247 - A Man For All Seasons

A Man For All Seasons
A Columbia release produced and directed by Fred Zinnemann
from a script adapted by Robert Bolt from his own play.

Sir Thomas More - Paul Scofield

Alice More - Wendy Hiller

Thomas Cromwell - Leo McKern

Henry VIII - Robert Shaw

Cardinal Wolsey - Orson Welles

Margaret More - Susannah York

Duke of Norfolk - Nigel Davenport

Rich - John Hurt

William Roper - Corin Redgrave

"He was," affirmed Samuel Johnson of Thomas More, "the person of the greatest virtue these islands have produced." The statement remains true in the twentieth century as it was in the eighteenth. No Englishman has elicited from his biographers a like respect, awe, and love. Brilliant lawyer, man of infinite wit and scrupulous sense of justice, de-

248 - A Man For All Seasons

voted husband, father, and friend; unselfish and humble servant of God and man, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)-and, as of 1885, Saint Thomas More-was one of the very crowns of creation.

Robert Bolt's Thomas More, masterfully played by Paul Scofield, is true to the man whose capacity for joy led him to treasure life, but whose sense of selfhood led him to prefer physical death to that death-in-life which follows upon surrender of self. And what is selfhood, that quintessence for which Mr. Bolt's More lives and dies? It is man's innermost core, the vessel of his personal conviction and integrity, the heart of God's image on earth. When More refuses to bend to his monarch, King Henry VIII, he claims for himself no omniscience or infallibility of judgment; he claims solely the imperative of following his conviction, the maintenance of which is the self's only nourishment. And so, when the Duke of Norfolk questions the validity of the Apostolic Succession of the Pope, Sir Thomas replies: "But what matters to me is not whether it's true or not but that I believe it to be true, or rather, not that I believe it, but that I believe it. . . ." More does not consider the beat of his pulse as of equal value to the integrity of the I.

Robert Bolt's More never seeks martyrdom, is not in love with death. He has no grandiose conception of himself as a courageous opponent of his King or defender of his Pope. When he finds that his self cannot support all the claims of the King, he resigns the post of Lord Chancellor and seeks only to remain silent. The "silence" of Thomas More, however, rings through Europe, and Henry will be satisfied with nothing less than More's admission that the King of England, not the Bishop of Rome, is supreme head of the church in England. More loses his life through a combination of Henry's panic-marked Act of Treason, the false witness of a man he had formerly befriended, and his own fidelity to selfhood.

The film is a visual triumph, an immense pleasure simply to see. The natural and architectural splendors of England are done full justice-one reflects on how painful it must be to die in a land where the eye is so bountifully fed! The stunning use of color, the esthetically satisfying framing of scene after scene, the quick film movement to convey the vitality (and malignancy) of an age marked by violent passions-all of these qualities underline the fine art of the cinema. Yet the viewer remembers above all the tenderness and dignity which Paul Scofield brings to "the person of the greatest virtue these islands have produced." He consistently dominates the action, in part because he seems not an actor playing a role: he becomes Sir Thomas More. Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey and Leo McKern as Thomas Cromwell do play their parts and are melodramatic where Scofield is dramatic. They come close to satanic

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caricature, seeming to embody traits rather than human beings. Scofield is aware of neither himself nor his audience; he is the self of More which Bolt seeks above all to convey.

To say that I did not find the film quite so exciting as that of Anouilh's Becket (one naturally thinks of the two together) is to praise with faint damn. The Burton-O'Toole Becket remains for me one of the peaks of my movie-going. A Man for All Seasons is nonetheless worthy of its Oscars. Scofield, surpassed by neither Burton nor O'Toole, certainly deserves his; and despite the reservations expressed above, the supporting cast is strong. And my gratitude to Robert Bolt for his superb interpretation of More's precious sense of selfhood is considerable.

William R. Mueller
Goucher College
Baltimore, Maryland