Episode 751: A Man for All Seasons (1966)

By request from Patreon supporter Peter Rogers, we’re tackling A Man for All Seasons (1966), Fred Zinnemann’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Bolt’s stage play. Joining Mike are Spencer Parsons and Robert Bellissimo to explore this portrait of Sir Thomas More, played with quiet defiance by Paul Scofield in an Oscar-winning performance. The film follows More’s moral and political stand against King Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage, a position that would cost him his freedom—and ultimately his life. We unpack the film’s legacy, its courtroom drama structure, and how it reflects shifting power, faith, and integrity during a pivotal moment in English history.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh he is, folks, it's show tied. People say, good
money to see this movie. When they go out to
a theater.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
They are cold sodas, hot popcorn in no monsters in
the protection booth.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
God As.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
From the Unforgettable Award winning play comes the Best Picture
of the Year, starring the Best Actor of the Year. So,
Thomas Moyle, you, having found guilty of high treason the
sentence of the cause yours. When I was practicing law

(01:03):
the man I was asked the prisoner before pronouncing sentence
if he had anything to say, Have you anything to say?

Speaker 5 (01:12):
Yes, I'm.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
Honored by six Academy Awards. A Man for All Seasons.

Speaker 6 (01:38):
So, Thomas Moore, have you anything to say to me?

Speaker 7 (01:41):
Regarding the King's marriage with Queen Anne.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
I understood I was not to be asked at again.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
Benevident to me wonders to bring me these char I'll
tell us for children, Master Secretary, not for me. A
Man for All Seasons, winner of six Academy AWAR Awards,
including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture

(02:08):
of the Year.

Speaker 5 (02:10):
Dangerous I mean as a friend, I am a friend.
I wish I wasn't what I am.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
Sir Thomas Thomas Paul Schofield hailed as Best Actor of
the Year for his performance as Thomas Moore now Wenday
Hillary as the woman behind the Man, Leo McKern as Cromwell,

(02:37):
a conspirator, Robert Shaw as the lusty King Henry of
the Eighth.

Speaker 6 (02:50):
In you Know, are you?

Speaker 8 (02:54):
Grace?

Speaker 5 (02:55):
Spare meal discretion.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Mm hmm to play and mark.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
Again orson Well says Cardinal Wolsey, and Susannah Yorke as
the daughter torn between love and.

Speaker 9 (03:12):
Mild Margaret What is it make?

Speaker 8 (03:16):
Father?

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Is a new act going through parliament?

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Why this actor going to administer an oath about the marriage?

Speaker 6 (03:26):
And what concussion is the earth.

Speaker 5 (03:29):
High treason?

Speaker 8 (03:39):
Honor.

Speaker 7 (03:59):
Welcome to the Project Booth. I'm your host, Mike White,
join me once again as mister Spencer Parsons.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Hello.

Speaker 7 (04:05):
Also back in the booth is mister Robert Bellissimo.

Speaker 8 (04:08):
Hello, Mike and Spencer and everyone listening. Thanks for having
me back on this episode.

Speaker 7 (04:13):
We are taking a request from Patreon listener. Peter Rogers
A Man for All Seasons directed by Fred Zinnemann and
written by Robert Bolt, adapted from his own play. The
film stars Paul Scholfield as Sir Thomas Moore, a statesman
from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. That's the
fourteen hundreds and the fifteen hundreds. I also have to
say that to myself, because the whole the twentieth century

(04:34):
was the nineteen hundreds always threw me off. When he
opposed the divorce and remarriage of Henry the Eighth, he
was arrested and eventually spoilers put to death. We will
be discussing more the film and its remake and other things,
and spoiling things as we go along, not that I
can really spoil it any more than I just did.
So if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the

(04:55):
podcast and track down the film. We will still be here. So, Spencer,
when was the first you saw this movie and what
did you think?

Speaker 2 (05:02):
My first memory of this movie, as it was one
of those that played very popularly during those PBS fundraising
marathons where they would interrupt every fifteen minutes or so
and the movie would take about.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Four hours to watch. They did this a bunch of times,
and I know I.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Saw it at least in pieces a couple of times.
As a kid, and you know, just stuck with me
as that kind of movie. Honestly, I've been meaning to
rewatch it because I'm a big Orson Wells fan, is
well known on this show, and felt like, oh I
got to see the Orson Wells performance, and on that score,

(05:42):
I was not disappointed. You know, Wells really brings it
absolutely best scene in the movie. I mean, it doesn't
feel like an Orson Wells movie, but you definitely feel
an influence in that scene that is very different in
terms of it. It's like visualization, filmmaker, everything from.

Speaker 7 (06:01):
The rest of the film and Robert, how about yourself.

Speaker 8 (06:04):
This was the first time view it for me, spent
for me Jowell's fan, so it had been on my
watch list for a while. And as you've interviewed Mike
Joseph Bride a few times, I know he's Well's historian
and he's very fond of Wells in this film. So
this was my first time seeing it. And then I
loved this scene and then before you knew it, he's dead.

(06:26):
I'm like, oh great, this movie just started in Wells
with Denaud Kiss. So yeah, not enough Wells, not enough.
Robert Shaw I thought like I thoughts great too.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Robert Seohn's incredible, He's so good.

Speaker 8 (06:37):
In it, and I was like, oh, we only see
him in a couple of scenes. But I liked it,
and I really loved I didn't love it, but I
liked it. But I always love a persons the system,
films or stories, and I thought, Okay, that's what this is,
but yet, why is it not? Why do I not
like it more than I do? And I think it

(07:00):
was because Thomas Moore. The way he's depicted anyways, is
that he's just unshakable stone, just right from the beginning,
you know, as right away they're asking him to compromise
and he will not, and of course throughout that's what
it is, and it obviously it gets worse and worse

(07:21):
for him. So I like that. And then I thought, well,
I love Surproco and he's not Surprogo. He's not so
complicated in that either. But I think the difference with
that is he starts he's a rookie cop. It gradually
builds to him seeing all this corruption. There's a lot
more feelings involved we see as a gregarious side. We

(07:42):
see him snap gradually. As I was furious and how
anxious he gets throughout, so it has a lot more
feelings to it, whereas this this guy is just like Nope,
I am not gonna bend. And I mean I thought
Schoolfield was fantastic in it, and there is some moments
where he really snap, but only a couple of times.
He's just he's a steady rock so and everybody else

(08:05):
is rather one dimensional as well, so it kind of
felt a little flat to me, pretty predictable. I thought, Okay,
I see where this is going. You know it's not
gonna hand well for this guy. But after reading that
there are certain things about him that they didn't include,
I thought it was a shame, which I'm sure we'll
get into as the review in folds, but that that's

(08:27):
my initial impressions.

Speaker 7 (08:29):
This was also a first time watch for me. This
movie has just always been there. I mean, it won
the Academy Award and won sixty six or for sixty
six won a whole bunch of awards. It's always just
been held up as like, oh, a man for all seasons,
and I just never went there. Had we not gotten
this request from Paul Rodgers, I don't think I would
have checked it out, even though I had a great

(08:50):
time with the next film that Cinnamon directed, which was
The Jackal. Had a wonderful discussion about that. But going
back to this one in sixty six, I mean, yeah,
you're kind of right as far as like, this is
the guy against the system type of thing. The play
was out in what sixty two? There was actually a
sixty three version of it made for Australian television. I

(09:11):
tried my best to find that was unable to And
then of course there's a remake that we'll talk about
a little bit later.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
This film looks beautiful.

Speaker 7 (09:19):
I like the use of the river throughout this whole thing,
that we start on the river and just use the
river to kind of go up and down from where
more is at down the river to I guess it's London.

Speaker 8 (09:31):
I guess.

Speaker 7 (09:32):
I feel so lost in this. And I had to
do so much fricking reading for this one because it
was just like who is this guy? Because I always
get him mixed up Thomas Moore, I get mixed up
with Thomas A. Beckett and Thomas Aquinas all the time.
So I'm just like, who is this guy? And then
when you ask that question, depending on who you ask

(09:53):
it of you're going to get a whole different answer.
There is the man of unshakable faith, and then and
there's the guy who put heretics to death. And it
feels like I would like a little bit of a
blend of the two and see a more three sixty
version of More because this, like you said, he's a
very static character, and we're just talking earlier today about

(10:16):
Return of the Jedi and like how characters can be
active dynamic or they can be very static and more
as a super static character.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
I'm gonna jump in.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
I think Schofield's performance it is the worst thing about
the movie. I think the performance is bad because he's
taken it in a direction that not different really from.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
What Zinnama is doing with it.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Zinneman not one of my favorite directors, and there will
be more shots fired about other Sacred Cow films. I
rewatched high Noon because this is like, this is basically
high Noon, but without shooting. It's a similar kind of
I realized while I was watching it again, it's.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
The same kind of movie. Both of these movies stink,
they're bad.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
They have the same kind of problem from Zimmerman, which
is that Zennaman just assumes the goodness of these aracters.
You know, Gary Cooper in the case of High Noon
all the way through and assumes the goodness of Thomas
Moore here and assumes too much for this to be
a real drama of a.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Man against the system.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
There is a system, and there's a person who's a
kind of I think Gary Cooper's performance is way better
in High Noon, but it's still the conception of the
character is this unshakable block of wood all the way through.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
And Schofield, this is.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
A movie where I actually question the editing to get
Schofield's performance In a couple of places. He is in
such a low register through the whole thing. One of
the only times that he raises his voice in any
recognizable way is he probably should against this situation that
he's in. Is a way long, wide shot looking at

(11:57):
his back when he yells in the courtroom near the end,
and I almost thought it was another character.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Because his voice was so different. It might even be dumped.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
I ran it back a few times, and I saw
this in the editing, and yeah, sure, I think you
can look into his face and you can believe him
moment to moment, But he has just made such a
disastrous choice about this character over time that I think
the movie actually works very much against itself. You know,
I come out on the side of corruption when I

(12:29):
watched this movie because I see a character it's a
kind of similar thing again to Hei Newon, and I
might get into that a little bit more later, but
I see this character who's mainly just what he is saying,
what he's doing, how he is behaving. It just makes
him kind of an asshole. And I think Thomas Moore
is a fascinating interesting character. It could be an interesting asshole.

(12:51):
I mean, this is somebody who really took heretics to task,
in particular Lutherans. He wrote flame notes to Luther that
were full of profanity.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
He wrote Utopia, which I actually read again for this
because I had read it in college, and I was like,
I don't think this guy is like a writer can
be different from you know, in person, from how they
are on the page. But there's no evidence of the
writer that wrote Utopia. There's only this idea that he's
never going to move and it starts to the very

(13:24):
beginning and goes through the end. When I get a
scene with Orson Wells, I'm convinced that actually the corruption
in this case is necessary.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
England has been through the Wars of Roses.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
It's been thirty straight years of mayhem and murder and insanity.
And the point here is to get an air who
will be legitimate to the throne when the tutors are
very weak in their.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Assumption of the throne. So there's a very serious kind
of issue.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
And I just start to wonder over the course of
this version because I also, you know, dealt with the play,
and I think the play is a different animal.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
In this version. We have this dickhead who won't move.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
At the cost, potentially at the cost of other people's
deaths over a particular point of how to deal with
the pope. And I actually think that the dealing with
the pope can be dealt with very seriously, but.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
The movie doesn't deal with it seriously.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
It's self evident that this guy is right, and he's
just going to quietly say no, no, no, and I
am going to be silent, you know, the entire time,
as there are other people dealing with a very serious,
deadly situation for ordinary people, and he won't move. And
this is especially difficult in terms of you know, there

(14:42):
are a lot of current resonances with a story like this,
not just man against the system, but the idea that
a lot of people are allowing the system to go
out of control because they're afraid. And I really want,
like I so in my core being want to sympathize
with his position, and I don't know. I see Robert

(15:04):
Shaw play Henry the Eighth, who is one of the
monsters of history, and I'm all about Robert Shaw. I
see Cardinal Wolseley at the beginning, played by Orson Wells
in a brilliant scene, and as he brings up the
salient points about recent history and what they need to do,
I cannot but side with Orson Wells. And then additionally,

(15:28):
Vanessa Redgrave appears very briefly as Anne boleyn Oh my god,
three minutes in the movie, maybe even less, has hardly
a line, completely amazing, riveting, full of life.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
And then everybody else in the movie Zenneman is toning
them all.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
John Hurt, also great actor Schofield, Hurt, lots of other
people toned into this kind of lame register of history.
It's not a living movie, and it makes precisely the
opposite points because of those who actually live on screen
in it.

Speaker 8 (16:05):
Shaw was so riveting. Yeah, I mean his presence is
certainly felt throughout because he's the one giving these orders.
And I thought, well, why wouldn't you see him, you know,
as they're hearing that Thomas More won't bend, as all
his allies are the ones now dealing with him and
not the king directly, I'm like, well, what do he do?

(16:27):
Cut back to him, Like, I would have loved to
have seen the way he reacted to this, because he
was so ferocious and he brought so much feeling to
a film that was mostly flat, And I just thought
that was very strange to have only had him in
what two or three scenes. I think the wedding and
when he comes and visit, well, in the wedding.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
Doesn't appear to be in the play. And I love
the wedding scene.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
I mean I love not just because of those performances,
but also because, like Zinnaman's camera comes to life in
relationship to the performances, not just like he's plunked down
the camera and Robert Shaw's taking over. It's like, all
of a sudden, the camera really cares about a character
and becomes part of their psychology, which just doesn't happen,

(17:11):
you know, much else in the film. There are some
very pretty pictures, but it's really interesting the strongest actors
do demand from Zennemon a different kind of approach to
how the story is told visually. The two scenes with
Orson Wells are also a lot more interesting.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
You know, there's the one scene where he's.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
In the very painterly They put him at a tiny,
tiny desk and he looks enormous, and Wells has I'm
sure Wells did his own makeup, so he's got this
like really grotesque makeup with like red rings around his eyes.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
He looks on death's door anyway.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
And then there's that later scene where he's been taken
to the Tower of London because you know, Henry, he's
failed Henry the Eighth and all of that. He's playing
it on his back and his face is like upside
down on the screen, and it's just this doesn't happen
for anybody else in the movie. And I think it's
in part because we have these two three obstreperous kind

(18:13):
of actors who simply demand another kind of photography from Zennerman,
and he's directed everybody else nicely, but they're just too
they're too painterly, they're too solid, they're not dynamic presences.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
That's a kind of tableau vivant movie. And I'm no
big fan of the Oscars.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
But this is like one of those movies that I
would point to as like, yeah, and in nineteen sixty
six they had this like Deadly Dull Man for All
Seasons and they gave that a heap of Oscars.

Speaker 7 (18:43):
Robert. The last time that you and I spoke, we
talked about just that whole thing of that characters. Zay
just having this promise he made and he is unshakable
in his faith, and it's similar, but it's so different
from what More is doing. It's just amazing that both
of these movies have these characters whe they're like, no,
this is what's right, and I have to do this.
It's a promise that he made to a saint and

(19:06):
he feels that he has to do this, Whereas in
this one, I know that Moore is struggling with his
faith and is very Catholic in his faith, and he's
just like, no, no, we can't do this. We really
can't bend the rules. But it doesn't feel like it's
like really down in his core. To me, it just
feels like, no, that's the rule, that's all it is,

(19:27):
and just I have to follow the rule. And obviously
the rules of religion are just so fricking arbitrary. It's crazy.

Speaker 5 (19:35):
You know.

Speaker 7 (19:35):
I've talked before about, you know, how wars and people
were murdered over silly little things or things that they
thought were just incredibly massive when it came to like
when was Jesus a human? When was he a god?
Does transubstantiation is that literal blood or is that just
figurative blood? Like people are being thrown out of windows

(19:58):
about this shit where it's just like no, no, and this
whole thing where it's like, you know, the Anglican Church,
I mean, from what I understand, it was basically like, hey,
we need a church system so that the king can
divorce and remarry and nobody's going to throw a fit.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Guess what.

Speaker 7 (20:13):
The Pope is not very happy with that. And we
have the Catholics, we have the Protestants, and we've had
hundreds of years of bloodshed over Protestants versus Catholics. No offense, y'all,
but I think you're really silly because I think it's
very very small differences. As an atheist, I see very
little difference between what you guys are doing and when

(20:34):
it comes to Lutheranism. And yeah, I heard about those
scatological letters that more would be writing to Luther. I mean,
Lutheranism is Catholic light lte. It's just basically the same
thing with a few less stand up and sit down
at the ceremonies. As far as me and Outsider see.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
So, I hate to.

Speaker 7 (20:53):
Be that guy who's just like you guys are all
being a bunch of silly a holes, But comes down
to that in this movie.

Speaker 8 (21:00):
It's interesting what Spencer was saying about the schoolfield because
I liked his performance, this sense of dignity he brought
to it. But now Spencer's making me it's true that
he's sort of I think he either him or ZI
him and made a choice that like, this guy's just
gonna put his nose up and not let anything get

(21:20):
but he hangs on to his dignity. He chokes it.
I mean, he just will not show. He shows very
little emotion. Intentionally interesting in a way. But now Spencer's
making me think maybe that is part of what's kind
of doll about it because maybe if he had allowed
that to sort of build. I mean, people are betraying left,
right and center. Like he's the one character who was

(21:42):
a closer friend of his what was his name, They
had more of a friendship, and you know, Thomas is
bringing him to do it, even though he's understanding his position.
But yeah, he just sort of like, no one's gonna
get to me. Even that scene, which I thought was
quite good where he says goodbye to his family and
everybody is getting so emotional except and you know, in
a way it's interesting, but yeah, it's making me think,

(22:04):
you know, perhaps he should have allowed these things to
get to him and brought a lot more to it.

Speaker 7 (22:10):
My most interesting character is the John Hurt character Richard
rich and I can think of Richie Rich through the
whole thing, but that he is there at the beginning
and he's like, hey, I'm really looking for this position.
He's striving for stuff. He's a little sneaky about things.
And then we find out how sneak he is later

(22:30):
on during some of the Leo McCarey stuff that he
glombs onto that cup, that silver cup that Moore was
given as a bribe and then takes that cup and
makes himself a man of the world. He buys himself
a new robe. He's like, this is what I need.
I need a new robe. I need to look like you.
I need to do this. And then he just kind
of parlays that into all of these things, and I'm

(22:52):
surprised he didn't stab more in the back later on
when it's like, oh, you got this coup, I'm expecting
him to lie under oath just to keep his position
and to really just throw under the bus, almost as
if I could take over this spot that Moore has.
I really like this whole machiavellian things that are going
on inside of this movie. I was like, Yeah, more

(23:12):
of that, please like Meo McCarey. I fucking love Leo mccarrey.
I talk so much about him when we talked about
the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as Smarter Brother and ironically
and that it's him as the bad guy, him as Moriarty,
and then who's a Roy Kinnear the guy that plays
the common man in the remake, like that McCarry was

(23:33):
the common man in the nineteen sixty two play and
then gets cast in this role in the sixty sixth movie,
and he just plays it wonderfully. And the use of
his glass eye to add to that performance where just
one eye staring straight ahead and the other one's just
kind of jumping back and forth. He looks so sinister,
and he pulls it off wonderfully.

Speaker 8 (23:55):
There was another thing with the Richard at Rigid that
he's a complete opportunist right from the getting it. Maybe
if they had made him much closer with Thomas Moore
and more of an ally, and then if we had
gradually seen him become corrupted, but that would have been
much richer. But right away he's like, can I get
a judge? Like you know that this guy's gonna the

(24:16):
first chance he gets, he's gonna throw a clothes to
this guy. He's like a little dog again, another character
who's just dealt with in a very one dimensional way.
It just there was a real opportunity there.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
I thought again, it felt so assumed that he's bad
right from the get go. And yeah, he's a striver
and whatnot, and this could be interesting drama, but it
doesn't precisely mean.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
To go in a particular direction with this either.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
There could be something about how Thomas Mohr was an
asshole to someone who was like a little person early on,
and it isn't quite that, but if it plays as
this mysterious thing of like instantly mar Is dismissing this
young striver guy and then eventually that guy is gonna
have his sort of long term petty revenge when we

(25:05):
get to committing perjury at the end. But the motivations
of the characters, everything is so deliberately underplayed in this
like that underplaying is some kind of key to depth
that I just found the relationship with this character.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
And I watched this movie twice this weekend.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Because I thought the first time, when I was really
hating on it, that I was maybe being unfair and
I had to check it out again. I found the
relationship between these characters again a little bit mysterious.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Right from the get go, that that like there's something
that's just assumed.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
About the relationship that I'm supposed to know and it
doesn't necessarily make sense. The script of the play is
not that much different, but for instance, in the Charlton
Heston version, the way that those characters play against each
other early on, I'm like, ah, I got it, and
it's so weird.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
To say this, but I know you want to talk
about the Charlton Heston at the end.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
The Charlton Heston directed version where he's starring in it
is so much better.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
It's not like great filmmaking. It's a film to play.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
It very much is a film to play, but as
a film to play, it's also so much more itself.
It's longer, there are passages of dialogue that helped to
make more sense of what's going on with everybody, and
also all the characters have like real emotions up and
down throughout it. Charlton Heston's decision to play a melodramatic

(26:31):
Thomas Moore makes so much more sense. And I think
it's so much better a performance. And this is like,
you know, a nineties TBS version or something not that
should necessarily be bad, but it's the kind of thing
for anybody that's listening.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
If you seek it.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Out, it's gonna look like a TV movie, you know,
right out of the gate, but it's a TV movie
that tells the story better, conveys character better. And I
came away from the TV movie version with Charlton Heston,
which also has a very interesting kind of thing with
a sort of chorus character for it, who speaks directly

(27:06):
to the audience, standing in for you know, it's one
guy who stands in for common men throughout the story.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
By having that device, it also sets the stakes better
for what real people are put through.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
The play version and the version that Charlon Heston did
recognizes that Thomas Moore is standing on principle, and his
principle makes more sense in that version. And also his
standing on principle is likely to get other people killed.
So it's a much more complicated version of history and
much more satisfying.

Speaker 8 (27:41):
I found the fact that he held on to his principles.
I didn't really understand that was going to get people
killed if he didn't go with what the king wanted.
Like there was a reference to it at the beginning
from Wells's character, so like old people will get killed.
But I thought that was just a fear tactic to
stand at the stake involve other than this is against

(28:03):
my religious principles. I'm not going to support what you
want to do. Like I had to read the plot
a few times, I had to go back. I mean,
if you have to dig into a story that much
outside of being interested something in this in the storytelling
and not right. I don't know if that made sense
for you guys, but.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
You know, we often see the phrase that didn't age
well about various movies, and it's always about like some
kind of offensive joke or moment, and yeah, that.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Stuff doesn't necessarily age well.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
But I actually feel like this is a bigger example
of doesn't age well where there's just a lot that
is assumed that the audience for this.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Movie must know. You know, that's not unfair in the time.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
You know, it can be successful as artwork, but it
doesn't last when there are really basic assumptions about what
the audience knows or what they might really truly care about. Again,
as to the principle involved here and the idea of
the law, you know, that's like that is a thing

(29:05):
that does really mean something to me. That like, what
Henry the eighth is trying to do is to make
the law to fit his purposes under this particular situation.
And in a certain way it's played as like, oh,
it's his whims, but it isn't just his whims. He
does really have to have an heir who can assume

(29:28):
the throne. That there will be the succession or there
will there could be more wars. So that's that's something
that's really really big. But so he's involved in changing
the laws in order to make things work. And I
do understand, you know, wanting to not just make law
or change law willy nilly, But Thomas Moore's point is

(29:49):
about a perceived law of God. And this isn't even
an atheistic thing. I'm going to take atheism out of
it philosophically. If you believe in God, how do you
know what is God's law versus what is man's law?

Speaker 1 (30:02):
The Pope is one of man's law, and Henry the.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Eighth is wielding man's law, where in this is God's law.
And the longer version of the play and the Charlton
Heston version do make more reference to like the kind
of not knowing that is risky here, But in this one,
it's just really hard for me to throw down for
somebody who believes that he knows God's law at the

(30:28):
expense of so many other people who could suffer, And
people could suffer either way. It's not as if like
Henry the Eighth, making a new church is going to
keep anyone from suffering. For instance, again in the longer
version of the play and the Heston version, there is
more discussion of how changing the church is about to
you know, the way that Henry the eighth has wanted

(30:50):
to is setting off problems.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
In Scotland because the Scots are more Catholic.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
The sixty sixth version of the movie just doesn't deal
in that kind of complexity and expects for me to
go with someone who.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Just seems pig headed. Oh yeah, you know God? Oh great,
I don't know. I like a lot of other people
here seem like they could know God.

Speaker 7 (31:13):
The troubles started officially in sixty eight. This is sixty six.
I mean that is all about Protestants versus Catholics. I'm
just like, guys, we are right here, like, look at
this stuff. And it's ironic that Heston back in sixty
six was trying to get this role and everybody's like no, no, no.
Schofield was him on Broadway and he won a Tony

(31:35):
and all this, but we can't have Heston. So I
think he really kept it with him for all those years,
and that's why he ended up playing it and then
directing it. And I'll agree with you. I kind of
like the Heston version better. And I especially like keeping
the common man character, the Roy Kaneer character, where it's
like Bolt was like, no, no, we have to get
rid of that for the movies. This is the movies.

(31:55):
That isn't a you know, it's not a play, And
I'm like, why not? Why not have that there's one actor.
It's the guy who plays like the guy who brings
him the message at the very beginning of the film.
I guess it would be like his servant or his
butler or something. I just like, yeah, use that guy.
That guy is great. I love him whenever he shows
up and everything. Nigel Davenport, and use this guy. He

(32:19):
is great. Have him show up as the boatman, have
him show up in this place, have him show up
in that. And I'm fine with him speaking directly to
the camera. I think that was way too out there
for Zinneman, but I would have loved something like that.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
It is hard to break the fourth wall, break through
the screen and speak directly to the audience.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
That is a kind of artifice.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
But also feel like, well, then both, if you're gonna
cut something like that, we deserve the information that comes
through in those moments. And it's more than exposition, because
it is the point of view or points of view
put into one person of the characters who are making

(32:59):
things possible for these wealthy people, and also at the
mercy of the wealthy. There's a line that comes up
a couple of times that's cut out of the sixty
six movie, which actually ends up in another form, and
Jonathan Demi is Something Wild, the thing about better to
be a live rat than a dead lion, which in

(33:20):
Jonathan Demi's Something Wild comes up as better to be
a live dog than a dead lion. I had to
mention something while because I love it, and I love
that this carries over weirdly into that movie. This idea
of the live rat, you know, making its way through
speaks to of course, that Richard rich makes it all
the way to the end and dies peacefully in his bed,

(33:43):
spoken in relationship to him as a character, but it's
also spoken in relationship to the problems of ordinary people
living in this kind of system where these different points
of conscience would clash. For me, in the play, it
makes Thomas Moore's conscience actually make a lot more sense

(34:06):
that he's within such a system himself, and that he
is trying, you know, he's trying his best to make
it as good as it can be. And at a
certain point, and he even says this in the sixty
sixth version, you know something about like how if he
doesn't follow his conscience, then you know that way lies chaos.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
That's understandable, but it's like everybody's.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Steak makes so much more sense in the way that
it's presented as a play.

Speaker 7 (34:35):
And in the Heston version, real quick, before I forget,
the guy who I was thinking of was Matthew that
was his servant and is played by Colin Blakeley, who
is just always phenomenal in what he's in and I
mostly remember him from the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
when we were doing that Holmes series, so more Holmes stuff.
I guess every British actor had to have shown up

(34:57):
in these Sherlock Holmes movies at some point, except for
Robert Shaw as far as I know. In Robert Shaw,
like you guys said, when he's on screen, he shines.
It helps that he's covered in gold and you have
that beautiful shot of the sun behind him. But just
when he jumps off the boat and jumps right into
the mud and all the people on the boat are like, oh, fuck,

(35:19):
what's gonna happen? And then he just lets out with
that huge cackle, and I'm just like, of course, I'm
going right to Jaws, and I'm just thinking of him,
you know.

Speaker 8 (35:28):
Like, oh, don't forget your Rubber's Chief.

Speaker 7 (35:30):
You know, all that kind of stuff, and I'm just like, oh,
I love Robert Shaw.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
When he's on he is great.

Speaker 7 (35:35):
And then he's just off of the screen for so
much of the movie.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Another great touch in the Heston version that Henry the Eighth,
who's played pretty well. You know, he's no Robert Shaw,
but he's really good. He appears during the courtroom scenes
but behind a curtain.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
And he peeks in, and this is also a great touch.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
It's humanizing Henry the Eighth is there at the courtroom
more is going to be executed, and as things are
obviously going wrong, and we see these moments of Henry
the Eighth like looking in and then closing the curtain
and really becoming emotional and really registering a kind of
human cost to his own actions behind the scenes. This

(36:20):
is something that I think is in a very different
approach that I wouldn't expect as much from Heston, to
be honest. I mean, you know, perhaps it's also coming
from Robert Bolt and both's intentions getting played out through
Heston through a more complete version of it.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
As a play to a movie.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
But Heston really does have a lot more attention to
like all the people, and he seems to understand the
high to low relationships, whereas Zennaman is just really straight
up interested in the great men at the top.

Speaker 7 (36:52):
I won't disagree with you at all. I think if
Hessen's version suffers from anything, it's just that when you
come to the Zinnamon thing, it feels like, and I
know he didn't make this on that much money, but
it feels like everybody is somebody. You've got super babyface,
John Hurt as Richard Ritch, and you've got just all
of these like oh, I know that guy, I know

(37:13):
that guy. And then you come to the Heston version
and you're just like, Okay, Well, it's really cool that
he went back in and cast Vanessa Redgrave, who had
that small part in the sixty six. Is really cool
that he's bringing in John Gilgood. That's great. Like I said,
I love Roy Kinear can never think about him without
thinking of Charlie and the chocolate factory, but then so

(37:35):
many of the other actors. I'm like, I don't know
these faces. I don't know the guy that plays Henry
the Eighth And I'm like, okay, I think that's because
of the budget of the who is at CNT or
TBS that put that out. I'm like, Okay, they probably
didn't have all the money in the world. You probably
spending that on Heston's salary, on Gilgood, on Redgrave, And
I imagine that Heston this is probably a passion project

(37:57):
for him, if he's both directing and starring in it.
Tried for the sixty six version, I kind of wish
that there had been a few more recognizable faces, but
that's a very minor complaint because of the actress that
they do have do a really competent job. And I
agree with you. Like I was loaded for Bear, thinking oh,
Paston is just going to be so bombastic and he's

(38:18):
not going to know how to direct this, And then
I'm sitting there going, Wow, this really feels good. I
like this version a lot, and it does capture a
Thomas Moore that I find a lot more interesting.

Speaker 8 (38:31):
I didn't get a chance to watch the remake, but
I'm going to because it seems like it makes a
lot more sense just from this discussion. But even like
I read that like in that he hated and we
touched on this already, but More hated Protestants so much,
you know that he called for their blood, And I thought,

(38:52):
what a we do see that he'd liked the son
in law for being from a different religion. Is alue Lutheran, Yeah,
Lutheran and can't raise my daughter. And but then like
we're just assumed that he's okay with it later, like
unless I missed it, like they seem to get they
get married, and he does it, It's like, oh, I
guess he just they skip over that or yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Basically Roper recants, which I find to be a very odd.
The Heston version makes the back and forth between them
make a little bit more sense. One of the things
that struck me as very odd is that if More
is so implacable and is so much about his conscience,
then can Ropert putitive son in law just change his

(39:36):
conscience and flip back to being Catholic again so easily
if he's really gone with Lutherism, if he really is
the heathen, then what does it really matter?

Speaker 1 (39:46):
In the end.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
There's a line of dialogue that is in both versions
that I find to be very troublesome. But it's troublesome
in a good way in the play version and troublesome
for me in a bad way in the version. It's
late in the movie and when he's being interrogated, his
friend Norfolk says, just come over to our side, just
join us, and More says back, And when we die

(40:09):
and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience
and I am sent to hell.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
For doing mine, will you come with me for fellowship?

Speaker 2 (40:17):
And it's really interesting because there's a total blank in
there by these rules. The Nazi who kills a bunch
of people to his conscience goes to heaven. The Quaker
who kills one Nazi to defend themselves goes to hell
because they've gone against their conscience. And in this version

(40:38):
it was really this where people's wives are at stake
over powerful men's consciousnesses. To have this zero at the
center seems immensely dangerous and seems to me like Moore's
stand is basically, well, this is what I think, and
so that's how everything has to go, and that actually

(40:59):
goes a little bit against his apparent view of the law.
Now again in the Haston version, this comes in a
place where it's more allowed to be kind of a
tendentious argument that then turns the corner and goes toward
dealing with fact, because his very next argument is about
whether the world is round or flat. And if the

(41:20):
king says it's round, is it really round? If the
king says it's flat, is it really flat? That's not
for a king to decide. That's kind of the real
that's the real argument. But the way that Schofield plays this,
I don't see the turn.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
It's all the same.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
And this statement about conscience does not play as, for instance,
the kind of scrum that we might get into where
we might change our minds about something from the argument,
whereas and when Haston plays it, he says it and
it makes a similar kind of wrong note for me,
But it's a wrong note that's in a context that

(41:54):
both feels like he's an emotional person who's turning corners,
and it's the playwright Robert Bolt kind of identifying the
kind of hollowness to the conscience that somebody is going
to stand on and giving us a harder time about
what it means to stand on conscience.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
That's like one of the I guess that's the thing
I really prefer about the play in the.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Heston movie is that it's not just easy to go
with more on this, and Zenneman and Schofield treat it
as an easy thing.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Well, yes, he's obviously right.

Speaker 7 (42:29):
You said, these are powerful men, you know, And that's
what it is. These are powerful men. If we were
talking about the common man, if we were talking about
people that weren't in these positions of power, this wouldn't
be a thing like they would be tortured, They'd be
tossed out on their ear. This would happen like there's
no room for debate. When you are poor. You need

(42:51):
to do what needs to be done. You have to
go with the tide or else you're going to drown.
And when it comes to this, it's like the king
versus the Chancellor, it's like, all right, these two are
having a pissing match. It kind of reminds me of
the CEO of X and the President of the United
States kind of having their own public meltdown here, and
it's just like, all right, guys, you're gonna go with

(43:12):
the program. No, okay, well, off with your head. But
it's like, yeah, this is the fucking King of England
that you're having this pissing match with. You know you're
gonna lose. And even though the Charlton Heston version is
longer at two and a half hours versus two hours
for this, it moves quicker. This movie feels very long,

(43:33):
but there's not a lot where I'd be like, oh,
they need to chop this, they need to chop that.
It just feels very languid in its pace. And maybe
it's that kind of flow of the river thing that
he's going for again, but he's definitely it's definitely aware
of the river. I mean, even to the point of
having the credits bee across the river and length wise
instead of vertical, you know, having it horizontal. I was like, well,

(43:57):
that's a pretty smart thing to do. No matter what
we think of this, I don't think anybody can disagree
that this is a beautifully shot film. It just needed
a little bit of a kick in the pants.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
It is beautifully shot.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
I think the lighting is gorgeous, especially for color film
at the time. Some of the outdoor photography at night
that they do is a little tricky, but for the
most part, you know, it is in a good way.
It is often very painterlly the way that it's shot,
for me, feels too detached from its characters. Comparing the

(44:31):
court case at the end, for instance, to Heston's version,
which is certainly nowhere near as handsome.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
I just feel like.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
We get to see faces, We see faces in relationship
to people. Heston is often framing one character's close up
with a couple of people slightly out of focus, but
that you can see reacting in the background at the
same time, and we are closer and we're there, and
we feel like, you know, we also get the beautiful
wide shots of the courtroom. But Zinnaman frames this essential

(45:01):
moment at the end as this really big spectacle where
we can't see the faces of the judges, you know,
the way that they're arrayed. They have some lines of dialogue,
but we can barely see their faces that are very
far away. I have a good TV so I you know,
I was watching this big and yeah, I know that
it's intended for the big screen, but there's a real

(45:21):
distancing that goes on in the approach that I just
don't think is right for this drama. Like Heston getting
both the wide that is beautiful and impressive, but also
being able to go in for close ups following the characters.
There's a really beautifully covered bit in the Heston version
where Cromwell is making his arguments and the camera is

(45:44):
going with him as he snakes around with different people
behind him at different moments for different pieces of his
argument that just felt more dramatically grounded and better for
getting the text across. You know, that's is extremely important.
It is a very talky thing. It's a talkie play,

(46:05):
and both movies are very talky, but you have to
film the talk in such a way that it's going
to really land. And you know, Zennaman is kind of
holding back and shooting for kind of grandiosity of event,
when actually the pettiness of everything that these characters have
been through with each other is quite intimate and deserves

(46:27):
its intimacy. In the courtroom, Heston gives us grandiosity and
intimacy both. And Zinnamon is just into great men in
big poses, in impressive shots of a.

Speaker 8 (46:40):
Big room, and he's on a white set of the
worst possible moment when we finally, guys, scream, freaking character
is so far away. I mean, I like to an
extent that he was making this guy really alone by
cutting wide so often. But I agree there it just
wasn't back and forth enough, because you're right, he is

(47:01):
very intimate and it is very dialogue heavy, and it
just didn't match well. It just did work, especially when
he was three. We finally see this guys snap and
the camera is nowhere near him. Maybe they had to
dub that line because he didn't do it or whatever,
and they had to do that. I mean, who knows.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, maybe he played it quiet again and they realized
in the editing, Oh, we made the wrong choice and
gotta be yelled.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
So let's let coscofield in. We'll dub it.

Speaker 7 (47:27):
So I have to apologize that I didn't realize that
this was first performed in sixty that it was actually
a radio play in fifty four, a one hour live
television event in fifty seven for the BBC, And then
I mentioned the Australian version. There was also a German
version under just the name Thomas Moore that was also

(47:47):
for TV in nineteen sixty four. So this had been
kicking around for a little over a decade by the
time it came to the film version of it.

Speaker 8 (47:57):
Oh but it wasn't they it's sixty two in the
West End.

Speaker 7 (48:02):
Well, it said that it had its premiere at the
Globe Theater on one July nineteen sixty but yeah, I
kept hearing sixty two as well, so maybe that was
when it had its big run in the West End.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Yeah, this struck me as very much like a post
McCarthy film.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
I mean, there's so many of them, but.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
This is like one of those responses to you know,
the McCarthy era and you know what we went through
in terms of anti communism, and there's there is a
kind of allegory to follow there. And again that's actually
a really big reason, you know why I want to
be more on Thomas Moore's side in this case as

(48:44):
a matter of conscience. You know, stories of conscience makes
sense in relationship to the McCarthy area. But the specifics
I think maybe it resonated a lot for people at
the time, which is why it was so popular. I mean,
I do think, you know, part of the popularity of
it as an artwork was at the time people were
really thinking about a lot about this kind of thing.
But beyond the issue of conscience, it doesn't make for

(49:06):
the best allegory.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
I had to I had to throw that away a
fair bit.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
And maybe they weren't thinking about that at all, and
that's just more in the sort of cultural mix that
made this important to people over time. But I'm just
wondering from you guys, did you make any of those
connections as you were watching.

Speaker 8 (49:22):
I was thinking that as well. And like as you
mentioned with high Noon, which so did, that's also an
allegory for the blacklisting period, because you know, it's like, Okay,
you're condemning this guy based on his lack of action
and lack of supporting everyone. It's exactly what they did.
Like if you didn't write on your friends, you were blacklisted.

(49:45):
And as you probably both know, SAG had allegiancy like
you had to sign an oath that you were never
a communist, that you hate communism, and unless you signed
the oath, then you're blacklisted. And that's very much what
happens here. He didn't sign the oath that he was
killed for it. So yeah, I was thinking that too.
I wasn't sure if that was intentional, but it must

(50:06):
have been and again using Zinnaman when we y'all know
Zinneman did High Noon and it was a very very
similar story and intense. Yeah. I don't know if Mike,
if that popped off for you, but I certainly saw it.

Speaker 7 (50:19):
I definitely was thinking of High Noon and the subsequent
to that, the hearings of McCarthy hearings. But yeah, I
was definitely thinking of like this guy standing by his principles,
and with that one, I really can stand by Gary
Cooper as far as like, hey, nobody's helping me out
here with hell's going on. This is a community. It

(50:39):
isn't all on my shoulders kind of thing, much more sympathetic,
empathetic to me. And I know some people hate that movie,
and that's absolutely fine. I enjoy the stupid theme song,
and I really enjoy the bad guys, and just I
love how that movie has been twisted over the years.
I mean, for me, the whole thing of these bad

(51:00):
guys come into town on this train translates so well
into the beginning of Once upon a Time in the West,
where I'm just like, here comes Harmonica. He's somewhere on
this train and you have these three guys waiting for him,
and these three Western legends was Jack Elam and Woody Strode,
and then I can't remember the actress name who was
in the Dollars movies. I'm just like, this is great.

(51:22):
It's a tie to the Old West. It's a tie
to these movies. It's a tie to the Italian Westerns,
and it's also a tie to High Noon, and I
appreciate that so much.

Speaker 8 (51:33):
I remember not really taking to it. You know, of
course it's well known the allegory connection, and this film
is discussed in that context though from what I read,
but it certainly it must have been intentional.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
The idea of the silence also is interesting, you know,
simply not ratting people out.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
You know, that's interesting, that's compelling.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
I think High Noon is a much better made film,
but for it, I find it more troublesome. I love
every performance in High Noon. Gary Cooper finds more levels
for his stolid law man who's got to do the
same thing all the way through. I just find that
it means as you describe it, Mike, you know, he
can't get people in the community, and there's just a

(52:15):
certain point where I'm just not believing that people are
not going to join him, and this was Howard Hawks's
big problem with the movie, which I you know, I
love Howard Hawks, but I'm not necessarily going to follow
his opinions on stuff. But I guess I do have
the same kind of analysis that at a certain point
it just doesn't it doesn't quite make sense that nobody
in town is going to go with Gary Cooper, and

(52:38):
so they become a lot of really well acted.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
NPCs in that film. They are not really playable characters.
They're just people that.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
Are not going to join him after a certain point,
and the arguments don't necessarily make that much sense on
their side for nobody to join him. And then he's
surrounded by the townspeople I guess, who have somewhat learned
the error of their ways after he and his Quaker
wife have shot the bad guys. At the end, there's
another one of those moves that I revie, better be
really good if you're gonna pull the like Quaker is

(53:07):
going to kill people thing that comes up in a
lot of war movies in Westerns or the not necessarily
always the Quaker, but the Pacifist of a real problem
with that particular trope, and this movie. You know, HeiG
Noon can't quite pull that off for me, because the
end is like, oh, all the bad townspeople gather around them,
and then he can just throw his badge in the
dirt and ride away with his wife, who's now gotten

(53:30):
the religion of violence. And I just find something utterly
fascist about the ending of that movie that it's trying
to present. It's a paternalistic liberalism, but it's providing a
kind of paternalistic liberal idea of.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
The law all the way through.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
But then by the end he's like, he killed off
the bad guys. He's the man of action, who did
the thing that needed to be done, and.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Then fuck all you little people. And so it just
makes it a very difficult movie for me.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
And I only go on about it now because it
registers as a very similar thing from Zennemon, with the
basic attitude toward more as a person who can just
go to.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
The end assume to be totally right. He must be right.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
He goes to his death absolutely right, no matter about
all the other little people.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
I know that Zenneman.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
You know, as a director, Hei Noon is directed visually
so beautifully.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
I got no quarrels with that movie.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
On the visual level, and man, when you finally arrive
at the shootout at the end, it's great. I don't
find man Van for all seasons to be nearly so
visually engaged. But Zennaman's obviously, you know, very good. But
for all the kind of liberal platitude andizing that comes
through in his films, I just I'm not quite buying.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
I find his work to actually.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Be really more conservative than some of the more conservative
filmmakers who are around at his time, like Howard Hawks,
who was pretty much straight up conservative and got to
be really a toxic conservative in his old age.

Speaker 7 (54:56):
And I love Rio Bravo, Rio, bravo, fantastic. I even
like all the remakes that Hawks did of it. And
had they had a shootout at the end of this one,
I think I would have added a little bit of
extra action. You know, it's Last Temptation of Christ. I'm like,
I know how this story ends. Can you switch it
up a little? Can we have Jesus do some kung
fu or something like, come on, let's let's do it up,

(55:18):
you know, muskets at the end of this Yes, because
I think we all you know, I'm ruined it at
the beginning that Morgus has head chopped off at the
end of this, and it's so final and such a
there's no ceremony to that scene whatsoever. It's just like, Okay,
now he's here and boom, and I'm like, wow, that
happens so quickly, like no final words from Henry the

(55:40):
Eighth or anybody else.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Or in the Heston version the play, the executioner takes
off his hood and it's our narrator, which I expected.
I knew as soon as I saw, you know, because
he'd played a couple of different things.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
I was like, he's going to be the executioner.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
But by that point in the movie, that's not like
getting ahead of it so much as just a satisfying
way to deal with the rest of the points. And
he narrates at the end, and he makes a point
from the position of the common person, you know, to
everything that's happened, and I, yeah, I just find that
to bring it all around, you know, quite a bit.

(56:16):
I'm back to Orson Welles really quickly because I want
to encourage people. I don't know if you've done at
chimes at Midnight episode. If you haven't, let's do it.
Seech times at midnight. Chimes to Midnight deals with so
much of the same stuff. Obviously different story, different Henry's
et cetera, but so much of the same stuff.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
And it is a brilliant like kind of repositioning.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Of Shakespeare to follow a common man as the tragic hero.
By Wells rewriting three plays, he can turn Falstaff into.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
The tragic hero. And by repositioning.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
That I love Shakespeare, and I love all the language
from Shakespeare. But it's like Wells kind of rescues these
Shakespeare plays from the you know, very regressive politics and
even regressive politics of the time. Shakespeare was staying good
with the court. He wasn't going to rock any boats.
He's telling the story that you know, that the royalty,

(57:12):
that the nobility wants to see. He's not telling stories
that go against that you know at the time. He's
telling the version. So Richard the third, for instance, has
to be a total villain. But the wonderful thing that
Wells does is that he takes the beauty of Shakespeare's
characterization and language and by rearranging these plays into one

(57:32):
long kind of meditation on what is justice within this society?

Speaker 1 (57:37):
How do people deal with power.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
How does someone change when they have to take power?
What are the stakes of having power and losing it?
I mean it just does everything.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
It's great.

Speaker 7 (57:49):
I have not seen it yet really want to, and
that makes me want to say it even more.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Oh, it's so good.

Speaker 8 (57:56):
Isaka Wells that just direct this? But I doubt the
studio wanted well I look at Beckett in relationship to
this because I remembered really liking it in high.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
School and I didn't watch the whole thing, but the
first forty five minutes of Beckett, it's a very similar
story to this. The biggest difference with Beckett is that
you know, Thomas A. Beckett and King Henry were really
close friends before they were on the outs. But it's
a very similar thing of Beckett is going to follow

(58:24):
through with the law even though the king wants something else,
and this ultimately gets him executed, and so very very
similar stories, very similar thing about conscience. But just like
the first forty five minutes of that, I was like,
this is so much better movie about the same kind
of story, the same kind of wrestling with conscience and religion.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
What does all this mean?

Speaker 2 (58:45):
Yeah, I'll throw that out is another I want to
be more positive. I was so negative about for all
seasons through. I want to add some positivity and recommend
some other better movies.

Speaker 7 (58:56):
Well, and apparently there's a TV show And first it
was a book called wolf Hall, and that is basically
for as much of a hero as Thomas Moore is
in this, he's a villain in that. Yes, So it's
amazing to see the difference between the ways that he's portrayed,
all of the stuff about pursuing heretics and basically he's

(59:19):
like the British Torquemada. Is how they portray him so different,
and I'm sure that the truth is somewhere in the
middle between that literal Catholic saint and the villain that
he is in wolf Hall. Thanks to friends of the show,
Tim Madigan, he turned me on to this podcast called
with It not just the Tutors, I think it is,
and they had one episode unfortunately, like the second episode

(59:42):
about Thomas coming out today to non subscribers, so I
wasn't able to listen to that. And last week I
listened to the first part and I was like, oh, okay,
this is pretty good. It was a good telling and
that's where I learned more about him and Martin Luther
exchanging some notes, just the scatological nature, and they're like, yeah,
that was kind of the that people wrote back then.
And it's like even these scholars were you know, they

(01:00:03):
probably were insulting each other, and I know they were
insulting each other in Latin, but it was pretty raunchy
with the way that they were going back and forth.
So yeah, I'd love to see kind of somewhere in
the middle what Thomas Moore really was. Like I was
trying to listen to a biography of him and it
was eighteen hours and after a while the narrator's voice
just kind of ground me down. But yeah, fascinating historical figure.

(01:00:27):
Just I don't believe that he was the guy that
we saw here in A Man for All Seasons.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Read Utopia as well, if you've never read it. It's
really really fun Utopia obviously, but it's you know, means
sort of perfect society.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Thomas More coined the word utopia. It means it doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
And part of the fun of reading it as a
work a political satire that's definitely under the shadow of
Machiavelli's The Prince is sort of seeing the way that
there's a picture being of this perfect society that has
no property and where people don't care about your religious beliefs.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Again, you know, kind of a strong element in.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Relationship to Thomas Moore as we see him in a
Man for All Seasons. It's a satire and that no,
he's not necessarily endorsing all these things, but what he's
doing is he's taking all these ideas of an ideal
society and kind of working through how contradictory and sort
of crazy they can be. And so it makes for

(01:01:30):
a really, really fun read. It's actually pretty funny and witty.
Like a lot of philosophical work at that time was
like I'm going to come up with some weird ass
story to play out these ideas, you know, kind of
like you know the Symposium and you know those kinds
of narratives where they're like dialogues among witty philosophers. So

(01:01:51):
this is a similar thing, is philosophical, it's definitely about government.
It takes about two and a half hours to read.
I can't recommend that one highly enough if you're interested
in Sir Thomas Moore or Saint Thomas Moore.

Speaker 8 (01:02:03):
I was just gonna mention one bit of trivia that
I thought was interesting because I was wondering, how did
they get Vanessa Redgrave to just be in this so briefly,
I think she barely had a line, even though I
thought that scene was great and she was in it.
But I read IMDb she was originally supposed to play Margaret,
whose Susannah York played, but she couldn't do it, so
she agreed to take this cameo just for the fun

(01:02:27):
of it, apparently. But I love Susannah York and yeah,
and again, I did think that scene that we already
talked about where they all say goodbye was very, very moving,
and the mother as well when Wendy Hiller, who played
I mean, that was really gut wrenching when they all
have to say goodbye. But other than that, I think

(01:02:47):
I like it less after this discussion, now that I
know some of my what's rating will change.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
I feel bad.

Speaker 7 (01:02:55):
I have to apologize to our Patreon person, Peter Rogers.
Now you hope you expecting a really glowing thing. I mean,
as we're talking about this, I'm looking at other films
that were released in sixty six and I'm just like
I would have given that the Oscar like the good
and the bad, the ugly or persona.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
But that's how always how good it is with the Oscars,
except in the nineteen seventies. It's like a really great
film would win the Oscar, and then you look at
the other nominees and they're also all great and could
have won. So there's like only one decade when the
Oscars were like, you know, worth the powder they would
take to blow them up.

Speaker 8 (01:03:28):
Who's afraid of Virginia wool Beatkins? Second, Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (01:03:33):
This was the year of Face of Another, the Tchakahara film.
Also Daisies was you know, the Vera hit Loova film.
I mean, there's so many good films this year. Unfortunately
most of them.

Speaker 8 (01:03:44):
Are foreign so they probably wouldn't have done nominated anyways,
but there were at least some really good American ones,
and they really.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Influenced, you know, American cinema going into the seventies.

Speaker 7 (01:03:56):
All right, guys, let's go ahead and take a break
and play a preview for next week's show.

Speaker 1 (01:03:59):
Right after these.

Speaker 6 (01:04:00):
Brief messages, get ready to dive deep into the life,
career and unforgettable moments of the one and Only Chevy Chase.
Join us on an exciting journey through the illustrious career
of this comedy icon as we explore his groundbreaking roles,
behind the scenes stories, and timeless contributions to the world

(01:04:22):
of entertainment. Each episode of the Chasing Chevy Chase podcast
brings you expert analysis and nostalgic reflections on Chevy Chase's
most iconic characters in classic films like National Lampoon's Vacation,
Caddy Shack, and Fletch. Whether you're a diehard Chevy Chase
aficionado or simply curious about the man behind the laughter,

(01:04:46):
Chasing Chevy Chase is your go to podcast for all
things Chevy Chase. Tune in and join the conversation as
we celebrate the life and legacy of a true Hollywood legend.
Don't miss out. Subscribe now to Chasing, Check Heavy Chase
wherever you get your podcasts, and let the adventure begin.

Speaker 5 (01:05:10):
In nineteen twenty six, noted director of Fritz Lang created
a dark and terrifying vision of the future. Now Academy
Award winner Georgio Moroder has completed a long term personal project,
a reconstruction of Lang's classic motion picture with a soundtrack,
created especially for this presentation and performed by today's top
musical artists. Georgio Moroder presents Fritz.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
Lang's Metropolis, Metropolis and all of you experience as you've

(01:06:22):
never heard it before.

Speaker 8 (01:06:25):
That's right.

Speaker 7 (01:06:25):
We'll be back next week with a look at Metropolis
as we kick off another Sci Fi July. Until then,
I want to think my co host Spencer and Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
So, Robert, what's the latest with you, sir?

Speaker 8 (01:06:35):
I just released and I've been doing very well on
my YouTube channel with Joan Crawford. Anything Joan Crawford related
people love, and I've come to really admire her as
an actor. As a result of these videos doing well,
I'm doing more and more of them. So I just
did a video where I took some interviews with Crawford's

(01:06:57):
scholars where we really discussed her acting. So I just
took some of those clips, put it together and did
a video about why you know, what what why? What
made her such a great actor? H from you know,
from our point of view. Tomorrow, I'm interview interviewing Jonathan Rosenbaum,
who I'm sure you know anyone listening or you also
from Chicago, Like Spencer, his new book travels in the

(01:07:20):
Cities of Cinema, so we're talking about that tomorrow. I've
had him on a couple of times, so he's a
very very, you know, really nice, great guest. And my
show is called Robert Bellissimo at the Movies and we
do I do a new video every Sunday. Occasionally I'll
put something out during the week if something comes up,

(01:07:41):
but it's usually once a week, and you can go
to YouTube dot com slash Robert Bellissimo at the Movies
and all of the links all of my social media
handles are on my link tree page, so if you
want to follow me, go to linktree dot com slash
Robert Bellisimo at the Movies. I also do some written
review use for a Toronto based website called Screenfish, and

(01:08:03):
they're all on there, so subscribe, like the videos, comment,
share and reach out. I'd love to hear from people.

Speaker 7 (01:08:11):
And Spencer, how about yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
I want to know about any episodes you're going to
do on trog or Straight Jacket. Those are obviously a
sad point in her career, but they're actually like really
fascinating movies and fascinating performances. He's so good and and Trog.
I'll always throw down for trog Is. It's a weird,
really strange, broken movie, but so so much fun. And

(01:08:35):
she's she's really she's giving her all in it. That's
what makes trog so remarkable. It's a real cruddy idea.
And Joan Crawford is like here to work.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
It's now, I guess officially summer for me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
My classes ended this week, so I go back to
I'm going to finish.

Speaker 1 (01:08:57):
Editing my movie that I've been editing forever.

Speaker 10 (01:09:00):
But I can finally work on that at a regular
clip and you know, hopefully we'll premiere in a sometime
in the fall.

Speaker 7 (01:09:10):
Thank you again, guys for being on the show. Thanks
everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of
me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the
other shows that I work on. They are all available
at Readingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the
Projection Booth take over the world.

Speaker 9 (01:09:31):
Everybody, do you want to leave? Just like you and
a half of it's a smart let's for.

Speaker 4 (01:10:02):
Sides.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
My word, no.

Speaker 9 (01:10:13):
I have.

Speaker 8 (01:10:20):
God, my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
Busy.

Speaker 6 (01:10:32):
Would you pray?

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
What makes the world go round?

Speaker 9 (01:10:46):
I haven't got cdy.

Speaker 8 (01:10:54):
My mind is lost and man.

Speaker 4 (01:11:05):
Blowing.

Speaker 10 (01:11:09):
I'm said, ba.

Speaker 9 (01:11:18):
I I am.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
I don't say

Speaker 3 (01:12:09):
Say oh, say