Man for All Seasons, A: Columbia Classics – Volume 5 (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Nov 25, 2024
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Fred ZinnemannRelease Date(s)
1966 (October 22, 2024)Studio(s)
Highland Films/Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: A+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
[Editor’s Note: Though we’re reviewing the films in the set one by one, A Man for All Seasons is currently only available on physical 4K disc in Sony’s Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5 box set. It’s available on Amazon by clicking here, or on any of the artwork pictured in this review.]
In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark is feeling tormented by the actions of others, with events beyond his control buffeting him from all sides. So, he devises a play of his own as a trap for his deceptive uncle Claudius, declaring that “the play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Three centuries later, Robert Bolt inverted that formula in his play A Man for All Seasons. The king in this case was Henry VIII, a man who lived a life completely untrammeled by the dictates of conscience. Instead, Bolt’s play was the thing that captured the conscience of one of the king’s subjects, Sir Thomas More. More held true to his own conscience against the capricious wishes of the king, and it ultimately cost him his head.
Bolt based his play on the final years of More’s life, when the philosopher and statesman found himself in conflict with Henry VIII over the king’s rejection of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry VIII wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, and since the Pope opposed the annulment, the king declared himself the Supreme Governor of the Church and required his subjects to take an Oath of Supremacy in acknowledgment of that fact. More refused, but knowing that his feelings on the subject would be considered treasonous, he relied on his own silence and the dictates of the law in order to avoid the ultimate punishment. Yet there were other forces conspiring against him, led by the unprincipled Thomas Cromwell and Richard Rich. More was convicted partly on the basis of their false testimony and executed on July 6, 1535. Exactly four centuries later, he was canonized as a Saint by Pope Pius XI.
Bolt’s play was successful in its initial London run at the Globe Theatre in London, with Paul Scofield assaying the role of More. It was an even bigger success on Broadway the following year, with Scofield once again playing More. The abstract nature of the play wasn’t necessarily something that would translate well to the screen, so when Columbia Pictures executive Mike Frankovich acquired the rights to the play, he brought the project to a director who was perfectly simpatico with Bolt: Fred Zinnemann. Zinnemann had already directed films like High Noon that dealt with individuals who held true to their own consciences, and he was no stranger to adapting challenging stage dramas and literary works like A Hatful of Rain and From Here to Eternity. Zinnemann naturally retained Scofield in order to immortalize More one more time, joined by Wendy Hiller as his wife Alice; Susannah York as his daughter Margaret; Corin Redgrave as her suitor William Roper; Robert Shaw as Henry VIII; Leo McKern as the devious Cromwell; John Hurt as the odious Richard Rich; Nigel Davenport as the hapless Duke of Norfolk; Orson Welles as Cardinal Wolsey; and Vanessa Redgrave in a brief cameo as Anne Boleyn.
Just as importantly, Zinnemann retained Robert Bolt to write the script. Bolt was no stranger to adapting literary material for the screen; he had recently scored an Oscar nomination for Lawrence of Arabia and he won the award for Dr. Zhivago shortly before he sat down to work on A Man for All Seasons. Bolt was ruthless in adapting his own material, jettisoning the stage devices that wouldn’t have worked well in a cinematic version. The settings of the play were all abstracted, and he had used the character of the Common Man as a sort of a Greek chorus in order to provide commentary directly to the audience. While Zinnemann liked the idea of the Common Man character, Bolt excised it completely from his adaptation. He also took advantage of the naturalistic nature of the motion picture camera and eliminated the abstraction in favor of realism, with More’s journeys back and forth along the River Thames serving as a more direct metaphor for the ways in which the characters are dragged along by the tides of fate.
Crucially, however, Bolt retained all of the incisive dialogue that had made the play so successful. The Sir Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons isn’t so much a historical character as he is a mouthpiece for the universal truths that Bolt wanted to express. The real More was far more nuanced than he’s presented here, both victim and victimizer. He was a man who may have been treated unjustly, but his own persecution of those who he deemed as heretics was no less unjust. That’s an uncomfortable realty that would have distracted from the points that Bolt wanted to make, so this version of More is far more saintly (both literally and figuratively). Yet Bolt ended up weaving fact and fiction together so skillfully in A Man for All Seasons that it became a truth of its own. When More says that “I have no window to look into another man’s conscience. I condemn no one,” and that “I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm,” that’s not necessarily true of the historical More, but it’s absolutely true of this iconic version of him. Bolt did include a moment where More denounces Martin Luther as a heretic in a conversation with his future son-in-law William Roper, but that condemnation is of a purely verbal sort, not the literal kind that the real More practiced.
Bolt was fascinated More’s devotion to following the dictates of his own conscience while maintaining his belief in the rule of law. More believed not just in the supremacy of the Roman Catholic church, but also in the supremacy of the law, and that it would keep him safe regardless of how hard that he was swimming against the tides. He felt that the law was for all men or else it was for no man, and when Roper suggests that devils like Richard Rich shouldn’t get the benefit of law, More responds angrily:
“What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
“Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Yet the law ultimately isn’t enough to keep More safe, because when his conscience comes into conflict with it, that which should have protected him is used against him instead. In the end, the issue wasn’t really with Henry’s marriage, divorce, or even his break with the Vatican, but rather that the king was asking More to act against the dictates of his own conscience. More openly admits that it doesn’t really matter whether he’s right or wrong, but rather that he believes that he’s right. He has to act in accordance with those beliefs, and asking him to violate them is the real unpardonable sin. More’s devotion to that principle is a source of frustration for the Duke of Norfolk:
“Oh confound all this. I’m not a scholar, I don’t know whether the marriage was lawful or not but dammit, Thomas, look at these names! Why can’t you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!”
“And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”
That’s perhaps the single most important universal truth that Bolt expressed with A Man for All Seasons. When social, political, or cultural currents are running out of control, it’s far too easy to get swept along with them, for fellowship. It’s only the rocks like Sir Thomas More who are able to stand firm against those tides, whatever the personal cost may be. More’s warning against being swept away is as true now as it ever was:
“I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
Cinematographer Ted Moore shot A Man for All Seasons on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at 1.66:1 for its theatrical release. As Grover Crisp explains in his detailed restoration notes, the film was restored photochemically back in the Nineties under the supervision of Robert Gitt. Since some sections of the negative were damaged and faded, the black-and-white separation masters were used to create new dupe negatives to replace that material. Yet by the time that a 4K scan was performed in 2015, digital tools had advanced sufficiently that the entire negative was able to be scanned with the damage corrected in the digital domain instead. Scanning was handled by Cineric in New York, with MTI Film and Sony Colorworks handling digital restoration and color grading in Hollywood. This version is a further refinement of their work, with additional cleanup and High Dynamic Range grading performed by Motion Picture Imaging in Burbank (both Dolby Vision and HDR10 are included on the disc).
The results are as impeccable as everything else to do with A Man for All Seasons. The textures are all perfectly resolved, from the fine details in the costuming to every last imperfection on the actor’s faces. While the moderate film grain does tend to obscure the minutest of details, that’s as it should be, and there aren’t any traces of compression artifacts to mar the reproduction of the grain itself. The colors do justice to how A Man for All Seasons would have looked via dye-transfer Technicolor prints back in 1966, with the costuming looking particularly dazzling—the gold robes worn by King Henry as he visits More’s estate positively glisten in this rendition. Yet aside from highlights like that, it’s not so much that the colors are brighter this time around, but rather that the maximum amount of color detail has been extracted from the data contained on the negative. From Cardinal Woolsey’s red robes to his red-rimmed eyes, every last variation in the shadings has been lovingly reproduced. The overall contrast range is superb, while the blacks are deep and dense, which is also how they should be (Ted Moore wasn’t afraid to let shadows be shadows). This 4K version of A Man for All Seasons is simple perfection.
Primary audio is offered in English Dolby Atmos, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, and 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. A Man for All Seasons was originally recorded, mixed, and released in mono, and this 2.0 track is the original theatrical mix. Chace Audio created the older 5.1 remix based on the original 3-track audio masters, while this new Atmos track is the work of Deluxe Audio. Digital tools have continued to improve, and they were able to take the mono stems and rework them into a credible multichannel mix that still retains all the character of the original mono. Some light directionality has been added to the sound effects, but nothing that’s too obtrusive. For the most part, it’s a matter of opening things up and providing a bit more spaciousness. That’s especially true of the Georges Delerue score, which gets a simulated stereo spread and some reverberations in the surrounds. Most importantly, of course, every last word of Robert Bolt’s choice dialogue is crystal-clear.
(As a side note, Variety reported back in 1966 that there was a technical flaw in the first reel of the film, with ambient noise levels varying depending on who was speaking. That’s never been an issue with any of the home video versions, though, and this one is no exception.)
Additional audio options include French, German, Italian, and Spanish 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. Subtitle options include English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
Sony’s 4K release of A Man for All Seasons is the third film in their Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5. The set also includes All the King’s Men, On the Waterfront, Tootsie, The Age of Innocence, and Little Women, plus a bonus UHD with the following silent films: The Price She Paid, Ladies of Leisure, The Belle of Broadway, The Desert Bride, and The Scarlet Lady. The packaging is similar to the other four volumes, with two wings that open up, each of which houses three films in individual Amaray cases with slipcovers. (The inserts use the original theatrical poster artwork, while the slipcovers offer new artwork.) At the back of the box is a separate compartment that houses a hardbound book featuring essays on each film by different authors (Peter Tonguette, in this case) as well as individual restoration notes by Grover Crisp, plus notes on the audio remixes where appropriate.
Each of the films in the collection includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film, all of them based on the same 4K masters as the UHDs. There’s also a paper insert tucked inside with Digital codes for each film. There are no extras on the UHD with the feature film, but the following extras are included on the Blu-ray only:
- Audio Commentary with Julie Kirgo, Lem Dobbs, and Nick Redman
- Moral Clarity with Bishop Robert Barron (HD – 14:35)
- The Life of Saint Thomas More (SD – 18:17)
- Theatrical Trailer (SD – 3:19)
The commentary with the Holy Trinity of Julie Kirgo, Lem Dobbs, and the late lamented Nick Redman was originally recorded for the 2015 Blu-ray release of A Man for All Seasons by their Twilight Time label. Interestingly enough, Sony omitted it from their own 2019 Blu-ray, but that oversight has been corrected here. They talk about the overlap between the careers of Fred Zinneman and Robert Bolt, and they dive into details about the various cast members (among other things, they note that John Hurt ended up somewhat typecast playing characters who projected an innate weakness). Zinnemann felt that it was like an independent production despite that fact that it was backed by Columbia Pictures, so he was able to cast relative unknowns (at the time, anyway) in many of the parts. Yet he was careful to add ringers like Orson Welles in order to help the marquee value. Kirgo, Dobbs and Redman also cover the differences between the film and the play, describing it as a textbook example of how to open up a play for the screen. The repeated motif of the river helps to visualize the way that the morality of most of the characters is swept along by the current of the times—More excepted, of course. Yet they acknowledge the reality that the real More was also a bit more morally complex than he’s portrayed in the film.
The rest of the extras consist of a new featurette and an archival one. Moral Clarity is a new appreciation of A Man for All Seasons by Bishop Robert Barron from the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota. He describes what the film has meant to him since ever since he saw it for the first time, and also explores the way that Fred Zinnemann was drawn to individuals who were under great moral pressure. The Life of Saint Thomas More was originally included with the 2007 DVD release of A Man for All Seasons. It examines the truth behind the fiction, featuring interviews with a variety of experts: Allison Weir, author of Henry VIII: The King and His Court and The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Dr. John Guy, author of Tudor England and Thomas More; and Dr. Gerard B. Wegemer, founding director or The Center for Thomas More Studies. They largely focus on the historical reality surrounding the events portrayed in the film, although they do offer a cursory look at some of More’s writings.
That’s all the extras from the previous Twilight Time and Sony Blu-rays, minus the isolated score track that was a staple on Twilight Time discs, but with the addition of one new extra. More importantly, A Man for All Seasons has never looked or sounded better than it does here in 4K. For now, it’s only available as a part of Sony’s Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5, which may be a bone of contention for some people who are interested in some but not all of the titles that it includes. Everyone’s mileage will vary on that score, but Volume 5 offers a potent collection of classic films that’s hard to resist even if one or more of them may not be to your tastes. The first three alone are worth the price of admission for the whole set. As a result, it’s highly, highly recommended.
- Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, and Letterboxd).