Gail, there's a video of "Cats" that was shown on the Vegas PBS station a few years ago. "Murder In The Cathedral" was made into a film in 1952 (if you have seen the Eliot episode of <u>Voices & Visions</u>, they showed a couple of scenes from it, lasting about a minute or two). There is a web site,
www.imdb.com , that lists it with some data, like: date, Director (Hoellering), writing (TSE & Hoellering), the cast (John Groser as Becket, etc including TSE as 4th tempter and Leo McKern [who died a few years ago, and was famous as <u>Rumpole of the Bailey</u>; he also was a monk in <u>Ladyhawk</u>, one of the No. 2's in <u>The Prisoner</u>, and Herod the Great in <u>The Nativity</u>] as 3rd knight), and a runtime of 140 mins. I've always wanted a copy of the film version of <u>Murder In The Cathedral</u> (either tape or disk), but it has never been available.
It had a book from it with pictures, the screenplay (it was slightly different the play, adding a Henry II character), and a preface written by Eliot.
THE FILM OF MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
by TS Eliot and George Hoellering (Faber & Faber, 1952)
"....The... most obvious difference [between stage & film]... was that the cinema... is much more realistic than the stage. ...In watching a stage performance, the member of the audience is in direct contact with the actor, is always conscious that he is looking at a stage and listening to an actor play a part. In looking at a film, we are much more passive; as audience, we contribute less. We are seized with the illusion that we are observing the actual event, or at least a series of photographs of the actual event; and nothing must be allowed to break this illusion. ...
"....The speeches of the Four Knights [in "Murder in the Cathedral"], which in the play are addressed directly to the audience, had to be completely revised. ...This also is a consequence of the realism of film: the Stilbruch -as such an abrupt change is aptly called in German- would be intolerable. ...For one thing, the camera must never stand still. An audience can give their attention to four men actually speaking to them; but to look at the picture of the same four men for that length of time would be an intolerable strain. ...
"In looking at a film we are always under the direction of the eye. It is part of the problem of the producer, to decide to what point on the screen, at every moment, the eyes of the audience are to be directed. You are, in fact, looking at the picture, though you do not realise it, through the eyes of the producer. What you see is what he makes the camera see. The fact that the audience's vision is directed by the producer of the film has special consequences for a verse play. It is important, first, that what you see should never distract your attention from what you hear. ...Several visual effects, magnificent in themselves, were sacrificed because ...the audience in watching them would cease to attend to the words. Second, the fact that the illustration of the words by the scene is, so much more positively than on the stage, an interpretation of the meaning of the words, points to the conclusion that only a producer who understands poetry, and has taken a good deal of trouble to grasp the value of every line, is competent to deal with such a play at all. ..."
TS Eliot, 1952
[This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited April 10, 2006).]