Glenville's direction is less justifiable—it's stagy without giving you the impression he'd be a great director for the stage, either. For one thing, he has a very odd sense of casting. Hawkins looks less like an aristocrat and more like a peasant than Guinness, who has the elongated refinement of El Greco's Portrait of a Cardinal. The casting is thus nearly as dylsexic as in Glenville's Becket (1964), in which fleshy Richard Burton plays the saint and airy Peter O'Toole the lusty, intemperate monarch. The actors here also have to overcome the use of the camera to capture the clever stage blocking.
In the worked-up compositions their gestures become too prominent: Guinness's hands when he recalls Nazi torture or his own suicide attempt, for instance. After an interesting opening during Mass, Glenville's visual sense is too often obvious (e.g., a shot from slightly above as the Interrogator moves a chess piece from one square to another that fades to a shot from above as the Cardinal steps from one flagstone to another) and even laughable (e.g., when the camera sneaks up behind the Interrogator who is doodling a spider's web).
Wilfrid Lawson also has a juicy role as the Cardinal's Jailer, an ordinary man whose attitude regarding what goes on in the prison ("A job's a job") is repugnantly adaptable. Maybe too juicy - Lawson come across as even more deliberate than Hawkins playing the master of entrapment. Both actors stretch their syllables out, though Lawson does it in the service of a musically obscene proletarian joviality, which, if highly theatrical, is at least memorable.
For his part, Hawkins does fit one's image of an upper-level apparatchik torturer and his mannered delivery gives him an "aristocratic" way with the dialogue. And Guinness's conspicuous etcher's technique — the acid is applied with a light hand but cuts deeply — seems right for a man who has attained his eminence.
Nothing holds the supremely resourceful star back. What Guinness does with his eyes alone, the way they alternately blaze and ash over, look enameled with serenity and then bug with emotional terror, provides a seminar on acting. And that's just from the neck up. When the Cardinal reaches his breaking point, Guinness sinks to his knees, desperate to be cleansed of sin. Glenville looks on from a long shot, but it registers; Guinness's embodiment of the disintegrating Cardinal is so imaginative that it works at any distance. (He throws himself into the role physically the way Laurence Olivier later did as a very North African Othello.)
Guilty of Treason (1950): Heil Hitler! Heil Stalin!
![Hollywood Classics Collectors Edition - Guilty of Treason [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N71Z4GN1L._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments