I have a life-long love affair with books, music, and film. For the life of me, I cannot throw away a book... no matter how insipid, or useless, or decrepit. I have paperbacks, from a time when they cost only 50 cents, that are yellowed and fragile like an ancient text. I cannot break off the intimate, secret relationships, all the things we've been through together. With music... a similar nostalgia, perhaps, with the 33LP vinyls. For CD's, no. They're too disposable, can't see the face, the grooves. With film... only the celluloid, the frame-by-frame pictures that look at me when I hold the strip up to the light. I can remember the thrill of my first projector and my first movie... it was The Bride Of Frankenstein, and it was all mine. I rolled it over and over again in a little bedroom on the wall. Imagine, owning a film when very few people did! For videotape, no. Can't see a thing. The tiny magnetic bars play in their own dimension, and exclude any touch and feel. For DVD's, no. They're also too disposable and there's nothing to see or smell.

The reason I collect these works of art and non-art is because they are part of my time continuum. They exist with me in the present, spread out in all space/time directions, and they are my friends. So I visit with my friends, excuse me, from time to time. I revisit the conversations and the images and the sounds that have placed me into the views of myself and the galaxy I float in.  

So it was that I recently revisited one of the best films ever made : TheLion In Winter.  This is a great film, adapted by James Goldman from his own wonderful play. On Broadway in 1966, the play starred Robert Preston as Henry, Rosemary Harris as Eleanor, and as Philip, young Christopher Walken in his first major stage role. In 1968, the honored film version starred Peter O'Toole as Henry (seemingly a reprise of his performance in 1964 in Becket), Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor, a young Timothy Dalton as Philip (his first major screen role), and as Richard, young Anthony Hopkins in his first major screen role. It was a magical cast with other fine actors, most of whom were unable to do anything comparable before or since. It was directed by Anthony Harvey, who also never got close to this work before or since as a director, though he was a brilliant editor. And John Barry, who did indeed match and rise beyond his work in Lion, composed the score.

This film is masterfully directed, beautifully photographed and cut... but it is the acting that accounts for the center flame of the magic. It is not an action or special effects film, it is a film of relationships... about strong-willed, self-defined people who understand the nature of their species and their roles in it. It is a film of words, perceptive, thought-sharpened, wit-honed words. In this work, Goldman is a master. At the acting helm is O'Toole, one of the great film actors of our time and an equally great stage actor (I haven't seen him on stage in 20 years, but the accounts of his theatre work and his films uphold his reputation.) And Hepburn... also one of the great film actors of our time and also an equally great stage actor (I had the privilege of spending one summer with her as an apprentice at the American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut. She was and is enduring.)  These two master talents elevated the acting performances of everyone else into a state-of-the-art of acting display in a medium that tends to dismiss the vitality of the actor.

It is the words! And in the present here-today-gone-tomorrow world of disposable film and the here-today-right-back-tomorrow world of disposable television (shoving aside the ``fuck-you" grunt writing of Tarantino and Mamet), even a well-crafted (despite its Speilbergian playroom view of humanity) film like A Beautiful Mind suffers in comparison. It too is a film of words, an acting film. Ron Howard and especially Russell Crowe cannot overcome the missing ingredient... the words fail them.

The Lion In Winter is a masterpiece and it tells us this: if acting is the stuff of theatre then the playwright is the giver of the key ingredient. If directing is the stuff of film, then the screenwriter is the mind's eye behind the eye of the camera.

Thank you and good night.  

©2003 Arthur Meiselman

For more commentary and articles by Arthur Meiselman, check the Archives.

Arthur Meiselman is a writer,
telomeres hunter, and zingaro.
He's also the director of the Talos Ensemble

© 2003 Aviar-DKA Ltd. All rights reserved (including authors' and individual copyrights as indicated). No
part of this material may be reproduced, translated, transmitted, framed or stored in a retrieval system for
public or private use without the written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder.
For permissions, contact publishers@scene4.com

.

All articles are archived on this site.
To access the Archives