A Man for All Seasons

Here is a movie that I had seen before but couldn’t remember much about it. Which typically means it wasn’t great and it wasn’t awful. So watching it again I pretty much came to the same conclusion. Not the best movie to win best picture but not the worst.

The movie is about Sir Thomas More in 16^th Century England and his refusal to break with the Catholic Church and recognize King Henry’s VIII divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  As a Chancellor he is in a position to make judgments on cases of his people. He refuses to take bribes and as a man of law he is very careful what he says. When he refuses the king he does so in a way that he can not be charged with treason. But he is pressured, bribed, jailed, and eventually framed and sentenced to death for not compromising his beliefs. 

Paul Scofield won Best Actor and was great as More and really showed his resolve to not compromise his beliefs. I guess my problem with this movie is it makes More out to be perfect and a holier than thou person. Maybe it just my cynical outlook but I would have liked a little more internal conflict within More especially when it came to his family.  He tried hard to not put his family in jeopardy but other than that he didn’t seem to care how he was hurting them. Director Fred Zimmerman won the Best Director Oscar and had previously been nominated 5 times including for High Noon, and had won for From Here to Eternity but I don’t think this is his finest movie. The final scene where More finally tells the world what he believes after keeping it a secret for so long is one of the best scenes in the movie but it takes so long to get there that by that point you're almost not interested any more. 

The other movie that came out in 1966 and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? TCM recently showed this on TV and I was lucky enough to catch it. The movie starred real husband and wife Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as an onscreen old bickering married couple Martha and George.  This was Mike Nichols (better know for The Graduate) first directorial effort. And it was a great movie.  I really think it should have won more awards.  It was about a self destructive couple who has a newly married younger couple over for drinks.  The movie is basically the four of them in the house as Martha and George play psychological games with themselves and the unsuspecting couple. The writing is amazing and I am not sure why it didn’t win best screenplay and the acting is great also and all four of its cast members were nominated.  It was interesting to see George Segal as a young guy in a serious role as all I know him from is the comedy TV show Just Shoot Me.  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe was also the movie that challenged the production code with the foul mouthed  Martha and eventually forced the MPAA to come up with the new rating system of G, PG, R, and X.  A perfect sign of how movies were becoming more edgy in the 60’s. 

Interesting Fact:

A Man for All Seasons became the third movie in a row to have won Best Picture after previously winning a Tony Award for Best (My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music had done it the previous two years and Amadeus would do it again in 1984).