Word: brooks
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...that is the drift of the directing throughout. Brook is impatient with peripheral events and dispenses with them as often as possible. He uses explanatory titles to speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film...
...Brook is constantly aware of the possibilities in film for more supple dramatic movement, and he is able to use a technique as fundamental as parallel montage to alter completely the dramatic rhythms. A long speech of Goneril's is intercut with shots of Lear riding furiously on the hunt, so that by the time the single speech is finished, the relationship of father and eldest daughter is completely redefined. And when Lear first realizes the emasculating ingratitude of Goneril and Regan ("O, reason not the need!"), Brook moves toward a close-up of the king's eyes that measure...
...times--especially in the elaborate lighting effects of the great storm--Brook's style verges on the overenthusiastic, but his instincts manage to save him before style turns into self-indulgence. He doesn't belabor the black-and-white bleakness of the land-scape, just as he doesn't belabor the malice of the elder daughters, or the virtue of the youngest...
Particularly fine is Brook's handling of the difficult scene between a now blinded Gloucester and his son Edgar, still disguised as a mad beggar. Not recognizing his son, Gloucester begs to be led to the cliffs of Dover where he would be able to jump to his death. Instead, Edgar leads him to the flattest of beaches, all the while persuading him that they are indeed scaling heights. Believing he is on a precipice, Gloucester leaps, only to fall harmlessly to the ground. Finally, convinced he has been saved by a miracle, he resolves to try suicide no more...
...long as Brook remains faithful to the Shakespearean source, his dramatic choices are justifiable, but in his desire to render the play more coherent, he makes some changes that are unforgivable. Edmund is deprived of the rhetorical flourish with which Shakespeare endowed him, and the brilliant soliloquy of the first act ("This is the excellent foppery of the world...") is shortened and presented as part of a dialogue between Edmund and his brother. Jack McGowran's Fool is more than competent but too clearly the sage unrecognized. And, incomprehensibly, Brook leaves out two of the best lines in the play...