A Man for All Seasons (1966)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

All right, everyone, raise your hand if you guessed already that today’s Film of the Week — inspired by our Word of the Week, season, would be this one, the pretty reliable historical film, A Man for All Seasons? The subject of our film is Thomas More, one of the most renowned scholars in Europe at the time, a man whom Henry VIII elevated to be Chancellor of England, and then, when More refused to give his approval to Henry’s divorce of his wife Catherine of Aragon to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, the man who gave his life, as he saw it, for God and for truth. Writing in 1520, fifteen years before More’s death by state execution, one Robert Whittington, in a book of grammar and rhetorical devices, said, referring to More,

“For where is the man (in whom is so many goodly virtues) of that gentleness, lowliness, and affability, and as time requireth a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes and sometime of as sad gravity, as who say, A man for all seasons?”

For “gentleness,” there, read courtliness, nobility. More, you see, was one of those fellows capable of speaking to high and low, and of laughing at himself too, punning on his name sometimes, since moros in Greek means fool. But that same “fool” was in the forefront of bringing the fullness of Renaissance learning into England, and his courage is undoubted.

I admire the works of the director, Fred Zinnemann, Zinnemann didn’t write the screenplay. A Man for All Seasons was already a successful play on Broadway and the West End (London), but Zinnemann wanted to make a film out of it. He was a committed opponent of mob action, and always an admirer of the lone man following his conscience to his own considerable danger, even at the cost of his life. That’s the heart of the plot of High Noon, one of the greatest of American films to feature the man who does his duty for the very people who betray him or break their promises to assist him against evil men. Zinnemann lined up the playwright Robert Bolt to adapt his own text for the screen, and Bolt’s changes are, and I’m not exaggerating, perfect. He cut away all the modernist play conventions that might work on the stage; he wrote a couple of new scenes, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to create a death scene for the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey; he made the Duke of Norfolk more of a true friend for More, and in fact the Norfolk family would remain opponents of the Tudors, and would suffer for it, too. So then, Bolt was the writer and Zinnemann both the producer and the director. The result is a film that always knows exactly what it is doing and where it is going.

I don’t want to get into the matter of the king’s divorce, except to say that no one has ever, to my knowledge, impeached the character of Queen Catherine, who loved Henry and who enjoyed the favor of the English people. Henry knew that his claim to the throne was tenuous; at any time from the accession of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1485, to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, you could probably fill the royal court with people lineally descended from Edward III, from whom everybody made their claim to royalty. So Henry needed a son, and Catherine couldn’t supply one. In A Man for All Seasons, then, we are dealing with a conflict between people motivated by ambition and political calculation, and Thomas More, who consistently asks the crucial question, “Is this right?” More doesn’t want to attack the king. All he wants to do is to be left alone, not to be compelled. But that’s not enough for the king, nor for his unscrupulous new henchman, Thomas Cromwell.

A Man for All Seasons won several Oscars, most notably for Best Picture, Best Director, Best (adapted) Screenplay, and Best Actor — for Paul Scofield, brilliant as Thomas More. But you really ought to see the film for all the performances. Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey is appropriately haughty and unctuous, and those lines he is said to have uttered as he lay dying strike us powerfully here, because he is only the first casualty: “Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” Robert Shaw, youthful and burly, is excellent as Henry, a man who would be virtuous if only it went along with his appetite and his political designs. The great Wendy Hiller is More’s wife Alice, who doesn’t understand a thing about why her husband has to be so stubborn, but she loves him, and she is a rock of loyalty, as is their daughter Margaret (Susannah York). Catch John Hurt’s breakout performance as the weaselly Richard Rich, More’s betrayer. But of all the supporting actors, the man who goes into my category of men so ugly or dumpy-looking you’d never think anyone would let them get within ten miles of a film, but they are tremendous — a category that includes Ernest Borgnine, Charles Laughton, and Richard Boone — is Leo McKern as Cromwell. McKern is the conservative cardinal in Shoes of the Fisherman, and one of the tormentors in the oddball British television series The Prisoner, but you’ll most likely remember him as Horace Rumpole, in the series Rumpole of the Bailey, gruff, intelligent, sometimes vain, friendly with the strangest people, an overlooked genius, sympathetic to people who are down and out, a lover of poetry that he’s got by heart. After McKern plays Rumpole, you can’t imagine anybody else doing it. I say the same thing about Paul Scofield as Thomas More.

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