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Assigned Viewing: A Man for All Seasons
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I just wanted to quickly tease a fun thing Mona Charen and I are going to be taping next week: a discussion of A Man for All Seasons, the 1966 film from director Fred Zinnemann based on the play of the same name by Robert Bolt. The film itself is not available to stream for free, unfortunately, but you can rent it for just $4 from Amazon, Apple, and other fine video-on-demand providers.
I rewatched it for the show for the first time in ages, and it’s really pretty striking, in part because I’d forgotten Orson Welles has a small part as the venal Cardinal Wolsey, a clergyman trying to convince Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) to abandon his moral convictions and sign off on Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) being made head of the Church of England so he can divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. More, of course, refuses, and the bulk of the film involves the struggle between what the law can prove—and how little that matters in the face of supreme executive power and complete public cowardice.
Zinnemann is best remembered for High Noon, and this movie operates in a similar vein: one man, abandoned by friends and unable to be helped by family, pressured to abandon his post and his moral convictions under threat of mortal violence. In this film, there’s the additional pressure of life under a supreme executive: the whims of the king are linked to the needs of the state, they are inseparable. Shaw plays Henry VIII as a man of mad whims, to be sure: His is the showiest work in the film, by far, but it makes sense if Zinnemann wants to demonstrate how crazy it is to invest supreme power in any one individual. One line in particular continues to rattle around my head some days later: “I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
No idea why that particular bit of wisdom resonates today!
Anyway, I quite enjoy these little movie-club-type episodes with my Bulwark colleagues and hope to do more of them. (Keep your eyes peeled for a chat with Gen. Mark Hertling about his favorite war films and the leadership lessons they impart!) I can’t promise a full resurrection of the Movie Club, but you never know.
And That Made All the DIFFerence
Many thanks to James Faust over at the Dallas International Film Festival, who put together a great festival despite very foolishly asking me to sit on the narrative feature jury alongside award-winning filmmakers King Hollis and Amy Talkington.
Five films were in the narrative feature competition; we ended up choosing If I Go Will They Miss Me from writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández as the winner and highlighted Pinch from director/co-writer Uttera Singh with a special jury prize. Frankly, all the films were solid; I’ll just give a separate shoutout here to Misper, a very dry British workplace dramedy by Harry Sherriff starring Samuel Blenkin, whom American audiences might recognize from last year’s Alien: Earth.
Full disclosure: I am not, by nature, a festival guy. In part, because I don’t love watching more than one new movie a day (I need time to process!) and in part because I find the red carpets and the like of little use for my actual work, which is letting you know what’s to be watched and what’s to be avoided. But this was a good reminder of the importance of such events and the way they highlight films that aren’t likely to get huge releases. I will endeavor to keep track of the films we watched in the hopes of getting y’all’s eyeballs on them once they’re released more broadly.
Review: The Sheep Detectives
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One thing I definitely recommend you watch: The Sheep Detectives! It’s high-quality entertainment for ages 9 to 99. Here’s the opening portion of my review:
An odd thing has happened every time I’ve been in a theater where the trailer for The Sheep Detectives has played.
At first, there is a confused tittering, an almost palpable wave of disbelief that this ridiculous thing has the temerity to exist. The murmurs percolate and then boil over: “Hugh Jackman’s reading detective stories to a flock of sheep? And they talk? And they solve his murder? Wolverine’s murder? What the hell is this?” But as the trailer continues the murmuring slows and people start paying attention and they realize that, whatever this thing is, it’s . . . amusing. The murmurs turn to chuckles, some self-consciously stifled. More often than not, the audience is at least open to the possibility that this thing is not ridiculous and might, in fact, be worth their time.
And, indeed, it is: The Sheep Detective is a high-grade all-ages entertainment, a throwback kids’ movie that nudges up to that line of darkness that ran through so much of our 1980s cinematic entertainments without quite crossing over. Occasionally a bit arch and a little heavy-handed in its messaging, the jokes land and the mystery will keep audiences guessing up until the final moments.
Please read the whole thing!