chorus character for it, who speaks directly
Speaker 2: to the audience, standing in for you know, it's one
Speaker 2: guy who stands in for common men throughout the story.
Speaker 1: By having that device, it also sets the stakes better
Speaker 1: for what real people are put through.
Speaker 2: The play version and the version that Charlon Heston did
Speaker 2: recognizes that Thomas Moore is standing on principle, and his
Speaker 2: principle makes more sense in that version. And also his
Speaker 2: standing on principle is likely to get other people killed.
Speaker 2: So it's a much more complicated version of history and
Speaker 2: much more satisfying.
Speaker 8: I found the fact that he held on to his principles.
Speaker 8: I didn't really understand that was going to get people
Speaker 8: killed if he didn't go with what the king wanted.
Speaker 8: Like there was a reference to it at the beginning
Speaker 8: from Wells's character, so like old people will get killed.
Speaker 8: But I thought that was just a fear tactic to
Speaker 8: stand at the stake involve other than this is against
Speaker 8: my religious principles. I'm not going to support what you
Speaker 8: want to do. Like I had to read the plot
Speaker 8: a few times, I had to go back. I mean,
Speaker 8: if you have to dig into a story that much
Speaker 8: outside of being interested something in this in the storytelling
Speaker 8: and not right. I don't know if that made sense
Speaker 8: for you guys, but.
Speaker 2: You know, we often see the phrase that didn't age
Speaker 2: well about various movies, and it's always about like some
Speaker 2: kind of offensive joke or moment, and yeah, that.
Speaker 1: Stuff doesn't necessarily age well.
Speaker 2: But I actually feel like this is a bigger example
Speaker 2: of doesn't age well where there's just a lot that
Speaker 2: is assumed that the audience for this.
Speaker 1: Movie must know. You know, that's not unfair in the time.
Speaker 2: You know, it can be successful as artwork, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't last when there are really basic assumptions about what
Speaker 2: the audience knows or what they might really truly care about. Again,
Speaker 2: as to the principle involved here and the idea of
Speaker 2: the law, you know, that's like that is a thing
Speaker 2: that does really mean something to me. That like, what
Speaker 2: Henry the eighth is trying to do is to make
Speaker 2: the law to fit his purposes under this particular situation.
Speaker 2: And in a certain way it's played as like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's his whims, but it isn't just his whims. He
Speaker 2: does really have to have an heir who can assume
Speaker 2: the throne. That there will be the succession or there
Speaker 2: will there could be more wars. So that's that's something
Speaker 2: that's really really big. But so he's involved in changing
Speaker 2: the laws in order to make things work. And I
Speaker 2: do understand, you know, wanting to not just make law
Speaker 2: or change law willy nilly, But Thomas Moore's point is
Speaker 2: about a perceived law of God. And this isn't even
Speaker 2: an atheistic thing. I'm going to take atheism out of
Speaker 2: it philosophically. If you believe in God, how do you
Speaker 2: know what is God's law versus what is man's law?
Speaker 1: The Pope is one of man's law, and Henry the.
Speaker 2: Eighth is wielding man's law, where in this is God's law.
Speaker 2: And the longer version of the play and the Charlton
Speaker 2: Heston version do make more reference to like the kind
Speaker 2: of not knowing that is risky here, But in this one,
Speaker 2: it's just really hard for me to throw down for
Speaker 2: somebody who believes that he knows God's law at the
Speaker 2: expense of so many other people who could suffer, And
Speaker 2: people could suffer either way. It's not as if like
Speaker 2: Henry the Eighth, making a new church is going to
Speaker 2: keep anyone from suffering. For instance, again in the longer
Speaker 2: version of the play and the Heston version, there is
Speaker 2: more discussion of how changing the church is about to
Speaker 2: you know, the way that Henry the eighth has wanted
Speaker 2: to is setting off problems.
Speaker 1: In Scotland because the Scots are more Catholic.
Speaker 2: The sixty sixth version of the movie just doesn't deal
Speaker 2: in that kind of complexity and expects for me to
Speaker 2: go with someone who.
Speaker 1: Just seems pig headed. Oh yeah, you know God? Oh great,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I like a lot of other people
Speaker 1: here seem like they could know God.
Speaker 7: The troubles started officially in sixty eight. This is sixty six.
Speaker 7: I mean that is all about Protestants versus Catholics. I'm
Speaker 7: just like, guys, we are right here, like, look at
Speaker 7: this stuff. And it's ironic that Heston back in sixty
Speaker 7: six was trying to get this role and everybody's like no, no, no.
Speaker 7: Schofield was him on Broadway and he won a Tony
Speaker 7: and all this, but we can't have Heston. So I
Speaker 7: think he really kept it with him for all those years,
Speaker 7: and that's why he ended up playing it and then
Speaker 7: directing it. And I'll agree with you. I kind of
Speaker 7: like the Heston version better. And I especially like keeping
Speaker 7: the common man character, the Roy Kaneer character, where it's
Speaker 7: like Bolt was like, no, no, we have to get
Speaker 7: rid of that for the movies. This is the movies.
Speaker 7: That isn't a you know, it's not a play, And
Speaker 7: I'm like, why not? Why not have that there's one actor.
Speaker 7: It's the guy who plays like the guy who brings
Speaker 7: him the message at the very beginning of the film.
Speaker 7: I guess it would be like his servant or his
Speaker 7: butler or something. I just like, yeah, use that guy.
Speaker 7: That guy is great. I love him whenever he shows
Speaker 7: up and everything. Nigel Davenport, and use this guy. He
Speaker 7: is great. Have him show up as the boatman, have
Speaker 7: him show up in this place, have him show up
Speaker 7: in that. And I'm fine with him speaking directly to
Speaker 7: the camera. I think that was way too out there
Speaker 7: for Zinneman, but I would have loved something like that.
Speaker 2: It is hard to break the fourth wall, break through
Speaker 2: the screen and speak directly to the audience.
Speaker 1: That is a kind of artifice.
Speaker 2: But also feel like, well, then both, if you're gonna
Speaker 2: cut something like that, we deserve the information that comes
Speaker 2: through in those moments. And it's more than exposition, because
Speaker 2: it is the point of view or points of view
Speaker 2: put into one person of the characters who are making
Speaker 2: things possible for these wealthy people, and also at the
Speaker 2: mercy of the wealthy. There's a line that comes up
Speaker 2: a couple of times that's cut out of the sixty
Speaker 2: six movie, which actually ends up in another form, and
Speaker 2: Jonathan Demi is Something Wild, the thing about better to
Speaker 2: be a live rat than a dead lion, which in
Speaker 2: Jonathan Demi's Something Wild comes up as better to be
Speaker 2: a live dog than a dead lion. I had to
Speaker 2: mention something while because I love it, and I love
Speaker 2: that this carries over weirdly into that movie. This idea
Speaker 2: of the live rat, you know, making its way through
Speaker 2: speaks to of course, that Richard rich makes it all
Speaker 2: the way to the end and dies peacefully in his bed,
Speaker 2: spoken in relationship to him as a character, but it's
Speaker 2: also spoken in relationship to the problems of ordinary people
Speaker 2: living in this kind of system where these different points
Speaker 2: of conscience would clash. For me, in the play, it
Speaker 2: makes Thomas Moore's conscience actually make a lot more sense
Speaker 2: that he's within such a system himself, and that he
Speaker 2: is trying, you know, he's trying his best to make
Speaker 2: it as good as it can be. And at a
Speaker 2: certain point, and he even says this in the sixty
Speaker 2: sixth version, you know something about like how if he
Speaker 2: doesn't follow his conscience, then you know that way lies chaos.
Speaker 1: That's understandable, but it's like everybody's.
Speaker 2: Steak makes so much more sense in the way that
Speaker 2: it's presented as a play.
Speaker 7: And in the Heston version, real quick, before I forget,
Speaker 7: the guy who I was thinking of was Matthew that
Speaker 7: was his servant and is played by Colin Blakeley, who
Speaker 7: is just always phenomenal in what he's in and I
Speaker 7: mostly remember him from the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
Speaker 7: when we were doing that Holmes series, so more Holmes stuff.
Speaker 7: I guess every British actor had to have shown up
Speaker 7: in these Sherlock Holmes movies at some point, except for
Speaker 7: Robert Shaw as far as I know. In Robert Shaw,
Speaker 7: like you guys said, when he's on screen, he shines.
Speaker 7: It helps that he's covered in gold and you have
Speaker 7: that beautiful shot of the sun behind him. But just
Speaker 7: when he jumps off the boat and jumps right into
Speaker 7: the mud and all the people on the boat are like, oh, fuck,
Speaker 7: what's gonna happen? And then he just lets out with
Speaker 7: that huge cackle, and I'm just like, of course, I'm
Speaker 7: going right to Jaws, and I'm just thinking of him,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 8: Like, oh, don't forget your Rubber's Chief.
Speaker 7: You know, all that kind of stuff, and I'm just like, oh,
Speaker 7: I love Robert Shaw.
Speaker 1: When he's on he is great.
Speaker 7: And then he's just off of the screen for so
Speaker 7: much of the movie.
Speaker 2: Another great touch in the Heston version that Henry the Eighth,
Speaker 2: who's played pretty well. You know, he's no Robert Shaw,
Speaker 2: but he's really good. He appears during the courtroom scenes
Speaker 2: but behind a curtain.
Speaker 1: And he peeks in, and this is also a great touch.
Speaker 2: It's humanizing Henry the Eighth is there at the courtroom
Speaker 2: more is going to be executed, and as things are
Speaker 2: obviously going wrong, and we see these moments of Henry
Speaker 2: the Eighth like looking in and then closing the curtain
Speaker 2: and really becoming emotional and really registering a kind of
Speaker 2: human cost to his own actions behind the scenes. This
Speaker 2: is something that I think is in a very different
Speaker 2: approach that I wouldn't expect as much from Heston, to
Speaker 2: be honest. I mean, you know, perhaps it's also coming
Speaker 2: from Robert Bolt and both's intentions getting played out through
Speaker 2: Heston through a more complete version of it.
Speaker 1: As a play to a movie.
Speaker 2: But Heston really does have a lot more attention to
Speaker 2: like all the people, and he seems to understand the
Speaker 2: high to low relationships, whereas Zennaman is just really straight
Speaker 2: up interested in the great men at the top.
Speaker 7: I won't disagree with you at all. I think if
Speaker 7: Hessen's version suffers from anything, it's just that when you
Speaker 7: come to the Zinnamon thing, it feels like, and I
Speaker 7: know he didn't make this on that much money, but
Speaker 7: it feels like everybody is somebody. You've got super babyface,
Speaker 7: John Hurt as Richard Ritch, and you've got just all
Speaker 7: of these like oh, I know that guy, I know
Speaker 7: that guy. And then you come to the Heston version
Speaker 7: and you're just like, Okay, Well, it's really cool that
Speaker 7: he went back in and cast Vanessa Redgrave, who had
Speaker 7: that small part in the sixty six. Is really cool
Speaker 7: that he's bringing in John Gilgood. That's great. Like I said,
Speaker 7: I love Roy Kinear can never think about him without
Speaker 7: thinking of Charlie and the chocolate factory, but then so
Speaker 7: many of the other actors. I'm like, I don't know
Speaker 7: these faces. I don't know the guy that plays Henry
Speaker 7: the Eighth And I'm like, okay, I think that's because
Speaker 7: of the budget of the who is at CNT or
Speaker 7: TBS that put that out. I'm like, Okay, they probably
Speaker 7: didn't have all the money in the world. You probably
Speaker 7: spending that on Heston's salary, on Gilgood, on Redgrave, And
Speaker 7: I imagine that Heston this is probably a passion project
Speaker 7: for him, if he's both directing and starring in it.
Speaker 7: Tried for the sixty six version, I kind of wish
Speaker 7: that there had been a few more recognizable faces, but
Speaker 7: that's a very minor complaint because of the actress that
Speaker 7: they do have do a really competent job. And I
Speaker 7: agree with you. Like I was loaded for Bear, thinking oh,
Speaker 7: Paston is just going to be so bombastic and he's
Speaker 7: not going to know how to direct this, And then
Speaker 7: I'm sitting there going, Wow, this really feels good. I
Speaker 7: like this version a lot, and it does capture a
Speaker 7: Thomas Moore that I find a lot more interesting.
Speaker 8: I didn't get a chance to watch the remake, but
Speaker 8: I'm going to because it seems like it makes a
Speaker 8: lot more sense just from this discussion. But even like
Speaker 8: I read that like in that he hated and we
Speaker 8: touched on this already, but More hated Protestants so much,
Speaker 8: you know that he called for their blood, And I thought,
Speaker 8: what a we do see that he'd liked the son
Speaker 8: in law for being from a different religion. Is alue Lutheran, Yeah,
Speaker 8: Lutheran and can't raise my daughter. And but then like
Speaker 8: we're just assumed that he's okay with it later, like
Speaker 8: unless I missed it, like they seem to get they
Speaker 8: get married, and he does it, It's like, oh, I
Speaker 8: guess he just they skip over that or yeah.
Speaker 2: Basically Roper recants, which I find to be a very odd.
Speaker 2: The Heston version makes the back and forth between them
Speaker 2: make a little bit more sense. One of the things
Speaker 2: that struck me as very odd is that if More
Speaker 2: is so implacable and is so much about his conscience,
Speaker 2: then can Ropert putitive son in law just change his
Speaker 2: conscience and flip back to being Catholic again so easily
Speaker 2: if he's really gone with Lutherism, if he really is
Speaker 2: the heathen, then what does it really matter?
Speaker 1: In the end.
Speaker 2: There's a line of dialogue that is in both versions
Speaker 2: that I find to be very troublesome. But it's troublesome
Speaker 2: in a good way in the play version and troublesome
Speaker 2: for me in a bad way in the version. It's
Speaker 2: late in the movie and when he's being interrogated, his
Speaker 2: friend Norfolk says, just come over to our side, just
Speaker 2: join us, and More says back, And when we die
Speaker 2: and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience
Speaker 2: and I am sent to hell.
Speaker 1: For doing mine, will you come with me for fellowship?
Speaker 2: And it's really interesting because there's a total blank in
Speaker 2: there by these rules. The Nazi who kills a bunch
Speaker 2: of people to his conscience goes to heaven. The Quaker
Speaker 2: who kills one Nazi to defend themselves goes to hell
Speaker 2: because they've gone against their conscience. And in this version
Speaker 2: it was really this where people's wives are at stake
Speaker 2: over powerful men's consciousnesses. To have this zero at the
Speaker 2: center seems immensely dangerous and seems to me like Moore's
Speaker 2: stand is basically, well, this is what I think, and
Speaker 2: so that's how everything has to go, and that actually
Speaker 2: goes a little bit against his apparent view of the law.
Speaker 2: Now again in the Haston version, this comes in a
Speaker 2: place where it's more allowed to be kind of a
Speaker 2: tendentious argument that then turns the corner and goes toward
Speaker 2: dealing with fact, because his very next argument is about
Speaker 2: whether the world is round or flat. And if the
Speaker 2: king says it's round, is it really round? If the
Speaker 2: king says it's flat, is it really flat? That's not
Speaker 2: for a king to decide. That's kind of the real
Speaker 2: that's the real argument. But the way that Schofield plays this,
Speaker 2: I don't see the turn.
Speaker 1: It's all the same.
Speaker 2: And this statement about conscience does not play as, for instance,
Speaker 2: the kind of scrum that we might get into where
Speaker 2: we might change our minds about something from the argument,
Speaker 2: whereas and when Haston plays it, he says it and
Speaker 2: it makes a similar kind of wrong note for me,
Speaker 2: But it's a wrong note that's in a context that
Speaker 2: both feels like he's an emotional person who's turning corners,
Speaker 2: and it's the playwright Robert Bolt kind of identifying the
Speaker 2: kind of hollowness to the conscience that somebody is going
Speaker 2: to stand on and giving us a harder time about
Speaker 2: what it means to stand on conscience.
Speaker 1: That's like one of the I guess that's the thing
Speaker 1: I really prefer about the play in the.
Speaker 2: Heston movie is that it's not just easy to go
Speaker 2: with more on this, and Zenneman and Schofield treat it
Speaker 2: as an easy thing.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, he's obviously right.
Speaker 7: You said, these are powerful men, you know, And that's
Speaker 7: what it is. These are powerful men. If we were
Speaker 7: talking about the common man, if we were talking about
Speaker 7: people that weren't in these positions of power, this wouldn't
Speaker 7: be a thing like they would be tortured, They'd be
Speaker 7: tossed out on their ear. This would happen like there's
Speaker 7: no room for debate. When you are poor. You need
Speaker 7: to do what needs to be done. You have to
Speaker 7: go with the tide or else you're going to drown.
Speaker 7: And when it comes to this, it's like the king
Speaker 7: versus the Chancellor, it's like, all right, these two are
Speaker 7: having a pissing match. It kind of reminds me of
Speaker 7: the CEO of X and the President of the United
Speaker 7: States kind of having their own public meltdown here, and
Speaker 7: it's just like, all right, guys, you're gonna go with
Speaker 7: the program. No, okay, well, off with your head. But
Speaker 7: it's like, yeah, this is the fucking King of England
Speaker 7: that you're having this pissing match with. You know you're
Speaker 7: gonna lose. And even though the Charlton Heston version is
Speaker 7: longer at two and a half hours versus two hours
Speaker 7: for this, it moves quicker. This movie feels very long,
Speaker 7: but there's not a lot where I'd be like, oh,
Speaker 7: they need to chop this, they need to chop that.
Speaker 7: It just feels very languid in its pace. And maybe
Speaker 7: it's that kind of flow of the river thing that
Speaker 7: he's going for again, but he's definitely it's definitely aware
Speaker 7: of the river. I mean, even to the point of
Speaker 7: having the credits bee across the river and length wise
Speaker 7: instead of vertical, you know, having it horizontal. I was like, well,
Speaker 7: that's a pretty smart thing to do. No matter what
Speaker 7: we think of this, I don't think anybody can disagree
Speaker 7: that this is a beautifully shot film. It just needed
Speaker 7: a little bit of a kick in the pants.
Speaker 1: It is beautifully shot.
Speaker 2: I think the lighting is gorgeous, especially for color film
Speaker 2: at the time. Some of the outdoor photography at night
Speaker 2: that they do is a little tricky, but for the
Speaker 2: most part, you know, it is in a good way.
Speaker 2: It is often very painterlly the way that it's shot,
Speaker 2: for me, feels too detached from its characters. Comparing the
Speaker 2: court case at the end, for instance, to Heston's version,
Speaker 2: which is certainly nowhere near as handsome.
Speaker 1: I just feel like.
Speaker 2: We get to see faces, We see faces in relationship
Speaker 2: to people. Heston is often framing one character's close up
Speaker 2: with a couple of people slightly out of focus, but
Speaker 2: that you can see reacting in the background at the
Speaker 2: same time, and we are closer and we're there, and
Speaker 2: we feel like, you know, we also get the beautiful
Speaker 2: wide shots of the courtroom. But Zinnaman frames this essential
Speaker 2: moment at the end as this really big spectacle where
Speaker 2: we can't see the faces of the judges, you know,
Speaker 2: the way that they're arrayed. They have some lines of dialogue,
Speaker 2: but we can barely see their faces that are very
Speaker 2: far away. I have a good TV so I you know,
Speaker 2: I was watching this big and yeah, I know that
Speaker 2: it's intended for the big screen, but there's a real
Speaker 2: distancing that goes on in the approach that I just
Speaker 2: don't think is right for this drama. Like Heston getting
Speaker 2: both the wide that is beautiful and impressive, but also
Speaker 2: being able to go in for close ups following the characters.
Speaker 2: There's a really beautifully covered bit in the Heston version
Speaker 2: where Cromwell is making his arguments and the camera is
Speaker 2: going with him as he snakes around with different people
Speaker 2: behind him at different moments for different pieces of his
Speaker 2: argument that just felt more dramatically grounded and better for
Speaker 2: getting the text across. You know, that's is extremely important.
Speaker 2: It is a very talky thing. It's a talkie play,
Speaker 2: and both movies are very talky, but you have to
Speaker 2: film the talk in such a way that it's going
Speaker 2: to really land. And you know, Zennaman is kind of
Speaker 2: holding back and shooting for kind of grandiosity of event,
Speaker 2: when actually the pettiness of everything that these characters have
Speaker 2: been through with each other is quite intimate and deserves
Speaker 2: its intimacy. In the courtroom, Heston gives us grandiosity and
Speaker 2: intimacy both. And Zinnamon is just into great men in
Speaker 2: big poses, in impressive shots of a.
Speaker 8: Big room, and he's on a white set of the
Speaker 8: worst possible moment when we finally, guys, scream, freaking character
Speaker 8: is so far away. I mean, I like to an
Speaker 8: extent that he was making this guy really alone by
Speaker 8: cutting wide so often. But I agree there it just
Speaker 8: wasn't back and forth enough, because you're right, he is
Speaker 8: very intimate and it is very dialogue heavy, and it
Speaker 8: just didn't match well. It just did work, especially when
Speaker 8: he was three. We finally see this guys snap and
Speaker 8: the camera is nowhere near him. Maybe they had to
Speaker 8: dub that line because he didn't do it or whatever,
Speaker 8: and they had to do that. I mean, who knows.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe he played it quiet again and they realized
Speaker 2: in the editing, Oh, we made the wrong choice and
Speaker 2: gotta be yelled.
Speaker 1: So let's let coscofield in. We'll dub it.
Speaker 7: So I have to apologize that I didn't realize that
Speaker 7: this was first performed in sixty that it was actually
Speaker 7: a radio play in fifty four, a one hour live
Speaker 7: television event in fifty seven for the BBC, And then
Speaker 7: I mentioned the Australian version. There was also a German
Speaker 7: version under just the name Thomas Moore that was also
Speaker 7: for TV in nineteen sixty four. So this had been
Speaker 7: kicking around for a little over a decade by the
Speaker 7: time it came to the film version of it.
Speaker 8: Oh but it wasn't they it's sixty two in the
Speaker 8: West End.
Speaker 7: Well, it said that it had its premiere at the
Speaker 7: Globe Theater on one July nineteen sixty but yeah, I
Speaker 7: kept hearing sixty two as well, so maybe that was
Speaker 7: when it had its big run in the West End.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this struck me as very much like a post
Speaker 2: McCarthy film.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so many of them, but.
Speaker 2: This is like one of those responses to you know,
Speaker 2: the McCarthy era and you know what we went through
Speaker 2: in terms of anti communism, and there's there is a
Speaker 2: kind of allegory to follow there. And again that's actually
Speaker 2: a really big reason, you know why I want to
Speaker 2: be more on Thomas Moore's side in this case as
Speaker 2: a matter of conscience. You know, stories of conscience makes
Speaker 2: sense in relationship to the McCarthy area. But the specifics
Speaker 2: I think maybe it resonated a lot for people at
Speaker 2: the time, which is why it was so popular. I mean,
Speaker 2: I do think, you know, part of the popularity of
Speaker 2: it as an artwork was at the time people were
Speaker 2: really thinking about a lot about this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: But beyond the issue of conscience, it doesn't make for
Speaker 2: the best allegory.
Speaker 1: I had to I had to throw that away a
Speaker 1: fair bit.
Speaker 2: And maybe they weren't thinking about that at all, and
Speaker 2: that's just more in the sort of cultural mix that
Speaker 2: made this important to people over time. But I'm just
Speaker 2: wondering from you guys, did you make any of those
Speaker 2: connections as you were watching.
Speaker 8: I was thinking that as well. And like as you
Speaker 8: mentioned with high Noon, which so did, that's also an
Speaker 8: allegory for the blacklisting period, because you know, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 8: you're condemning this guy based on his lack of action
Speaker 8: and lack of supporting everyone. It's exactly what they did.
Speaker 8: Like if you didn't write on your friends, you were blacklisted.
Speaker 8: And as you probably both know, SAG had allegiancy like
Speaker 8: you had to sign an oath that you were never
Speaker 8: a communist, that you hate communism, and unless you signed
Speaker 8: the oath, then you're blacklisted. And that's very much what
Speaker 8: happens here. He didn't sign the oath that he was
Speaker 8: killed for it. So yeah, I was thinking that too.
Speaker 8: I wasn't sure if that was intentional, but it must
Speaker 8: have been and again using Zinnaman when we y'all know
Speaker 8: Zinneman did High Noon and it was a very very
Speaker 8: similar story and intense. Yeah. I don't know if Mike,
Speaker 8: if that popped off for you, but I certainly saw it.
Speaker 7: I definitely was thinking of High Noon and the subsequent
Speaker 7: to that, the hearings of McCarthy hearings. But yeah, I
Speaker 7: was definitely thinking of like this guy standing by his principles,
Speaker 7: and with that one, I really can stand by Gary
Speaker 7: Cooper as far as like, hey, nobody's helping me out
Speaker 7: here with hell's going on. This is a community. It
Speaker 7: isn't all on my shoulders kind of thing, much more sympathetic,
Speaker 7: empathetic to me. And I know some people hate that movie,
Speaker 7: and that's absolutely fine. I enjoy the stupid theme song,
Speaker 7: and I really enjoy the bad guys, and just I
Speaker 7: love how that movie has been twisted over the years.
Speaker 7: I mean, for me, the whole thing of these bad
Speaker 7: guys come into town on this train translates so well
Speaker 7: into the beginning of Once upon a Time in the West,
Speaker 7: where I'm just like, here comes Harmonica. He's somewhere on
Speaker 7: this train and you have these three guys waiting for him,
Speaker 7: and these three Western legends was Jack Elam and Woody Strode,
Speaker 7: and then I can't remember the actress name who was
Speaker 7: in the Dollars movies. I'm just like, this is great.
Speaker 7: It's a tie to the Old West. It's a tie
Speaker 7: to these movies. It's a tie to the Italian Westerns,
Speaker 7: and it's also a tie to High Noon, and I
Speaker 7: appreciate that so much.
Speaker 8: I remember not really taking to it. You know, of
Speaker 8: course it's well known the allegory connection, and this film
Speaker 8: is discussed in that context though from what I read,
Speaker 8: but it certainly it must have been intentional.
Speaker 2: The idea of the silence also is interesting, you know,
Speaker 2: simply not ratting people out.
Speaker 1: You know, that's interesting, that's compelling.
Speaker 2: I think High Noon is a much better made film,
Speaker 2: but for it, I find it more troublesome. I love
Speaker 2: every performance in High Noon. Gary Cooper finds more levels
Speaker 2: for his stolid law man who's got to do the
Speaker 2: same thing all the way through. I just find that
Speaker 2: it means as you describe it, Mike, you know, he
Speaker 2: can't get people in the community, and there's just a
Speaker 2: certain point where I'm just not believing that people are
Speaker 2: not going to join him, and this was Howard Hawks's
Speaker 2: big problem with the movie, which I you know, I
Speaker 2: love Howard Hawks, but I'm not necessarily going to follow
Speaker 2: his opinions on stuff. But I guess I do have
Speaker 2: the same kind of analysis that at a certain point
Speaker 2: it just doesn't it doesn't quite make sense that nobody
Speaker 2: in town is going to go with Gary Cooper, and
Speaker 2: so they become a lot of really well acted.
Speaker 1: NPCs in that film. They are not really playable characters.
Speaker 1: They're just people that.
Speaker 2: Are not going to join him after a certain point,
Speaker 2: and the arguments don't necessarily make that much sense on
Speaker 2: their side for nobody to join him. And then he's
Speaker 2: surrounded by the townspeople I guess, who have somewhat learned
Speaker 2: the error of their ways after he and his Quaker
Speaker 2: wife have shot the bad guys. At the end, there's
Speaker 2: another one of those moves that I revie, better be
Speaker 2: really good if you're gonna pull the like Quaker is
Speaker 2: going to kill people thing that comes up in a
Speaker 2: lot of war movies in Westerns or the not necessarily
Speaker 2: always the Quaker, but the Pacifist of a real problem
Speaker 2: with that particular trope, and this movie. You know, HeiG
Speaker 2: Noon can't quite pull that off for me, because the
Speaker 2: end is like, oh, all the bad townspeople gather around them,
Speaker 2: and then he can just throw his badge in the
Speaker 2: dirt and ride away with his wife, who's now gotten
Speaker 2: the religion of violence. And I just find something utterly
Speaker 2: fascist about the ending of that movie that it's trying
Speaker 2: to present. It's a paternalistic liberalism, but it's providing a
Speaker 2: kind of paternalistic liberal idea of.
Speaker 1: The law all the way through.
Speaker 2: But then by the end he's like, he killed off
Speaker 2: the bad guys. He's the man of action, who did
Speaker 2: the thing that needed to be done, and.
Speaker 1: Then fuck all you little people. And so it just
Speaker 1: makes it a very difficult movie for me.
Speaker 2: And I only go on about it now because it
Speaker 2: registers as a very similar thing from Zennemon, with the
Speaker 2: basic attitude toward more as a person who can just
Speaker 2: go to.
Speaker 1: The end assume to be totally right. He must be right.
Speaker 2: He goes to his death absolutely right, no matter about
Speaker 2: all the other little people.
Speaker 1: I know that Zenneman.
Speaker 2: You know, as a director, Hei Noon is directed visually
Speaker 2: so beautifully.
Speaker 1: I got no quarrels with that movie.
Speaker 2: On the visual level, and man, when you finally arrive
Speaker 2: at the shootout at the end, it's great. I don't
Speaker 2: find man Van for all seasons to be nearly so
Speaker 2: visually engaged. But Zennaman's obviously, you know, very good. But
Speaker 2: for all the kind of liberal platitude andizing that comes
Speaker 2: through in his films, I just I'm not quite buying.
Speaker 1: I find his work to actually.
Speaker 2: Be really more conservative than some of the more conservative
Speaker 2: filmmakers who are around at his time, like Howard Hawks,
Speaker 2: who was pretty much straight up conservative and got to
Speaker 2: be really a toxic conservative in his old age.
Speaker 7: And I love Rio Bravo, Rio, bravo, fantastic. I even
Speaker 7: like all the remakes that Hawks did of it. And
Speaker 7: had they had a shootout at the end of this one,
Speaker 7: I think I would have added a little bit of
Speaker 7: extra action. You know, it's Last Temptation of Christ. I'm like,
Speaker 7: I know how this story ends. Can you switch it
Speaker 7: up a little? Can we have Jesus do some kung
Speaker 7: fu or something like, come on, let's let's do it up,
Speaker 7: you know, muskets at the end of this Yes, because
Speaker 7: I think we all you know, I'm ruined it at
Speaker 7: the beginning that Morgus has head chopped off at the
Speaker 7: end of this, and it's so final and such a
Speaker 7: there's no ceremony to that scene whatsoever. It's just like, Okay,
Speaker 7: now he's here and boom, and I'm like, wow, that
Speaker 7: happens so quickly, like no final words from Henry the
Speaker 7: Eighth or anybody else.
Speaker 2: Or in the Heston version the play, the executioner takes
Speaker 2: off his hood and it's our narrator, which I expected.
Speaker 2: I knew as soon as I saw, you know, because
Speaker 2: he'd played a couple of different things.
Speaker 1: I was like, he's going to be the executioner.
Speaker 2: But by that point in the movie, that's not like
Speaker 2: getting ahead of it so much as just a satisfying
Speaker 2: way to deal with the rest of the points. And
Speaker 2: he narrates at the end, and he makes a point
Speaker 2: from the position of the common person, you know, to
Speaker 2: everything that's happened, and I, yeah, I just find that
Speaker 2: to bring it all around, you know, quite a bit.
Speaker 2: I'm back to Orson Welles really quickly because I want
Speaker 2: to encourage people. I don't know if you've done at
Speaker 2: chimes at Midnight episode. If you haven't, let's do it.
Speaker 2: Seech times at midnight. Chimes to Midnight deals with so
Speaker 2: much of the same stuff. Obviously different story, different Henry's
Speaker 2: et cetera, but so much of the same stuff.
Speaker 1: And it is a brilliant like kind of repositioning.
Speaker 2: Of Shakespeare to follow a common man as the tragic hero.
Speaker 2: By Wells rewriting three plays, he can turn Falstaff into.
Speaker 1: The tragic hero. And by repositioning.
Speaker 2: That I love Shakespeare, and I love all the language
Speaker 2: from Shakespeare. But it's like Wells kind of rescues these
Speaker 2: Shakespeare plays from the you know, very regressive politics and
Speaker 2: even regressive politics of the time. Shakespeare was staying good
Speaker 2: with the court. He wasn't going to rock any boats.
Speaker 2: He's telling the story that you know, that the royalty,
Speaker 2: that the nobility wants to see. He's not telling stories
Speaker 2: that go against that you know at the time. He's
Speaker 2: telling the version. So Richard the third, for instance, has
Speaker 2: to be a total villain. But the wonderful thing that
Speaker 2: Wells does is that he takes the beauty of Shakespeare's
Speaker 2: characterization and language and by rearranging these plays into one
Speaker 2: long kind of meditation on what is justice within this society?
Speaker 1: How do people deal with power.
Speaker 2: How does someone change when they have to take power?
Speaker 2: What are the stakes of having power and losing it?
Speaker 2: I mean it just does everything.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 7: I have not seen it yet really want to, and
Speaker 7: that makes me want to say it even more.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so good.
Speaker 8: Isaka Wells that just direct this? But I doubt the
Speaker 8: studio wanted well I look at Beckett in relationship to
Speaker 8: this because I remembered really liking it in high.
Speaker 2: School and I didn't watch the whole thing, but the
Speaker 2: first forty five minutes of Beckett, it's a very similar
Speaker 2: story to this. The biggest difference with Beckett is that
Speaker 2: you know, Thomas A. Beckett and King Henry were really
Speaker 2: close friends before they were on the outs. But it's
Speaker 2: a very similar thing of Beckett is going to follow
Speaker 2: through with the law even though the king wants something else,
Speaker 2: and this ultimately gets him executed, and so very very
Speaker 2: similar stories, very similar thing about conscience. But just like
Speaker 2: the first forty five minutes of that, I was like,
Speaker 2: this is so much better movie about the same kind
Speaker 2: of story, the same kind of wrestling with conscience and religion.
Speaker 1: What does all this mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll throw that out is another I want to
Speaker 2: be more positive. I was so negative about for all
Speaker 2: seasons through. I want to add some positivity and recommend
Speaker 2: some other better movies.
Speaker 7: Well, and apparently there's a TV show And first it
Speaker 7: was a book called wolf Hall, and that is basically
Speaker 7: for as much of a hero as Thomas Moore is
Speaker 7: in this, he's a villain in that. Yes, So it's
Speaker 7: amazing to see the difference between the ways that he's portrayed,
Speaker 7: all of the stuff about pursuing heretics and basically he's
Speaker 7: like the British Torquemada. Is how they portray him so different,
Speaker 7: and I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in the
Speaker 7: middle between that literal Catholic saint and the villain that
Speaker 7: he is in wolf Hall. Thanks to friends of the show,
Speaker 7: Tim Madigan, he turned me on to this podcast called
Speaker 7: with It not just the Tutors, I think it is,
Speaker 7: and they had one episode unfortunately, like the second episode
Speaker 7: about Thomas coming out today to non subscribers, so I
Speaker 7: wasn't able to listen to that. And last week I
Speaker 7: listened to the first part and I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 7: this is pretty good. It was a good telling and
Speaker 7: that's where I learned more about him and Martin Luther
Speaker 7: exchanging some notes, just the scatological nature, and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 7: that was kind of the that people wrote back then.
Speaker 7: And it's like even these scholars were you know, they
Speaker 7: probably were insulting each other, and I know they were
Speaker 7: insulting each other in Latin, but it was pretty raunchy
Speaker 7: with the way that they were going back and forth.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I'd love to see kind of somewhere in
Speaker 7: the middle what Thomas Moore really was. Like I was
Speaker 7: trying to listen to a biography of him and it
Speaker 7: was eighteen hours and after a while the narrator's voice
Speaker 7: just kind of ground me down. But yeah, fascinating historical figure.
Speaker 7: Just I don't believe that he was the guy that
Speaker 7: we saw here in A Man for All Seasons.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Read Utopia as well, if you've never read it. It's
Speaker 2: really really fun Utopia obviously, but it's you know, means
Speaker 2: sort of perfect society.
Speaker 1: Thomas More coined the word utopia. It means it doesn't exist.
Speaker 2: And part of the fun of reading it as a
Speaker 2: work a political satire that's definitely under the shadow of
Speaker 2: Machiavelli's The Prince is sort of seeing the way that
Speaker 2: there's a picture being of this perfect society that has
Speaker 2: no property and where people don't care about your religious beliefs.
Speaker 1: Again, you know, kind of a strong element in.
Speaker 2: Relationship to Thomas Moore as we see him in a
Speaker 2: Man for All Seasons. It's a satire and that no,
Speaker 2: he's not necessarily endorsing all these things, but what he's
Speaker 2: doing is he's taking all these ideas of an ideal
Speaker 2: society and kind of working through how contradictory and sort
Speaker 2: of crazy they can be. And so it makes for
Speaker 2: a really, really fun read. It's actually pretty funny and witty.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of philosophical work at that time was
Speaker 2: like I'm going to come up with some weird ass
Speaker 2: story to play out these ideas, you know, kind of
Speaker 2: like you know the Symposium and you know those kinds
Speaker 2: of narratives where they're like dialogues among witty philosophers. So
Speaker 2: this is a similar thing, is philosophical, it's definitely about government.
Speaker 2: It takes about two and a half hours to read.
Speaker 2: I can't recommend that one highly enough if you're interested
Speaker 2: in Sir Thomas Moore or Saint Thomas Moore.
Speaker 8: I was just gonna mention one bit of trivia that
Speaker 8: I thought was interesting because I was wondering, how did
Speaker 8: they get Vanessa Redgrave to just be in this so briefly,
Speaker 8: I think she barely had a line, even though I
Speaker 8: thought that scene was great and she was in it.
Speaker 8: But I read IMDb she was originally supposed to play Margaret,
Speaker 8: whose Susannah York played, but she couldn't do it, so
Speaker 8: she agreed to take this cameo just for the fun
Speaker 8: of it, apparently. But I love Susannah York and yeah,
Speaker 8: and again, I did think that scene that we already
Speaker 8: talked about where they all say goodbye was very, very moving,
Speaker 8: and the mother as well when Wendy Hiller, who played
Speaker 8: I mean, that was really gut wrenching when they all
Speaker 8: have to say goodbye. But other than that, I think
Speaker 8: I like it less after this discussion, now that I
Speaker 8: know some of my what's rating will change.
Speaker 1: I feel bad.
Speaker 7: I have to apologize to our Patreon person, Peter Rogers.
Speaker 7: Now you hope you expecting a really glowing thing. I mean,
Speaker 7: as we're talking about this, I'm looking at other films
Speaker 7: that were released in sixty six and I'm just like
Speaker 7: I would have given that the Oscar like the good
Speaker 7: and the bad, the ugly or persona.
Speaker 2: But that's how always how good it is with the Oscars,
Speaker 2: except in the nineteen seventies. It's like a really great
Speaker 2: film would win the Oscar, and then you look at
Speaker 2: the other nominees and they're also all great and could
Speaker 2: have won. So there's like only one decade when the
Speaker 2: Oscars were like, you know, worth the powder they would
Speaker 2: take to blow them up.
Speaker 8: Who's afraid of Virginia wool Beatkins? Second, Oh my god.
Speaker 7: This was the year of Face of Another, the Tchakahara film.
Speaker 7: Also Daisies was you know, the Vera hit Loova film.
Speaker 7: I mean, there's so many good films this year. Unfortunately
Speaker 7: most of them.
Speaker 8: Are foreign so they probably wouldn't have done nominated anyways,
Speaker 8: but there were at least some really good American ones,
Speaker 8: and they really.
Speaker 2: Influenced, you know, American cinema going into the seventies.
Speaker 7: All right, guys, let's go ahead and take a break
Speaker 7: and play a preview for next week's show.
Speaker 1: Right after these.
Speaker 6: Brief messages, get ready to dive deep into the life,
Speaker 6: career and unforgettable moments of the one and Only Chevy Chase.
Speaker 6: Join us on an exciting journey through the illustrious career
Speaker 6: of this comedy icon as we explore his groundbreaking roles,
Speaker 6: behind the scenes stories, and timeless contributions to the world
Speaker 6: of entertainment. Each episode of the Chasing Chevy Chase podcast
Speaker 6: brings you expert analysis and nostalgic reflections on Chevy Chase's
Speaker 6: most iconic characters in classic films like National Lampoon's Vacation,
Speaker 6: Caddy Shack, and Fletch. Whether you're a diehard Chevy Chase
Speaker 6: aficionado or simply curious about the man behind the laughter,
Speaker 6: Chasing Chevy Chase is your go to podcast for all
Speaker 6: things Chevy Chase. Tune in and join the conversation as
Speaker 6: we celebrate the life and legacy of a true Hollywood legend.
Speaker 6: Don't miss out. Subscribe now to Chasing, Check Heavy Chase
Speaker 6: wherever you get your podcasts, and let the adventure begin.
Speaker 5: In nineteen twenty six, noted director of Fritz Lang created
Speaker 5: a dark and terrifying vision of the future. Now Academy
Speaker 5: Award winner Georgio Moroder has completed a long term personal project,
Speaker 5: a reconstruction of Lang's classic motion picture with a soundtrack,
Speaker 5: created especially for this presentation and performed by today's top
Speaker 5: musical artists. Georgio Moroder presents Fritz.
Speaker 3: Lang's Metropolis, Metropolis and all of you experience as you've
Speaker 3: never heard it before.
Speaker 8: That's right.
Speaker 7: We'll be back next week with a look at Metropolis
Speaker 7: as we kick off another Sci Fi July. Until then,
Speaker 7: I want to think my co host Spencer and Robert.
Speaker 1: So, Robert, what's the latest with you, sir?
Speaker 8: I just released and I've been doing very well on
Speaker 8: my YouTube channel with Joan Crawford. Anything Joan Crawford related
Speaker 8: people love, and I've come to really admire her as
Speaker 8: an actor. As a result of these videos doing well,
Speaker 8: I'm doing more and more of them. So I just
Speaker 8: did a video where I took some interviews with Crawford's
Speaker 8: scholars where we really discussed her acting. So I just
Speaker 8: took some of those clips, put it together and did
Speaker 8: a video about why you know, what what why? What
Speaker 8: made her such a great actor? H from you know,
Speaker 8: from our point of view. Tomorrow, I'm interview interviewing Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Speaker 8: who I'm sure you know anyone listening or you also
Speaker 8: from Chicago, Like Spencer, his new book travels in the
Speaker 8: Cities of Cinema, so we're talking about that tomorrow. I've
Speaker 8: had him on a couple of times, so he's a
Speaker 8: very very, you know, really nice, great guest. And my
Speaker 8: show is called Robert Bellissimo at the Movies and we
Speaker 8: do I do a new video every Sunday. Occasionally I'll
Speaker 8: put something out during the week if something comes up,
Speaker 8: but it's usually once a week, and you can go
Speaker 8: to YouTube dot com slash Robert Bellissimo at the Movies
Speaker 8: and all of the links all of my social media
Speaker 8: handles are on my link tree page, so if you
Speaker 8: want to follow me, go to linktree dot com slash
Speaker 8: Robert Bellisimo at the Movies. I also do some written
Speaker 8: review use for a Toronto based website called Screenfish, and
Speaker 8: they're all on there, so subscribe, like the videos, comment,
Speaker 8: share and reach out. I'd love to hear from people.
Speaker 7: And Spencer, how about yourself.
Speaker 2: I want to know about any episodes you're going to
Speaker 2: do on trog or Straight Jacket. Those are obviously a
Speaker 2: sad point in her career, but they're actually like really
Speaker 2: fascinating movies and fascinating performances. He's so good and and Trog.
Speaker 2: I'll always throw down for trog Is. It's a weird,
Speaker 2: really strange, broken movie, but so so much fun. And
Speaker 2: she's she's really she's giving her all in it. That's
Speaker 2: what makes trog so remarkable. It's a real cruddy idea.
Speaker 2: And Joan Crawford is like here to work.
Speaker 1: It's now, I guess officially summer for me.
Speaker 2: My classes ended this week, so I go back to
Speaker 2: I'm going to finish.
Speaker 1: Editing my movie that I've been editing forever.
Speaker 10: But I can finally work on that at a regular
Speaker 10: clip and you know, hopefully we'll premiere in a sometime
Speaker 10: in the fall.
Speaker 7: Thank you again, guys for being on the show. Thanks
Speaker 7: everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of
Speaker 7: me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the
Speaker 7: other shows that I work on. They are all available
Speaker 7: at Readingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
Speaker 7: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
Speaker 7: com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the
Speaker 7: Projection Booth take over the world.
Speaker 9: Everybody, do you want to leave? Just like you and
Speaker 9: a half of it's a smart let's for.
Speaker 4: Sides.
Speaker 1: My word, no.
Speaker 9: I have.
Speaker 8: God, my mind.
Speaker 2: Busy.
Speaker 6: Would you pray?
Speaker 2: What makes the world go round?
Speaker 9: I haven't got cdy.
Speaker 8: My mind is lost and man.
Speaker 4: Blowing.
Speaker 10: I'm said, ba.
Speaker 9: I I am.
Speaker 1: I don't say
Speaker 3: Say oh, say