Dr Faustus Movies

[Ashely Wolfgram]

StunningOne of the greatest films I have ever seen. People complain about the acting????? Are they bats???? You said the word: operatic!!!! If this movie was made in sound, the acting would be the SAME exact way!

This is in my top 10 favorite movies list at various positions depending on my mood when I draw up the list. Though I must confess that Murnau usually holds two or three of the movies in my favorites list.

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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was released in 2009 and directed by Terry Gilliam. I think its two main claims to faim are the fact that it was the last movie Heath Leger was ever in, and I think it is one of the most imaginative movies ever made. Suck it James Cameron.

I would like to mention that this movie came across a very tough challenge. During filming Heath Leger died. There have been precedent for such a situation. Plan 9 From Outer Space (yes, the movie considered by some to be the worst ever made) cast Bella Lugosi to play a vampire, and he died three days in. What they did was cast someone new and simply told the actor to hold his cape in front of his face the entire movie. Which I would like to believe started that image of a vampire.

The personal attacks on Elizabeth Taylor found in the criticisms of Doctor Faustus have continued to haunt the film, even though the 2004 DVD release of the movie seemed to generate mostly positive reviews.

In the following clip I came across on Youtube you can witness Elizabeth Taylor take on a group of journalists as they question Richard Burton about his career choices in relation to Doctor Faustus. Taylor had grown-up in the public eye and she had clearly grown weary of thoughtless critics. Burton on the other hand is rather new to this kind of extreme critical attention and he remains calm and collected in the clip. He also seems to get a mild kick out of seeing his wife lash back at the reporters.

If you enjoy classic Elizabethan drama or classic gothic horror from the sixties, I recommend giving the 1967 film version of Doctor Faustus a look. The film should also hold a lot of interest for fans of Cleopatra and The Taming of the Shrew since both films could be considered siblings to Doctor Faustus due to the fact that so many crew members worked with Taylor and Burton on all three productions.

That interview is classic! If looks could kill, Taylor would have wiped out all those reporters in a minute. It seems strange now to think that film acting was thought of as such a lowly craft back then and unworthy of serious critical consideration. In many ways Burton and Taylor helped bridge the gap between the stage and film with many of their own movies.

I am doing a heritage project about a hospital in Oxford and uncovered the fact that the Royal World Premiere of Dr Faustus was held in Oxford with the proceeds going to the hospital. I have even managed to unearth a copy of original program.

If celebrities as big as Burton and Taylor made a movie filled with this much occult energy in 2023, I have no idea how insane people would go. The cameras get gelled all over the corners, things get neon, skeletons appear and the idea that this is the sixth of thirteen movies that Liz and Dick would make together takes on numerological significance.

Silent movies are currently the rage of Tinseltown, so what better moment to brush up on one of the treasures of the pre-talkie era? Top movie-ologists now contend that FW Murnau's 1926 film of Faust is a neglected all-time great ("one of the most beautifully crafted films ever made," according to Theodore Huff in Sight & Sound). It's an opinion shared by Greek composer Aphrodite Raickopoulou, whose painstakingly wrought new score for the film was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall last night.

Performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra under conductor Benjamin Wallfisch, and featuring piano soloist Gabriela Montero, Raickopoulou's sweepingly symphonic writing amplified the dramatic turbulence of Murnau's movie with a passion that would surely have impressed the director himself. An audience bristling with Greek royalty and socialites responded with appropriate ecstasy (Murnau at work, pictured below).

But first, there was an introduction by a dinner-suited Hugh Grant, who is not (he explained) an expert on German expressionist film-making, but is however a friend and fan of the composer. Grant's droll chat roved freely over Murnau's career in Germany and subsequently Hollywood, and Raickopoulou's interest in his work. Richard Curtis could hardly have scripted it better, with its self-effacing asides about his imperfect acting skills and a Faust-evoking joke about David Cameron's pact with Andy Coulson. A shame, perhaps, that he kept calling Murnau "Gurnau", though even that was an improvement on his real name, Plumpe. Nor did Grant forget to hail the excellence of the orchestra, "with the exception of Jill on cor anglais, who's a bit dodgy."

As the room darkened and the film commenced with a trio of apocalyptic horsemen galloping through a stormy sky, it was immediately clear that this would be not so much a movie, more of a pre-psychedelic trip. Mid-1920s special effects were "digital" only insofar as everything had to be painstakingly devised and constructed by hand, but even so it wasn't hard to see how Faust was considered a benchmark in lighting, camerawork, effects and design. The scene where Faust and Mephisto fly across a landscape of mountains, villages and countryside (achieved by putting the camera on a kind of rollercoaster) was somehow far more affecting than a similar feat performed using a bank of super-computers would have been, while the sequence where a towering devil envelops the little town below in his enormous black wings and sends black plague-clouds billowing over the streets and houses was stupefying (pictured below).

Raickopoulou's music mirrored the film's fantastical qualities with intensely-coloured string passages and some Wagner-esque brass, and wasn't afraid of a dollop of treacle for moments such as Faust's first romantic encounter with his beloved Gretchen or children dancing on the village green. Funereal piano and sombre violins greeted Faust's ill-judged decision to sign on Mephisto's dotted line.

The acting wasn't quite as we know it today, even from Hugh Grant. Emil Jannings's gurning, pantomimic Mephisto often brought farce where soul-piercing dread was required, while Gsta Ekman's Faust was too much like a young and fey Gene Wilder for comfort. Nonetheless, this was still film-making of boundary-busting ambition, and now it has a fine new score to go with it. All that's lacking is a big wad of funding to get some repeat performances on the road.

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Based on the 16th century play by Christopher Marlow, Doctor Faustus ranks among the worst stage-to-screen adaptations churned out by Hollywood. Marlow's hopelessly outdated text is certainly a contributing factor, but the scenery chomping central performance by Richard Burton and the flimsy sets also weight heavily of the sheer awfulness of the movie.

Though the story is a fairly simple one - a man sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for youth, knowledge, and a beautiful woman - the script's allegiance to Marlow's play turns the movie into an almost incoherent experience. Unless one is intimately familiar with the source material, it's virtually impossible to discern what these characters are prattling on about. The interminably talky nature of the story is exacerbated by the complete lack of plot, as the majority of the movie follows Faustus as he talks and talks (and talks) about nothing in particular. None of this dialogue has any meaning; it's mostly introspective soliloquies that might have worked on the page, but come off as pompous on screen.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the film's visual look is exceedingly unpleasant and garish. Co-directors Burton and Coghill's overindulgence in '60s gimmicks - the two even utilize a kaleidoscope effect, for crying out loud! - give the movie a dated feel (though it's highly unlikely that the film looked good even upon it's original release). Not helping matters are the sets, which look as though they were picked up on the cheap from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. The only way these sets might have worked would've been on very darkly lit stage, but even that's pushing it.

And then there's Burton's performance, which is a marvel of unrestrained histrionics. He hits all the wrong notes as Faustus, turning the character into someone that we're never convinced is an actual person. There's nothing in his actions or words that makes him seem like anything other than the creation of a 400-year-old dead guy. Impossibly irrelevant, the character's slow descent into the netherworld is often interminable - and the fact that we're rooting for him to just die already probably doesn't help. Elizabeth Taylor pops up as Helen of Troy, a role that requires the actress to merely stand around looking "sexy." Her presence is baffling, especially when you consider that she has exactly one word of dialogue, but it's probably safe to assume she agreed to appear only because of her then-husband Burton.

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