br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (March 7) at 5 Turner Classic Movies showed the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons as part of their “#1 Days of Oscar” tribute to the Academy Awards, which are this coming Sunday, March 12 at 5 p.m. on ABC. The TCM schedule seemed focused on historical epics about real people – though not always telling the absolutely true stories of them – and A Man for All Seasons was no exception. I remember seeing A Man for All Seasons when it was originally released in theatres in 1966 when I was 12 years old, and my mother took me and said along the way that she was impressed at the power of an absolute monarch to declare, “All right, so the Roman Catholic Church won’t let me get a divorce? O.K., I declare that England is no longer Catholic!” A Man for All Seasons tells the story of Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of Englaid (essentially King Henry VIII’s second-in-command) until he ran afoul of Henry VIII’s determination to dump his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because though she’d given him a daughter, Mary, se had not produced a son. Henry VIII was determined to have a male heir to avoid a repeat of the extended civil war that has roiled England during the 15th century and led to the accession of his father, Henry VII, as first king of the Tudor dynasty. A Man for All Seasons began as a play by Robert Bolt, who also did the screenplay for the movie, and he was clearly out to portray More literally as “a man for all seasons,” a symbol of unbending principle and courage in standing up for what he believed in in the face of an obstinate ruler who brooked no dissent or interference with his powers. Obviously the parallel to More’s situation was the attitude of then-U.S. President Lyndon Juhnson towards critics of the war in Viet Nam, including people like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, King, Jr. whom he had previously worked with and admired.
What we didn’t know then – because Robert Bolt didn’t bother to tell us – was that Thomas More was a pretty nasty piece of work himself; as a hard-core Roman Catholic he had led persecutions himself and ordered the executions of thousands of alleged “heretics” whom he had beheaded for their refusal to accept the dictates of the Church in Rome. So there’s a sense of karma in More’s meeting the same fate himself once the party line changed and Henry VIII switched from defender of the Roman church to its bitter opponent and antagonist. A writer more subtle and less determined to canonize his hero than Robert Bolt might have made something out of the irony that More, former prosecutor of alleged heretics and traitors, ultimately met the same fate as he’d decreed for so many others. But as presented in the film, More – especially as portrayed by Paul Scofield in an Academy Award-winning performance (the movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture, Best Director for Fred Zinnemann, Best Actor for Scofield, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Bolt – though it’s always struck me as odd that you can win the “Adapted Screenplay” award for adapting something you yourself wrote in the first place) – is just plain annoying in his stuffy self-righteousness. One of the conceits behind Bolt’s script is that More apparently thought he could get away with defying the King by never explaining to anyone just why he wouldn’t sign the oath of allegiance to King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. He even puts off his wife Alice (Wendy Hiller) and their daughter Margaret (Susannah York) when they understandably want to know just why he’s going to be executed and they’ll face penury at best and imprisonment or execution themselves at worst (Tudor England was very big on guilt by association). At least according to Bolt, More figured that of he remained silent about his reasons to refuse to sign the oath, no one could accuse him of speaking out against the King because he would not literally have done so.
What he didn’t reckon with was that an opportunist, Richard Rich (played by the young John Hurt in a role that clearly marked him for biggers and betters), would lie against him and tell the court that More had told him he woudln’t sing the oath because the Parliament didn’t have the authority to disestablish the Roman Catholic Church; only God could do that. Rich is really the principal villain of the piece, an opportunistic slimeball whom More reads accurately from the moment he meets him as anxious for some kind of well-paying appointment. One can all too readily imagine Richard Rich today as a sycophant for Donald Trump – at least until Trump got tired of him and threw him to the wolves once he no longer had use for him. (Eighteen years later Hurt would play someone on the opposite side of an individual-versus-authoritarianism story as Winston Smith in the 1984 version of George Orwell’s 1984.) King Henry VIII is portrayed by the young Robert Shaw, who comes off as so overbearing one wants to ask him, based on his most famous role a decade later in the film Jaws, “Isn’t there a shark somewhere you have to go out and kill?” Otherwise A Man for All Seasons is an irritating movie; as I watched it I kept thinking of George Orwell’s comment on why he didn’t like Gandhi. Orwell said he didn’t trust people who so obviously were consciously auditioning for sainthood the way he thought Gandhi was.
Obviously, as a refugee from Nazism, director Fred Zinnemann knew something about the dangers of standing up to authoritarian crazies with absolute power, and the second half of the film more or less works the way Zinnemann and Bolt clearly intended. No doubt there are people still standing up to authoritarian bullies in today’s world and meeting the same fate to More’s, or something less bloodthirsty but equally definitive – Alexei Navalny and Lynne Cheney are two names that come to mind – but I can’t help but think that a more complex film that admitted that More had once been on the other side of the machinery that eventually executed him (something along the lines of Arthur Koestler’s anti-Stalinist classic Darkness at Noon) might have held up better than the film we have. Despite some fine performances in supporting roles – notably Leo McKern as Thoams Cromwell (yet another opportunist who sucks up to the King), Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey (I think he was the only non-British actor in the cast, and this may be the only time he ever acted in a film that won the Best Picture Oscar), Nigel Davenport as More’s friend the Duke of Norfolk, Corin Redgrave (brother of Vanessa and Lynn) as More’s openly Protestant son-in-law William Roper, and Vanessa Redgrave herself as Anne Boleyn (Zinnemann originally wanted her to play More’s daughter but she dropped out to do a play; later he asked her to play Anne Boleyn even though she’d appear for only 45 seconds, on the ground that she could portray a woman so hot Henry VIII would risk his throne and his relations with the rest of Europe for her), More to the end remains as stubbornly and smugly self-righteous as ever, greeting the axeman with the remark that he was cool with being executed because that meant he would go to meet God that much sooner. (Barf.)
