Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

chaswe-28402 Scofield is a great actor, and Peter Brook is a great director, but this production lacks moxie. Scofield doesn't seem old enough, weak enough, or mentally decayed enough. He doesn't have enough force in the storm. "Nothing will come of nothing" is not a line to throw away.Also, the narrative was insufficiently clear: it was difficult to understand what anybody's motivation was, other than that the daughters were fed up with their father's demands. Why did the rest of the cast behave in the way that they did ? I don't think it was at all clear, and one would really have to know the play backwards already to get any satisfactory meaning from it.Still, it was an interesting experience to have seen it, which I don't regret. Olivier was better.

tom_amity I have read altogether too many reviews of this film which bash it all to hell because the reviewer doesn't agree with Brook's reading of KING LEAR. To all such folk I would like to say: We Shakespeare fans should positively glory in the fact that every reader (and a fortiori every director) has his or her own interpretation of all the plays. Given Brook's interpretation, the film is wonderful.This version of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy is not only consistent with itself, which most aren't, it is acted to a hilt. The characters are brilliantly portrayed. The interactions between them appear as the absolute and utter epitome of conflict and love, of the heroic and villainous way people act when confronted with a situation that is calculated to freak a human being out.My favorite characterization is that of the Fool, who utterly steals the show and who becomes almost a Greek chorus. The way he interacts with Lear suggests a metaphysical mood of "We know exactly what's going on here, don't we?" The understanding between these two is too deep to be expressed in normal language; in the conversation around "The reason why the seven stars are only seven" (which would have struck any of the other characters, except maybe Kent, as a demented sequence of non sequiturs) suggests that Lear knows, at least at that moment, how the story will turn out, and that his attitude is one of "what is't to leave betimes? Let be." The Fool is here a prophet of absurdity, a Dark Age cross between a Marx Brother and Lenny Bruce.And I challenge anyone to show me any actors who could do Kent and Gloucester better than those who portrayed them in this film. To say nothing of the wonderful job Scofield does with the title role.Brook's Lear is almost sociopathically unfeeling until disaster begins to overtake him. To be sure, this view of Lear is not mine. But again, Shakespeare's characters are topics inexhaustible, and there is no such thing as a Lear to end all Lears. Whether one agrees with Brook or not, he carries his idiosyncratic reading off brilliantly---just as brilliantly as Laurence Olivier and Ian Holm in their utterly un-Brookish TV versions. I say: Let it ride! Let's have as many defensible and indefensible Lears as possible, and let's have them as utterly contradictory of each other as the 1945 and 1991 film versions of Henry the Fifth are.By the way, I am a recent convert to this position. Before I saw the light, I was (for example) utterly ticked off at Kenneth Branagh's film of HAMLET, because it portrayed the Prince as having had sex with Ophelia way back when, and because its Fortinbras was an uncultured creep who dissed Hamlet by tearing down his father's monument. Wasn't it obvious that the text utterly contradicts both notions? Yep! But Branagh would have every right to say to me, "The hell with you, go make your own film." And so would Brook to his critics.See it, friend. I look forward to our friendly argument.

lorenellroy Paul Scofield is a magnificent actor and for me the definitive Lear,but his powerful performance is grievously handicapped by some savage editing of the text which renders much of the story confusing to those coming new to the play This is bad enough but the neurotic direction of Peter Brooks makes it worse It is a bleak play and the frozen watelands of the external scenes are apt and well rendered by the camera crew.I maintain however that if we are to grasp the full horror of Lears's predicament we need to see how far he has fallen and the interiors look scarcely more inviting than the moorland =In Lear text is paramount and nothing should take our attention away from the words and the actor uttering them .Brook evidently does not agree and the camera is constantly fidgeting and at times not even focussing on the actor but zooming around like an over active fly It is not an uplifting play being rather about the fragility of sanity and reason,the key line for me being" as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/they kill us for their sport" It should be an unsettling experience because of the story and the implications for us as humans,and not because some showoff with a movie camera wants to prove he is a "Director" and in the process sabotaging a uniformly fine cast

Darroch Greer I can think of few other films that carry such epic and classical themes, yet have been so fully and masterfully realized on the screen. I have been returning of late to my 25 favorite films, and "King Lear" has not faded one bit, albeit a poor transfer to video. Peter Brook's vision is staggeringly bleak, yet every actor, scene, and line reading is deeply suited to the text and Brook's vision. The camera work and editing, a tour de force. I think it is his finest film.Paul Scofield may have been the greatest actor in the English-speaking world, yet he made relatively few films, prefering the stage. Yes, he was honored for A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, but that was an easy roll for him. His Lear demands to be seen: from his opening shot in the stoney silence of his tree-trunk throne to his moaning in the storm with his Fool to his howl of grief at his lifeless, cherished daughter, this is a performance to be returned to time and again.Plus, there is a supporting cast to beat all: Irene Worth as Goneril (with a surprising death scene), the great Jack MacGowran as the Fool, Patrick Magee as Cornwall, Cyril Cusak as Albany, and Brook stalwart Robert Lloyd in the difficult roll of Edgar. The film was shot in Jutland, Denmark, during the winter, and the setting is as bleak and barren as Lear's eldest daughters' feelings for their confused father.Why is this film so rarely seen? It deserves a new, letter-boxed print, and it seems a project right up Criterion's alley. In the meantime, make the effort to find a copy. It's on DVD in England.