1966 was a great year for movies, and six decades later, the five nominated for “Best Picture” at the 39th Academy Awards the following year are all still worth watching: Alfie; A Man for All Seasons; The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; The Sand Pebbles; and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?
That 1967 Oscar ceremony seems to have taken place on a distant and different planet, though, light-years removed from the vulgar wokery that dominates Oscar night these days. Then, the show was elegant, well-paced, and wonderfully emceed by Bob Hope, dressed in a white tie. The most memorable moment came during Audrey Hepburn’s presentation of the “Best Picture” Oscar, the dramatic finale of Hollywood’s annual celebration of cinema as art. After a brief exchange of compliments with Hope, Miss Hepburn recited the names and producers of the nominated films, took the envelope, read the card therein, looked briefly up to heaven—and then, with a smile of satisfaction, as if her prayers had been answered, announced that the winner was A Man for All Seasons.
I recently rewatched Fred Zinnemann’s riveting cinematic adaptation of Robert Bolt’s play for at least the sixth time, and the thought occurred: Is A Man for All Seasons the most perfect film ever made? Everything about it seems exactly right.
Bolt’s screenplay keeps the action moving, highlighting the story’s pivotal moments while losing nothing of consequence from the play’s script. Everyone in the cast is terrific, beginning with Paul Scofield’s Thomas More and continuing through Wendy Hiller’s Alice More, Robert Shaw’s Henry VIII (the young Renaissance hero, not the porcine lecher of later years), Orson Welles’s Cardinal Wolsey (embodiment of a Church crippled by its alliance with state power), Nigel Davenport’s rough-and-tumble Duke of Norfolk, Leo McKern’s cynically amoral Thomas Cromwell, and John Hurt’s Richard Rich, corrupted by intellectual arrogance and overweening ambition. Vanessa Redgrave’s lascivious, 80-second cameo as Anne Boleyn hints at the sorry end awaiting the woman for whom King Henry broke with the Church of Rome.
Ted Moore’s cinematography is both gorgeous and true to history; I once looked out the window in More’s cell in the Tower of London and was struck by how cannily Zinnemann and his cinematographer used that view of the Thames embankment to convey the changing seasons during Sir Thomas’ lengthy imprisonment. Georges Delerue’s score is well-matched to the flow of the film and gives it an authentic Renaissance flavor.
If there is anything awry in A Man for All Seasons, I didn’t notice it.
I’ve often taken exception to Bolt’s attempt, in the preface he wrote for the 1962 paperback edition of his play, to justify to his secularist peers his esteem for More, an ardent Catholic. In that apologia, the agnostic-bordering-on-atheist playwright positioned Thomas More as a proto-existentialist hero: one who died in defense of “an adamantine sense of his own self,” King Henry’s threat to which caused “this supple, humorous, unassuming, and sophisticated person [to] set like metal, [and be] overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigor”—a man “who could no more be budged than a cliff.”
Yet in his screenplay, Bolt could not escape some decidedly Catholic facts: that the More family prayed together; that More, as a theologically knowledgeable consultant, helped Henry VIII win the title “Defender of the Faith” for a book defending the seven sacraments against Martin Luther; and that More, at his trial, insisted that the papacy was a divinely mandated institution. Then, at the end, Bolt’s More confesses that he dies “the King’s good servant, but God’s first” — the God “who will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.”
In that preface, Robert Bolt admits an admiration for Albert Camus that I share in some respects. But it is impossible to imagine Camus’ last words mirroring More’s, had the French existentialist writer died in similar circumstances. In giving his 16th-century hero those lines on the scaffold, Bolt thus tacitly conceded that More thought he was dying for the truth of Christ and the Gospel, not because, as a good existentialist with an “adamantine sense of self,” he could do no other.
Thomas More was a highly effective, conscientious public official. That aspect of his life is muted in A Man for All Seasons, where we see More invested as Lord Chancellor of England but not acting in that high office. Nonetheless, More’s example is important to lift up today, when public office is too often an invitation to performance art (or performance sludge).
Which suggests that A Man for All Seasons, sixty years old in December, should be required viewing for those in public service in 2026.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
There are a few things in the film that are not true to life. Small potatoes. I have seen it enough times to have memorized it.
For me, it will always bring back the day in 1967 when three special teachers put 150 eighth graders on public transportation in San Francisco and took us to a theatre downtown to see it. I like to think that St. Thomas More was the chairman of the welcoming committee for each of those teachers when they got to heaven.
Again, as I commented yesterday about lay Catholics in public life, I prefer to see Catholics engaging in less political polemic. Rather than excoriating and demonizing one iteration of political persuasion over another, I’d prefer that Catholic laity perfect ourselves in the Faith and align ourselves more closely with the Christ who came to “serve and not be served.” When we are on the road of perfecting ourselves in Christ, then we Catholics ought to decidedly involve ourselves in politics, government, education, law, journalism, medicine and social action. But first we need to be thoroughly immersed in the Catholic faith above all else. Then we could stand with St. Thomas More and say that we are loyal servants of the City of Man but our first allegiance is to the City of God.
Having read the play and seen the film more times than I can count, I have to agree with this assessment — with one, probably extremely unimportant, exception. The “adamantine sense of self” comment Bolt made in his preface (I had the same edition until I wore it out) said more than Bolt intended, in my opinion. In a long, involved argument I won’t make here, a sense of self is essential if one is to become more fully human, that is, virtuous, which is the meaning and purpose of life, regardless of your faith, philosophy, or lack thereof. This, in Christian (i.e., Catholic) terms necessarily means conforming yourself to truth, which is God . . . and why Jesus, God Incarnate, is the perfect model for life.
That being said, in my opinion, it is actually “more Catholic” that Bolt did not emphasize religion in the play and the film, but integrated it as if it were an unquestioned part of life. I don’t know if Bolt intended to do that, but that’s the way it came across to me. It is actually a relief, more “true to life” and thus “more Catholic” not to beat the reader or viewer over the head with religion at every opportunity to demonstrate how Catholic the characters are (and thus the author is); it’s good storytelling technique to let the reader/viewer figure it out him- or herself. Some writers are so anxious to produce such holier-than-thou works that they forget to tell a story or make a point other than how Catholic they are — resulting in both fiction and non-fiction that (as Dr. Ralph McInerny said in connection with some fictional characters inflicted on the reading public) is so good, it’s bad.
In my own experience, I once made an argument for a “pro-life economic agenda” that did not rely on religious arguments and so could not be dismissed as “opinion” by non- or anti-Christians (especially the paradoxical anti-Christian Christians), and was harshly criticized for not presenting a religious argument. Whether Bolt’s avoiding explicit religious motivations was intentional (probably, as he himself alludes to it) and for whatever reason is, ultimately, irrelevant, for St. Thomas’s Christianity necessarily comes through as integral to the story as it was to reality.
It comes through clearly in the play that where Henry VIII manipulated religion to get what he wanted, as a means to an end, for More religion — God — was the end. As the character magnificently sums up at the climax of the play, pointing out Henry’s (and the court’s) hypocrisy in subverting an eternal religion to attain a fleeting political and personal desire (thereby violating the first “law” of social justice on a cosmic scale, that the common good must remain inviolate), “It is not for the Supremacy [of the Church] that you have sought my blood, but because I would not bend to the marriage!”
Yes. With Paul Scofield, [English acting the high bar including Lawrence Olivier in Hamlet], brilliant script by Robert Bolt, historical setting, and all that Weigel mentions in this article.
My nomination is the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field”. It received several Academy Award Nominations, including best actor (Sidney Poitier) and best picture.
Saw it for the first time over the summer, knew about it for a long time. I strained to find any imperfections. Paul Scofield comes across as a person (truly) saturated in grace (a gigantic rarity in film). The rest of the cast give a master class in acting, without exception. Puts you firmly almost physically in the space at that time, the greatest miracle of cinema. Film score by Georges Delerue, original and impeccable. In one word, incredible.
Yes, 1966, a great year for cinema. Four of my favorite quotes from Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”:
First, (to Cramner): “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it? No, I will not sign” (Obergefell v. Hodges?).
Second, (to Norfolk): “And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?” (synodal consensus?).
Third, and surely authentic: “I do nobody harm I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live…” (More’s Letter #15 to Meg, in Stephen Smith, “The Last Riddle,” Word on Fire, 2026, p. 168).
Fourth, also surely authentic: “His last words according to the Paris Newsletter [link below] were that he begged them earnestly to pray for the King that he might have good counsel, protesting that he himself ‘died the King’s good servant, but God’s first’.” (in E.E. Reynolds, “St. Thomas More,” Image 1962; citing: Harpsfield, “The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More…”, ed. E. V. Hitchcock and R.W. Chambers, [E.E.T.S. 1932]).
The Paris Newsletter of August 4, 1535: https://thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Paris-Newsletter-Account-of-More.pdf
Andrei Rublev by Andre Tarkovsky in that signal year (66). Astonishingly great.