Billy Budd (1962)

Directed by Peter Ustinov

It surprised me just now to look over our archives and find that we haven’t done anything with Herman Melville here at Word and Song, even though both Debra and I are tremendous admirers of his work — and of the man himself, too, who never budged an inch when it came to ginning up an audience for his novels and short stories. The story that was the basis for our Film of the Week, Billy Budd, was never published in Melville’s lifetime. It lay among his papers, unfinished, because Melville was constantly revising and revising and letting things rest. His widow Elizabeth found it among his papers and tried to put it into good order from his text and his notes, but it didn’t see first publication till 1924, long after the author had died. It gained immediate fame. Benjamin Britten composed an opera, Billy Budd, to a libretto written by Eric Crozier and the novelist E. M. Forster (whom film lovers may remember as the source for three excellent films, David Lean’s A Passage to India; A Room with a View; and The Remains of the Day). In that same year, 1951, a stage production of Billy Budd debuted on Broadway. It’s the text of that production that the brilliant Peter Ustinov used for our film — and Ustinov was the brains and the energy behind it all, producer, director, adapter of the screenplay, and, in one of his most difficult and sympathetic roles, Edward Fairfax Vere, “Starry” Vere as Melville called him, the Captain of the ship on which Billy serves.

Let me set the stage. Billy is a young man, a foundling, innocent and preternaturally handsome. In fact, that’s what the sailors call him, the Handsome Sailor. Crews aboard a warship are not known for easy friendliness, and Billy wasn’t even one of them from the start. He was on a merchant marine ship, aptly named The Rights of Man, but impressed into service against the French navy by Vere’s ship, the Bellipotent — meaning, Powerful in War. And yet everyone loves Billy. He is not prissy — but he is pure. He cannot imagine hatred. He is quite incapable of telling a lie. He doesn’t seek friendship, because he doesn’t have to; the roughest and saltiest of old tars warm up in his presence. His greatest flaw? He stutters when he is confused or excited. He is not the master of his words. But there is one man aboard, the master-at-arms, John Claggart, sly, well-spoken, who is drawn to Billy but who envies him and hates him for his purity. It must be false! He seeks cause against Billy, and the master-at-arms on a warship during wartime has great authority and plenty of opportunity for cruelty. The Captain of the ship, meanwhile, is a good man, a thinker, not easily approachable, admired and respected by his commissioned officers. There is also the Dansker, an old ship’s carpenter with a Bible, and with a keen ability, not born of rationalism, to see into the hearts of the people around him.

Claggart is out to destroy Billy. If you have not read the story, you are in for a couple of remarkable surprises in the plot. Since Melville never used plot devices merely to surprise or entertain the reader, you should consider that they are meant to suggest profound questions regarding the nature of good and evil, the heart of fallen man, and the impossibility of realizing perfect justice in this world. Law is for the sake of justice, but what do we do when it seems that the enforcement of a rational and just law, according to the terms the law provides, will in the individual case work a great injustice? Can the judge set aside the very rules that establish him as judge? If so, what precedent does that set? What happens to the very idea of law, if it must yield to arbitrary human feelings?

This film is always intelligent, always gripping. There is nothing extraneous in it, and no human being is portrayed as simply easy to understand. Great mysteries move among us: they are other people. Peter Ustinov directs it with a sure and flawless hand. The cast is superb. Terence Stamp, as Billy, curly-haired and blond, became an overnight sensation. Melvyn Douglas is the Dansker — thoroughly absorbed into his role, so that you’d hardly suspect that he played many a lead in romantic comedies. Ustinov’s acting is impeccable as always. But for my money, his greatest stroke of genius was in casting Robert Ryan as Claggart. Ryan was, by the way, a religious man, one of the good guys in Hollywood who never let stardom affect his marriage and his family life. He wasn’t easy to get to know. But pay very close attention to his eyes and the cast of his mouth, especially when he is not speaking. That man could act.

So then, it’s a voyage we’re on, and the most dangerous voyage of all: into the seas of human good and evil. The film is true to the book in that most important way.

You will find the full film online for this week at the link above. Click on the photo, and at the site, you can open a full-sized page for viewing.

Many thanks for following along on our mission to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.