Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sanford & Son (NBC) is a promising situation comedy produced by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, the team that created All in the Family. Like Family, which was based on a long-running BBC hit called Till Death Do Us Part, the new show is also an adaptation of an English model. This time Yorkin and Lear have taken the BBC's Steptoe & Son, about the tribulations of a cockney junk dealer and his son, and Americanized it by setting it in a low-income black milieu. In the process they have come up with an inspired piece of casting...
Perhaps the single greatest difficulty in a difficult play is making plausible the evolution of Lear's character. In the crucial opening lines, Lear is completely self-possessed. The camera frames Scofield's face, jowly and immobile, and the mouth moves just barely, opening to let the words fall out, slow-paced and certain. By the time of his madness in the storm, all such self-possession has vanished. Lear is frenzied, physically shrunken in his defeat. It is Scofield's peculiar ability to make all of these changes appear supremely necessary. Even in the poise and control...
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...
...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, Lear's dying "Pray you undo this button," and Kent's "Break, heart; I prithee break," after his king's death...
...these are finally little failures, and the successes are large. Brook is not always right, but when he is right, he is very, very right. King Lear is the summit of Shakespeare, and were this production only half so good, it would demand to be seen...