Doctor Faustus

NEW MOVIES Doctor Faustus Lots of grads bring their wives back to the old school and ham it up for home movies -- but this is ridiculous.

Richard Burton is charging admission.

The Burton version of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was cooked up in 1966 with the help of his old drama coach at the Oxford University Dramatic Society, plus 48 undergraduate actors, plus Wife Elizabeth. Every body involved got a kick out of doing it, but Marlowe got the boot. Burton and Professor Nevill Coghill cropped lines, gouged passages, transplanted speeches and transposed sequences with complete indifference to the original.

They even smuggled in lines from different plays, such as the famous "passing brave to be a king" speech from Tamburlaine, for no discernible reason other than to provide new sonorities for the Burton baritone.

Visually, the Burton Faustus is a darkling carnival of skeletons, candles, caves and necromancy, tricked out with such cinematic hocus-pocus as action shots montaged into a skull's eye sock et and heartbeats lub-dubbed onto the sound track. There is even a bit of bor rowing here too: a film clip of the magnificent charge of the French knights at Agincourt from Olivier's Henry V inexplicably turns up, and it is easily the best thing in the movie.

The worst is Elizabeth Taylor, who has a series of walk-ons mostly meant to exemplify lust. Her makeup varies from Greek statuesque to a head-to-toe spray job of aluminum paint. When she welcomes Burton to an eternity of damnation, her eyeballs and teeth are dripping pink in what seems to be a hellish combination of conjunctivitis and trench mouth. Mercifully mute throughout, she merely moves in and out of camera range, breasting the waves of candle smoke, dry-ice vapor and vulgarity that swirl through the sets.

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