Popular reviews

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  Review by MovingPictures ★★★

  Murder in the Cathedral (1951) UK, b/w, 110m.
  Directed by George Hoellering.
  T.S. Eliot made the screenplay after his own play.
  The original release ran at 140 minutes.

  Watched the R2 (2015) Dual Format edition by BFI.

  Made as a play, showing the relationship between British king Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, until the murder of Becket in 1170. Interesting while static and not entirely enjoyable.
  An integral part in British and world history, nevertheless.

  Happy to have watched it.

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  Review by PUNQ ★★

  A direct to screen adaptation of T.S. Eliot stage play about the murder Archbishop Thomas Becket. Or more the slow burn leading up to the killing. Stiff, heavy-handed and stagnant presentation, representable of what a stage adaptation would look like, with only minor adjustments done for the camera. It's a deliberate artistic choice, and I'm not sure if I'm any richer because of it.

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  Review by strunkovice ★★

  Nice to hear Elliot as a tempter and a good performance by Father John Groser as Becket. Otherwise a depressing experience. Làszló Lajtha wasn't that much of a composer and the lazy use of his music, randomly cutting across the action with no respect of tension or context is a text book illustration of how not to do it. The camera work is wooden even given that this is from the stage production. The posh voices even for 1951 would have been out of place. So two for its historical interest

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  Review by brotherdeacon ★★

  Unless you're of a type that may stay up all night thrilled by the dialectics of John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, you may, like me, find this historical re-hash awfully dull: be it camera work, music, costumes, editing, or acting. Though Murder in the Cathedral is a famous piece of England's modern theater, with the exception of its literary merit, I have no idea precisely why. The moralizing, religious affiliation and Classical formaIism seem antiquated to a fault when compared to most other plays in the modernist canon. Eliot here seems to be trading his lines with Elizabethans and Jacobeans. I can guess that Brecht or Beckett didn't find much solidarity with this cinematic or theatrical effort.

  Idiosyncratically,…

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  Review by victoryfish ★

  Murder in the Cathedral feels like a movie made by a film student who saw The Seventh Seal (1957) once and said “I can do that.”

  I didn’t think that T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral would lend itself easily to film, and unfortunately I was right. Eliot’s screenplay is static and slow-moving; the whole film just feels so heavy and one-note. The first thirty minutes are scenes added for the film and they’re unnecessary and uninspired. I read Murder in the Cathedral as a high schooler and loved it, but it was a struggle to make it all the way through this film now, as a grad student.

  The background music (especially during the encounters with the Four Tempters)…

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  Review by Kevin Bertolero ★★

  It looks pretty! That’s about it.