Sunday, August 05, 2007

Becket (1964)**
This might be a case of high expectations and/or seeing a film in hindsight. I thought the screenplay was a bit too simplistic. I thought Burton was sleepwalking and O'Toole over the top. We are supposed to feel that those 2 have some sort of chemistry together, that they really do love each other as friends and indeed in real life they did. But on the screen in this picture, I didn't get that at all. It is a beautiful picture, well shot, very colorful, well designed. And maybe I am just incapable of enjoying a film with ham-fisted use of music but I thought that was exceedingly bad here. I know it was the style at the time but Hitchcock was able to make films with virtually NO music (The Birds, eg.), and I like a number of films that use music very effectively such as nearly all of Kubrick's work, To Kill A Mockingbird, to name but a few.

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