Most critics admire it, and the praise gathers around two things: Paul Scofield’s Thomas More and Robert Bolt’s screenplay. The reviews from 1966 call it handsome, stirring and a faithful rendering of the play’s substance, with the English countryside doing a good deal of the work. Later critics find it wittier and quicker than its reputation suggests, with enough intrigue to keep it from becoming a history lesson. Scofield is singled out almost everywhere, and Robert Shaw’s Henry and Orson Welles’s Wolsey are noted as the livelier turns around him.
The reservations are about pace and piety. The Guardian wants a less regal rhythm and a less saintly More, and the one outright dissent, from Time Out, finds the film respectable to the point of tedium, with only Welles’s cameo to relieve it. The spread is otherwise narrow, seven of eight positive, and the argument among critics is less about whether it is well made than about whether stateliness is a virtue.