To Serve God Wittily

A Man for All Seasons. "Sir Thomas More is a man of angel's wit and singular learning, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometimes of as sad gravity: a man for all seasons."

The opinion of the 16th century, as expressed by Robert Whytynton, has become the judgment of history: both in public achievement and private character, Sir Thomas was the greatest Englishman of his age. As a humanist and classical scholar, he ranked with Pico and Erasmus. As an author (Utopia), he became the first great social philosopher of the modern era. As a jurist, he was the brightest legal light of the realm. As a politician, he rose to the highest office in the King's gift: Lord Chancellor. As a Christian, he stood fast to his principles in the greatest scandal of the century, choosing to save his soul though he lost his head, and for his martyrdom he is recorded in the calendar of saints.

In 1960 Britain's Robert Bolt re-examined the matter of More in a superb chronicle play. Now Playwright Bolt and Director Fred Zinnemann have transformed the drama into one of the most intelligent religious movies ever made. The film retells the tragedy of a practical man who, when forced to choose between the world at his feet and the God above his head, tried terribly hard to stay right where he was, but was forced by the strength of his spirit to become a martyr malgre lui.

Bolt's scenario preserves the prinking wit and rolling eloquence of the play, but the plot has been smoothed and straightened in its passage through the projector. What comes out is a swift and vivid story. Henry VIII (Robert Shaw), having decided to put away a Queen "as barren as a brick," names Sir Thomas (Paul Scofield) as Lord

Chancellor in the childlike expectation that such a nimble brain will easily leap the theological barriers to his divorce.

Sir Thomas tries with all his mental might to find some way he can promote the King's project without breaking God's law, but at last he declares he can do nothing. The famous crisis rapidly develops. Henry angrily renounces the authority of Rome, causes Parliament to pass a law constraining all his subjects under pain of death to swear fealty to the King as head of the church as well as the state. Sir Thomas, unable in all conscience to take the oath, nevertheless decides he is "not the stuff of which martyrs are made." Being the greatest wit of the age, he decides "to serve God wittily, in the tangle of the mind." Being the sharpest lawyer in the kingdom, he darts through a loophole in Henry's law. "I will not take the oath," he announces gravely to Thomas Cromwell (Leo Mc-Kern), the leader of the King's pack of political jackals. "I will not tell you why I will not." Cromwell: "This silence is denial!" More: "The maxim of the law is, 'Silence gives consent.' " Cromwell: "Is that what the world construes?" More: "The world must construe according to its wits. The court must construe according to the law."

Pettifogging is countered by perjury. In return for the attorney-generalship of Wales, a fair-weather friend (John Hurt) trumps up evidence that More is a traitor. "Why, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world," the doomed man murmurs with incredulous irony. "But for Wales!"

Seldom in these days of coast-to-coast screens and retina-wrecking color is a play so tastefully transformed into a film. Scene after scene is played in sober old Tudor houses glozed by candlelight, or by the warm green verges of the New Forest. The costumes are rich, not gaudy, and the actors are borne lightly on the lucid stream of language that flows throughout the film. Even more mesmerically than he did in the play, Paul Scofield pulls all eyes toward himself by the abundance and subtlety of what seems to be happening inside him. Seen close up, he gives off a vibration of greatness very like what More's must have been. His eyes impart the solar glare of genius, and the rest of his face breathes a slow, heavy sweetness of feeling. It is not the face of a saint but of a sage, of a man who could say of the values he died for: "Finally it is not a matter of reason; finally it is a matter of love."

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