Cinema: Arrogance in Athens

It was something of a stunt when British TV Director Philip Saville went to Denmark’s Elsinore Castle to make a television Hamlet, starring Christopher Plummer. Going to Greece to film Oedipus the King in an ancient amphitheater is also a gimmick, but it has paid off better. The stones of the theater at Dodona and the sere Greek hills behind them grandly evoke the atmosphere in which Sophocles himself saw his great tragedy performed. The local peasant faces among the extras give an authenticity to the hoi polloi that makeup men could never have managed.

The one problem is that Saville took Christopher Plummer along on the trip. Plummer is simply not up to Oedipus. For one thing, he has a bad habit of punctuating his lines with portentous pauses that have no connection with either sense or cadence. A more serious failure is his foothills approach to the part—he neither climbs high enough at the beginning nor falls low enough at the end. Plummer as King of Thebes is arrogant rather than hubristic; his fate seems more like a matter of just deserts than a result of the awesome machinations of Apollo.

For the rest, Saville has done well enough by Sophocles. The English version by Poet-Translator Paul Roche is both dignified enough for the classic matter and nimble enough for the modern manner, in which the actors and chorus are deployed all over the amphitheater, not just in front of the royal palace. Orson Welles is appropriately resonant as the blind Tiresias—though he appears so massive that it is hard to imagine his having been turned into a woman, as the legend has it. Lilli Palmer’s Jocasta manages to be at once regal, sexy and maternal in this famous Freudian archetype of mother love gone too far.