Word: beckets
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...Becket is a cerebral film spectacle based on the play by Jean Anouilh, in which English history wars with an impudent Gallic wit. Director Peter Glenville has flung the drama onto the screen like a vast Bayeux tapestry, held fast with the lancet-sharp performances of Peter O'Toole as Henry II, England's first Plantagenet ruler, and of Richard Burton as the 12th century martyr Thomas Becket. Henry loved Becket, raised him to eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, then lost his onetime friend in a struggle between church and state that ended with Becket's murder...
...time is a hundred years after the Norman Conquest, and Anouilh roots his conflict in the blood enmity between Henry, great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and his Saxon subject. Henry sneers at Becket as a "collaborator," but in fact the king is sycophant to the courtier, whose quiet contempt holds his master eternally in thrall...
...that rivals his own Lawrence of Arabia. Lusty, spindle-shanked, spiteful, neurasthenic, bored with responsibility, despising his wife and children, he gives the whore-mongering Henry dimension both as man and monarch. The film also advances a further suggestion about Henry: before he frees himself from his love of Becket...
...Burton-Becket hardly senses this obsession; his concern is his own soul, "Where honor should be, in me there is only a void," he tells his mistress (Sian Phillips). Then the easy-living courtier becomes archbishop, and fate summons him to uphold "the honor of God." But does he die to defend canon law, made great by the great office thrust upon him, or is he merely a self-appointed martyr in search of his Cain? Given a mass of ambiguities to project, Burton projects them remarkably well. He daringly meets the competition offered by O'Toole with...
...country club. The round pavilion with glass walls and a cookie-cutter roof juts out from a circular pedestal, and might be overlooking the swimming pool and the 18th hole instead of the corner of Century Boulevard and Vicksburg Avenue. But by some medieval quirk, Welton Becket & Associates has designed the entrances as bridges over a moat...