Peter Glenville | Becket / 1964

trembling and shaking: misconceptions of a 1964 movie audience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Anhalt (screenplay, based on the stage play by Jean Anouilh), Peter Glenville (director) Becket / 1964

 

It’s hard to explain the phenomenon of the 1964 film Becket. The dramatic historical film, based on the relationship between Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole) and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) was a vast success in its day, nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actors (both Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton were nominated), Best Supporting Actor (John Gielgud), Best Screenplay from another medium (the only Oscar it won), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing, among other categories. It won a Golden Globe for O’Toole, was nominated for several British Academy Awards, and won for the best screenplay in Writers Guild of America Awards.

      Just two years after this film, Robert Preston played Henry II across from Rosemary Harris as Eleanor of Aquitaine (winning her a Tony Award) in a very different version of Henry’s life in Lion in Winter which became a successful film with Peter O’Toole performing as a very different Henry in the film version. That version was also nominated for a number of Academy Awards, with Katherine Hepburn tying Barbra Streisand for the Best Actress, Hepburn winning her third Oscar, and Peter O’Toole winning a Golden Globe. James Goldman also won the Writers Guild of America Award for the Best Screenplay.

      But although the second is revived on TV every so often, one seldom even hears mention the more financially successful of the two, Becket. And with good reason.

      When it first appeared, however, the film received stellar praise from almost all major newspapers and magazines. The usually level-headed Variety was typical in its heady praise:

 

“…This is a very fine, perhaps great, motion picture. It is costume drama but not routine, invigorated by story substance, personality clash, bright dialog and religious interest. Not least among its virtues is the pace of the narrative in the astute handing of Peter Glenville, with his advantage of having also mounted the stage play from which the film is derived.

     The screenplay owes much to Jean Anouilh’s original stage script. The modern psychology of Anouilh lends fascination to these 12th century shenanigans by investing them with special motivational insights rare in costume drama. The basic story is, of course, historic, the murder on December 29, 1170, in the cathedral of Canterbury of its archbishop, Becket, by barons from the entourage of Henry II, great grandson of William the Conqueror. For fictional purposes, Becket and the King had been old roustabouts together, much as, later in English history, Henry V and Falstaff were.

      In the title role, Richard Burton gives a generally convincing and resourceful performance. The transition from the cold, calculating Saxon courtier of a Norman king into a duty-obsessed sincere churchman is not easily managed. Burton does manage.

       As Henry II, Peter O’Toole emerges as the fatter role, and the more colorful. The king is an unhappy monarch who has known little affection in life. His only satisfying companionship has been provided by the Saxon Becket. Hating-loving, miserably lonely when deserted by his friend, O’Toole makes of the king a tormented, many-sided baffled, believable human being.”

 

     Even though I was in Norway for most of 1964, in a small town where I seldom saw new movies, I remember seeing it upon my return that year to the US, wondering why I couldn’t perceive its marvels. But then as a closeted 16-year-old I also missed its absolutely campy portrayal of a King so desperately in love with a man he has made into a priest that it might have made for a good script for the Theatre of the Ridiculous, founded the very next year by former Andy Warhol script writer Ronald Tavel.

      But even when it was briefly reissued in 2007 after being restored, there were many who still grudgingly praised it. And only a few recognized just how startingly open it was about Henry’s apparently carnal desires for his friend. But by that time some of its commentators had begun not only to wonder what the fuss had been all about, but why no one seemed to say anything about its seemingly open expression of homosexual love. Ed Gonzalez’ review in The Village Voice represented one the new naysayers:

 

“At least as far back as Summer and Smoke, director Peter Glenville demonstrated a unique talent for sucking the life out of good theater. So there was little hope for this adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Becket, or the Honor of God, which essentially modernized T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral for Freud enthusiasts. Mysteriously being resurrected at Film Forum for one week, this desiccated historical pageant about two close friends who become great ideological enemies adheres to Anouilh’s singularly obsessed idea that King Henry II’s affections for his friend Thomas Becket may have been more than platonic, inviting queer analysis as soon as the king bends over and thanks his friend for a massage: “No one does it the way you do, Thomas.” Setting up a model for Al Pacino’s career, Peter O’Toole plays Henry as an explosive trip through the character’s id. Henry’s a babyish and attention-grubbing royal who impulsively appoints Richard Burton’s Becket as the Archbishop of Canterbury only to vindictively turn against his friend when Becket chooses God over him. Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket’s rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film’s innuendo might have seemed daring; today it’s close to ridiculous.”

     Certainly Addison Engelking, writing in 2007 in the Memphis Flyer recognized it as camp. Noting Henry’s absolute abuse of his best friend, while being surprised when he later finds the man whom he loved devoted to another far greater being, namely God, Engelking writes:

 

“Which brings us to the other film lurking within Becket. The second half of the film, which chronicles the tragic end of the Becket-Henry alliance, grows seriously campy — a real queer-studies classic about sublimated male desire and the social disapproval that comes with homosexual love. Surprisingly, many irritations of the Cinemascope-period pageant — obnoxious musical cues, spectacle for its own sake, bitchy faux-Shakespearean banter — only serve to foreground the romance more. As O’Toole stews in an agony of desire for his lost friend, he resembles less a king than a puppet controlled by his own heartstrings, and his shrieks of “THOMAS!!” echo along the French coastline as both heartfelt and ludicrous. It’s an appropriate mixed message for a silly, daring, long-overlooked film to send.”

     Laura Clifford of Reeling Reviews added, upon seeing the 2007 version: “This 1964 historical period classic has been restored for rerelease in theaters, but this is one film that has not aged well. Besides the times' outdated filmmaking techniques, yielding closeups of actors on unseen horseback as scenery whizzes by and costumes of too obvious a modern manufacture, the homosexual romance which may have passed as subtlety in its day today clonks one over the head with sniggering innuendo. Peter O'Toole plays Henry like Ian McKellan doing a camp cameo.”

 

     Alex Good, writing on the film even more recently in 2018, was seemingly astonished both by its apparent power over the audiences of the day, but by the outrageously obviously expressions of homosexuality expressed in this movie:

 

“Well, this is one case where I can’t fault the fickle taste of the public. I found Becket to be nearly unwatchable this time out, which was the first time I’d seen it in twenty years. It’s so heavy-handed, so ponderous, so pious, that it makes you feel like you’re visiting a different planet. Did we really think this was great filmmaking sixty years ago?

    …Peter O’Toole does try his best to liven things up, but he’s stuck in a ridiculous part that barely makes any sense. Did you not know that he loves Thomas? Then he’ll tell you. Again. And again. But in what sense does he love him? How can such a long, overwritten film dealing with only two characters fail to give us any real sense of who they are, or of their motivations? They’re just voices and costumes.

   About the only amusing thing is all the homoerotic stuff. I can’t call this a subtext because there’s nothing secondary or hidden about it. It’s so pervasive and explicit it starts to be funny after a while. I think there are even three scenes where Burton and O’Toole are lying or sitting in bed together (a couple of times after throwing a woman out).

    It’s hard to overstate how blatant this is. The two men are more than just boon companions. As noted, Henry is constantly crying about his love for Thomas. His mother upbraids him for his ‘unhealthy and unnatural’ attachment and his wife complains of his neglecting her.”

 

      Good goes even further in his astonishment of this text: “I wonder where this comes from. I don’t think Jean Anouilh, who wrote the play the film was based on, or screenwriter Edward Anhalt were gay. Homosexuality was still a crime in England at the time, and yet it’s not like they were hiding anything here. Is there a political point being made? I’m not sure what it could be.”

     From evidence, neither the noted French playwright Anouilh nor the gifted Hollywood scriptwriter Anhalt (who, with his wife Edna, also penned the film version of The Member of the Wedding, a film with some gay content and a great deal of lesbian sentiment) as well as a great many other notable solo scripts. But director Peter Glenville was a closeted gay man in a life-time relationship with his producer Hardy William Smith. Glenville, a devout Catholic, was so uptight about his homosexuality that some friends went so far as to suggest his relationship with Smith may have been celibate. But anyone who as seen even a picture of Glenville, a truly beautiful man—as Laurence Olivier’s photograph of him proves—would find that difficult to believe. And it is ridiculous to imagine even two confirmed bachelors remaining together for over 50 years without something having transpired in their bed.

      But what is interesting in this absurd speculation about Glenville’s sex habits is just how truly conservative and angst-ridden were the early to mid-1960s, when Beckett was made, regarding gay behavior. As Michael S. Sherry argues in his insightful portrait of that period, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, with regard to gay playwrights, composers, poets, and other celebrity artists, whereas in the 1950s gay bars may have been regularly raided by the police and gay men, mostly invisible, ostracized from the heterosexual world when recognized, by the early 1960s there was not only new kind of public hatred of gay men in the US but “there was a near-unified belief that homosexuality was not only a corruption of American values but a real threat to American power.”

      It’s all the more difficult, accordingly, to explain how a film that begins with the two men in bed with a woman, and soon after shifts to a work in Henry II (O’Toole) is looked after by Becket (Burton) as a kind of loving valet, a man who massages him, dries him off when he leaves him bath, and generally serves as his surrogate lover—as Henry says to Becket early in the film, “You have made me into a man of the most delicate sensibilities”—could possibly have gotten by the censors, let alone be embraced by both the US and British public.

      Not only does Henry go around shouting out his love of Becket, when he discovers that Gwendolyn (Siân Phillips, at the time Peter O’Toole’s wife), whom he has just stolen from Becket has killed herself, he comes creeping back into Becket’s room, leaps into his bed, and shouts out, “I’m sleeping here tonight.”

      Henry does merely tell Becket, when as the Archbishop he has turned to God, that “I loved you. And you didn’t love me.”; but he later tells his entire court, including his wife Eleanor (Pamela Brown) and his mother Empress Matilda (Martita Hunt), “No one has ever loved me except Becket.”

      Matilda, taunting him, suggests: “Call him back then and love him if he loves you.”

    Later, at another such family occasion, planning to use even his own son as a way to get back at Becket—planning to crown him the future king at the York cathedral instead of the holy shrine of Canterbury where kings were always crowned—Henry once more regales Becket for his failure to love him back. Shocked by his plans, Mathilda finally speaks her full mind to her son: “Think of England and not your disappointed love for this man. You have an obsession about that is unhealthy and unnatural.” And Eleanor, finally realizing that he loves Becket far more than he has ever loved his own wife, responds: “I have permitted all your mistresses, but must I come second to your love of Becket, as well.”

      Dismissing his entire retinue, except for his four drunken barons, Henry absolutely turns into a love-smitten school boy: 

 

“Before I met Becket I was like you, a well-oiled machine for belching, whoring, and punching heads. The man I loved. I loved him. I loved him. And I still do.”

 

Literally sliding to the floor, as he holds his hand to his heart, Henry continues: “I’m as useless as a woman. As long as he’s alive, I tremble. I shake.”

     It is at this point that the quite drunken King calls out, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” For the “belching, whoring, punching heads” to whom he speaks, those words are as much as a command to kill the Archbishop in his cathedral. And it is at that moment, shaking and trembling with love, that Henry has doomed his lover.

      There’s even more if you dare to sit through this absurdly gay paean to lost love.  For example, I haven't even mentioned John Gielgud's prissy, aesthete representation of Louis VII, King of France. What hasn’t been answered is how the audiences of the day could perceive this work so very differently. Of course, not all viewers were blind to what the movie was saying. When asked about its homosexual content, O’Toole answered, “to put it in terms of homosexual and heterosexual is to miss the point. It was love.”

       Even the actor seems, at first at least, to be blind to the obvious. But for audiences in the early 1960s, homosexuality was such an unknown and awful thing that even thinking about it seemed sinful. Few every day, average heterosexuals, at least to their knowledge had never even met a gay man, let alone a lesbian. Such people existed only in the dark corners and alleys of urban centers such as New York City and San Francisco. For the rest of their lives, they simply put the possibility of such world out of their mind.

      The very same year as Becket, 1964, Life magazine ran a photo-essay by Philip Welch titled “Homosexuality in America” (Time ran an essay in 1966 and Look ran a similar piece in 1967). I read that article and still remember, wrongly apparently, that one caption read that they had actually seen gay men kiss—which at the time utter startled me. “Why shouldn’t they be kissing if they were attracted to one another?” my 16-year-old brain pondered. Rereading the piece, it is not quite that naïve, but it might as well be given its tone, its conspiratorial-like relationship with the reader that hints at having uncovered behavior that is as strange and bizarre to the average American as having come upon a never before discovered Amazonian tribe with rituals that were hard to imagine. It’s opening sentences proclaim its shocking revelations:  

 

“These brawny young men in their leather caps, shirts, jackets and pants are practicing homosexuals, men who turn to other men for affection and sexual satisfaction. They are part of what they call the "gay world," which is actually a sad and often sordid world. On these pages, LIFE reports on homosexuality in America, on its locale and habits (pp. 66-74) and sums up (pp. 78-80) what science knows and seeks to know about it.”

 

And although there is no surprise about kisses, there is throughout a sense of wonderment that such human beings even live among us, perhaps dangerous to the heterosexual species at large, particularly to adolescent boys: “They hold good jobs in business, the professions or the arts. Many of them have apparently strong heterosexual relationships, get married and have children. They go to church, engage in civic activity, see their psychiatrists. They are there in unmeasured numbers, involved to some degree in homosexuality. The only difference between them [italics mine] and the "straight" world is the fear of exposure and their troubled consciences.” In its entirety it might remind some of Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a world made up of pea-pod-created duplicates who during the day behave like our ordinary neighbors but at night seep into to our sleep to take over our unconscious dreams. A Dr. Bieber, quoted in Welch’s essay goes so far as to declare (in front of a meeting of members of the Mattachine Society no less) "I used to think that all homosexuals were neurotic….I now believe that homosexuals in most instances are borderline psychotics." Although the article prides itself in revealing the dark and secret world of the homosexual, the misperceptions and myths it embraces might fill an entire chapter in a study of gay history. The article, indeed, is least interesting for what it pretends to know, and terrifyingly fascinating for its misconceptions.    

      The very mentality that allowed even Glenville’s friends to imagine that his relationship with his companion was celibate, was the same mindset that allowed most of the audiences of 1964 to perceive Henry’s love of Becket as being nothing other than a deep heterosexual bond, a kind of Damon and Pythias friendship that made the King suffer for its absence. No one—except for a prurient homosexual reader—might possibly even imagine that Henry’s philia (friendly or platonic love) would be confused with eros—even when Becket massages and wipes Henry off from his bath or Henry joins him in his bed for the night. It was no more an issue to be questioned than the fact, as both Anouilh’s play and movie posits, that Becket was “a little Saxon.” That he was, in fact, Norman simply didn’t matter.

      And in this respect, it is utterly fascinating for me to revisit Becket once again as an old man, its eros leaping out of the screen as if it were screaming to escape from the clutches of the boring historical drama into which it had been pressed like a violet of a long-ago lost lover. This film helps explain why my discussions of far more coded films send shutters through the spines of an older heterosexual generation who mutter in protest against my reading dirty things into their golden oldies. Apparently, some films didn’t even need to be coded in order to hide the usually censored issues they were exploring.

 

*Gold comments, “What he (O’Toole) means is nothing platonic, but more a laddish, locker-room kind of thing. But then O’Toole says how, in a locker-room, ‘blokes often give each other a rub, if you follow me.’ Then he breaks into laughter. So yes, we get it. We can’t miss it.”

 

Los Angeles, May 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).