Word: becket
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Film Cowboys Tom Mix and Buck Jones, who used it to stable their horses-is the largest piece of underdeveloped real estate in a city that is rapidly running out of space. Quietly for the past year, Fox has been drawing up plans to exploit the plot. Architect Welton Becket's models call for Fox to shrink its moviemaking operations into 79 acres on the southwest part of the property, build a $15 million structure to house all its offices and indoor stages. (For outdoor shooting, Fox has a 2,300-acre ranch, 25 miles away in the Malibu...
...Becket lived high, but only, Biographer Duggan maintains, to uphold his position. He sipped water flavored with lime blossoms while his guests downed Gascon wine. When Henry picked Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury-largely to get control of the church and church funds-Thomas accepted reluctantly. "The love you now feel for me," he said prophetically, "will turn to bitter hate...
Murder in the Cathedral. And now began Becket's great transformation. He exchanged the scarlet of state for a monk's hair shirt. If he was merely playing a part, he utterly convinced his audience and, in the end, himself. He proudly recalled that the Archbishops of Canterbury had traditionally been protectors of the poor and oppressed, that St. Augustine had been the first to occupy the ancient see. Step by step, Becket fought the King's encroachments on church power; finally, in danger of his life, he fled to France in a rowboat. After six years...
...four knights with a band of brigands approached Canterbury Cathedral. When the prior tried to bar the doors, the archbishop said: "The House of God should not be made a castle. I command you, under holy obedience, to open those doors!" In cold detail, Author Duggan describes how Becket, the trained warrior, suffered the fatal sword blows, and said, with his dying breath: "For the Holy Name of Jesus and the safety of His Church, I offer myself to death...
Duggan is a master at painting the background of this drama-the clothes, the customs, the pageantry. He reconstructs the dialogue of his characters and reads their thoughts. But somehow he never seems to read their souls. Why did Becket choose martyrdom? In Duggan's view, Becket was goaded to death by a kind of perverse romanticism: as a Norman knight ringed by his enemies, he died to show the English that it was "the Norman custom to stand fast." This mutedly rationalist ending of an otherwise excellent book will fail to satisfy many readers. It shows, once again...