Cinema: Duel in a Tapestry

Becket is a cerebral film spectacle based on the play by Jean Anouilh, in which English history wars with an impudent Gallic wit. Director Peter Glenville has flung the drama onto the screen like a vast Bayeux tapestry, held fast with the lancet-sharp performances of Peter O'Toole as Henry II, England's first Plantagenet ruler, and of Richard Burton as the 12th century martyr Thomas Becket. Henry loved Becket, raised him to eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, then lost his onetime friend in a struggle between church and state that ended with Becket's murder on Dec. 29, 1170.

The time is a hundred years after the Norman Conquest, and Anouilh roots his conflict in the blood enmity between Henry, great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and his Saxon subject. Henry sneers at Becket as a "collaborator," but in fact the king is sycophant to the courtier, whose quiet contempt holds his master eternally in thrall.

Together O'Toole and Burton galvanize the early scenes, making their acting duo an acting duel as they race through court and countryside flushing wild boars and wenches. Henry appropriates a peasant's daughter he finds trembling in a hut. "Shall we take her with us, or shall we have her sent?" he quips, in an anachronism that leaps centuries, but does not vitiate the pungent give-and-take of character.

O'Toole dominates the film, for his part is better written, and he plays it with a lacerating brilliance that rivals his own Lawrence of Arabia. Lusty, spindle-shanked, spiteful, neurasthenic, bored with responsibility, despising his wife and children, he gives the whore-mongering Henry dimension both as man and monarch. The film also advances a further suggestion about Henry: before he frees himself from his love of Becket,

Queen Mother Martita Hunt is moved to say: "You have an obsession about him which is unhealthy and unnatural."

Burton-Becket hardly senses this obsession; his concern is his own soul, "Where honor should be, in me there is only a void," he tells his mistress (Sian Phillips). Then the easy-living courtier becomes archbishop, and fate summons him to uphold "the honor of God." But does he die to defend canon law, made great by the great office thrust upon him, or is he merely a self-appointed martyr in search of his Cain? Given a mass of ambiguities to project, Burton projects them remarkably well. He daringly meets the competition offered by O'Toole with a sober, almost stubbornly restrained performance—and if the script defeats him, his commanding presence and magnificent voice carry him a long way. The scene of his assassination at Canterbury Cathedral brings the film to a bloody, bristling climax.

As chronicle, Becket distorts history, Saxonizes the Norman Becket, and even turns Henry's formidable mate, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Pamela Brown), into a dull castle frump. As tragedy, it has more dry intelligence than real depth. As production, it stunningly displays its homework in the solid sweep of Norman arches, the mist-and-heath-er greens of old England. But in the end it holds interest chiefly as a pageant so prodigally endowed with talent that it can, for example, afford to squander Sir John Gielgud in a minor role as Louis VII of France.