Word: collier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exactly be First Tango in Eden," John Collier says, conceding that his new script for Milton's Paradise Lost will not be as fleshly as most film epics of our day. Collier is sitting in a rented house in London...
...English was to justify God's ways to man, no Milton lover at this point feels much like standing up and shouting, "Milton! Thou should'st be living at this hour." Neither, as it turns out, need any Milton lover be too greatly cast down. History (like Collier) has not been kind to the Fall of Man-a satisfying and perhaps necessary myth which the modern world unwisely tends to dismiss as simple misinformation...
...decades Milton's Christian epic has been known for a few showily majestic peaks, separated by vast stretches of doctrinal desert. In rendering it into pre-celluloid form, John Collier has left a great deal of highly expendable Milton on the cutting-room floor...
...interminable tête-à-têtes about the creation of the world, etc., between God and Jesus, and between God and Adam. Gone too are most of the lofty jawboning sessions with angels who tend to sound like an unfortunate blend of Dean Rusk and Charlton Heston. Collier skips the Creation entirely, as well as the war in heaven (in fact, most of Books III, VI, VII, VIII, X, XI), except for the fall of Satan's defeated forces toward hell. Where it suits his purposes, though, he uses Milton's verse verbatim-and with reverence...
Describing the action for future cameramen, Collier creates prose that often matches and sometimes surpasses even Milton's great-ranging visual imagination. He sees the fall of the rebel angels at cosmic distance, as a golden snowfall that fills the firmament. After Pandemonium (the house of all demons) is created by magic, its central room becomes as black as night, or the inside of Satan's skull, and myriad rows of attendant devils wink like stars. Satan and his dark disciples fly toward the high gate of hell bound for the corruption of mankind. They look, Collier writes...