Becket (1964) - film review

In 12th Century England, the young King Henry II is more preoccupied with the hedonistic pursuits of youth than with matters of state, and in this he is aided and abetted by his good friend Thomas Becket.  But Henry gets a rude awakening when he learns that the royal coffers are running low.  He must find new sources of revenue if he is to hold the country together and prevent the native Saxons from turning on the Norman monarchy.  Henry’s decision that the Church should start paying taxes predictably brings him into conflict with his bishops.  When the Archbishop of Canterbury dies, the King appoints Becket as his replacement, safe in the knowledge that the loyal companion of his youth will not cause trouble for him.  But Becket takes his new position more seriously than Henry could have imagined, particularly after he experiences a Damascene conversion.  When one of the King’s barons kills a priest, Becket has no qualms over excommunicating the homicidal nobleman.  Inevitably, a rift of gigantic proportions opens up between Henry and Becket, with neither willing to give ground over the relative importance of Church and throne.  In the end, the King begins to wonder if anyone will rid him of this meddlesome priest...

Possibly the crowning achievement of Hal B. Willis’s stupendous career as a producer was this lavish historical drama based on a successful stage play by the acclaimed French playwright Jean Anouilh.   Becket has quality stamped all over it and is one of the most sumptuous productions to come out of a British film studio.  Not only was the film a global box office hit, it was almost universally acclaimed by the critics and was nominated for Oscars in virtually every category (twelve in total), although it won just one award, for Edward Anhalt’s superlative adaptation of Anouilh’s play.

When he first conceived the play, originally titled Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu, Jean Anouilh was inspired by the falling out between Gérard Philipe and Daniel Ivernel, the two main players in Paris’s leftwing theatre company TNP (le Théâtre National Populaire).  Ivernel felt betrayed by Philipe because the latter had, in his eyes, sold out to commercial cinema.  The two actors were intended to star in the first production of the play in 1959, but Philipe died whilst the play was in rehearsal and was replaced as Becket by an up-and-coming new talent, Bruno Cremer, who would later become a major figure in French cinema.  

Not long after the play proved to be a hit in France, a production opened on Broadway, directed by Peter Glenville and starring Laurence Olivier as Becket and Anthony Quinn as Henry II.  Peter O’Toole was signed up for the part of Henry II in Peter Hall’s London production, but had to pull out when David Lean cast him as the lead in Lawrence of Arabia.  When O’Toole was subsequently offered the role in Glenville’s film version of the play, he jumped at the chance.  His wife at the time, Siân Phillips, was cast in the minor role of Becket’s Welsh love interest, Gwendolen.

First and foremost, Becket has an exceptional cast, comprising some of the finest acting talent in Britain at that time.  In the lead parts of Becket and Henry respectively, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole both give knockout performances, relishing their roles to the extent that they almost resemble a pair of hungry lions gorging on a tasty gazelle.  The supporting contributions are no less impressive, but what would you expect from such illustrious performers as John Gielgud, Donald Wolfit, Martita Hunt, and Felix Aylmer (to name just four masters of the histrionic art)?   

Becket offers some of the juiciest performances of any British film of this era, but its production values are just as laudable.  Although most of the film was shot in the studio (at Shepperton), you would hardly think so given the sheer enormity and detailed design of the sets, beautifully complemented by Geoffrey Unsworth’s atmospheric cinematography and Laurence Rosenthal’s appropriately grandiose score.  For what is essentially a dialogue-rich character study, the film has a striking visual aesthetic and a truly epic feel.

What is ostensibly a film about the irreconcilable conflict between Church and State is in reality a deeply moving tragic love story.  Such is the intense nature of the friendship between King Henry and Thomas Becket that they appear to be two doomed lovers whose destiny it is to be torn asunder by events that neither has the power to control (principally Becket’s discovery of God).  O’Toole plays his part so passionately that his Henry really does come across as the spurned lover, tormented and embittered by the loss of the one thing he valued above all else.  It is revealing that the one and only addition to Jean Anouilh’s original script is a line (spoken by Martita Hunt’s character) which directly references the unnatural (i.e. homoerotic) nature of Henry’s friendship with Becket.   Clearly, in the film version at least, Henry and Thomas were more than just good friends.  They probably shared the same toothbrush.

Although acclaimed as a piece of drama, the film (like Anouilh’s play before it) has been endlessly faulted on its historical veracity.  Anouilh admitted that he did next to no research before he wrote his play, which explains the plethora of historical inaccuracies in the story.  The biggest gaff is that the play cites Becket as being a Saxon, whereas he was in fact a Norman.   The play is however broadly accurate in its portrayal of the relationship between Becket and Henry, the events that led to the breakdown of their friendship and Becket’s brutal martyrdom.

Four years after making this film, Peter O’Toole gladly agreed to reprise the role of Henry II in The Lion in Winter (1968), a film that illuminated another eventful period of the king’s life, focusing more on his parenting skills.  In Becket, model dad Henry is happy merely to boot his royal offspring up their royal buttocks and refer to them as cretins.  In this later film, he makes up his mind to have done and murder the lot of them.  It’s a laugh a minute with the Plantagenets...

© James Travers 2010

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