A Man for All Seasons

Robert Bolt wrote A Man for All Seasons for the stage and then wrote it again for Fred Zinnemann, who directed and produced. The story is Thomas More’s: a lawyer who rose to be the King’s Lord Chancellor and would not say the one sentence the King needed from him, about the divorce from Catherine and the marriage to Anne Boleyn. Nearly every scene is somebody asking and More declining. It is a good film, better than good in places, and it is a little too sure that its hero is right.

Paul Scofield played More on the stage before he played him here, and it shows in the best way. Nothing is rushed and nothing is underlined. He speaks quietly, half a beat later than you expect, and when Cromwell or Norfolk puts the question to him directly his eyes go somewhere else for a moment before he answers, as if checking the law one more time. The speech that got to us is an early one, in the garden at Chelsea, when Corin Redgrave’s William Roper wants a man arrested for being bad and More explains that the law is a forest, and if you cut it down to get at the Devil you have nowhere to stand when the wind comes. We did not expect a lecture on statute to tighten our throat. Scofield does it without raising his voice.

Around him Zinnemann has put two performers who do raise theirs. Orson Welles has one scene as Cardinal Wolsey, in a room lit entirely in scarlet, and plays him as an ill, enormous man who knows More is the only honest one in the building. Robert Shaw’s Henry arrives at Chelsea by barge, leaps off it into the mud, laughs, and then turns on More inside a single sentence. That half hour is the liveliest thing in the film and we would not have minded more of it.

Ted Moore shoots England as if the weather had been booked. The Thames carries people between scenes, the water bright and the banks green, and the country around More’s house is all soft light and long grass. John Box keeps the rooms low and dark by contrast, so the court is a place you step into out of the daylight. Elizabeth Haffenden and Joan Bridge dress More in black and grey, Wolsey in red and Henry in gold, and you could follow the argument from the clothes alone. Georges Delerue writes a sparse, brass-led score that mostly stays outside, on the river. Ralph Kemplen cuts at a walking pace, which suits the talk and does the middle of the film no favours.

That middle is where the flaws sit. Bolt gives More every good line and everyone else the worse half of the argument. Leo McKern’s Cromwell is a clever man written as a villain, in black, with a sneer, and McKern plays what is on the page. Nigel Davenport’s Norfolk is better served, a friend who loves More and cannot follow him, and their quarrel is the one scene in which More seems capable of cruelty. The play had a narrator, the Common Man, who kept the audience in on the joke; the film drops him, keeps Colin Blakely’s steward Matthew as a remnant, and is the more respectable for it and the less alive. Around the hour mark we were bored for a stretch, and then a little cross at being bored by a film this well made.

Two performances pulled us back. Wendy Hiller’s Alice More does not understand a word of what her husband is doing and loves him anyway, and Hiller plays the not understanding as anger, which is truer than tears would have been. Her last scene with him, which we will not place, moved us more than anything Scofield says. John Hurt’s Richard Rich, young and hungry and told by More to go and teach, is the film’s other story, running underneath the main one, and we will leave where it lands.

It is a U certificate and a film of talk, two hours of it, with little in the way of action beyond a man getting in and out of boats. Watch it at home with the volume up; the words are the point and Scofield does not shout them. If you like your history argued, this is the one to start with.