Religion: Becket on the Screen

The title of the movie for a Venice Film Festival world premiere last week was Murder in the Cathedral, and a lot of people who bought tickets expected a detective story. When it turned out to be 2½ hours of Poet T. S. Eliot's darkling verse—and on a religious theme at that—a good many disgruntled souls went off to a nearby gambling casino. Those who stayed saw one of the most unusual films that moviemakers have attempted in a long time. Its story: the murder of Thomas à Becket, 12th Century Archbishop of Canterbury, for refusing to compromise his church to the temporal power of Henry II.

Producer George Hoellering calls it "a film made largely through faith." A Viennese Roman Catholic, he first read Anglican Eliot's 1935 verse play in a British internment camp in 1940. On his release he went to Eliot and got the poet's skeptical permission to film it. It proved to be a ten-year job to bring the drama of Thomas à Becket's pride and inner conflict to the screen.

Hoellering needed a revised first act to make the play's historical setting clear to movie audiences. Eliot agreed to write the verse for it, even though it meant reaching back to his poetic style of the '30s.

Producer Hoellering set to work finding actors, studio, costumes and technicians. The Bishop of London let him use one of the city's bombed-out churches as a studio. Casting was more difficult. Dissatisfied with professional actors for the role of Thomas à Becket, Hoellering attended hundreds of church services, Catholic and Anglican, searching for "a man who looked the part, inside as well as out." In London's down-at-heel East End, he found him: the Rev. St. John B. Groser, Anglican Dean of Stepney. Father Groser was horrified at first at the idea of turning actor, but he soon grew enthusiastic enough to spend seven months growing a 12th-Century-style head of hair.

London will get to see the film next month, the U.S. whenever Hoellering completes distribution plans. Moviegoers should have a special interest in the lines of the invisible and diabolical Fourth Tempter, who urges Thomas à Becket to court martyrdom and the eventual reward of sainthood. The Fourth Tempter: T. S. Eliot himself.