Director: Peter Glenville
Length: 2 hours 29 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

Becket (1964) follows King Henry II of England and his closest companion Thomas Becket, a Saxon commoner elevated through royal favour to become Lord Chancellor, whose appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury Henry intends as a means of bringing the Church under the crown’s control. Becket, to Henry’s shock, undergoes a genuine spiritual transformation upon taking holy orders, discovering in the office of Archbishop a sense of sacred vocation that displaces his loyalty to the king entirely and places the two men on an immediate and irreversible collision course. The conflict centres on the competing jurisdictions of Church and crown, with Becket refusing to surrender the Church’s independence on any terms, forcing a rupture that drives him into exile in France and draws the Pope and the French king into a dispute that is at once constitutional, theological, and painfully personal. A reconciliation is eventually brokered, but it is hollow on both sides, and Henry’s furious outburst demanding to be rid of his turbulent priest is taken literally by four knights who travel to Canterbury Cathedral and murder Becket at the altar. Henry, politically exposed and genuinely devastated, is compelled to submit to public penance at Becket’s tomb, an act that concedes the Church’s moral authority even as it underlines how little that authority was able to protect its most faithful servant. The film ends not in resolution but in irony, leaving Henry in possession of his kingdom and bereft of the one person who ever truly held his respect.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Martyrdom’

The Church teaches that martyrdom is the supreme witness of faith, the highest and most costly form of testimony a Christian can offer, in which a person freely accepts death rather than renounce Christ, deny the faith, or act against the moral law he has received from God. The word itself derives from the Greek martys, meaning witness, and the Catechism (§2473) defines the martyr as one who bears witness to the truth of the faith with the shedding of blood, an act the Church regards not as defeat but as the most perfect possible conformation to the suffering and death of Christ himself. It is worth noting that the Church’s reverence for martyrdom is written into its very vestments: the scarlet dress of a Cardinal and the red shoes of the Pope are not merely ceremonial adornments but deliberate symbols of a willingness to shed blood in defence of the faith, a permanent and visible reminder that the highest offices in the Church are understood to carry with them the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice. Saint Augustine in The City of God was careful to insist that it is not the suffering but the cause that makes the martyr, establishing the crucial distinction between a death that constitutes genuine witness and one that is merely violent or self-willed, a distinction that would shape all subsequent theological reflection on the subject. The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium (§42) affirms that martyrdom is a gift of grace rather than a human achievement, describing it as the supreme charism by which the Church is built up and the world evangelised, while the long tradition of canonising martyrs reflects the Church’s conviction that those who die in this way pass immediately into the fullness of eternal life. The theological richness of the concept lies in its paradox: that the moment of greatest apparent defeat – the destruction of the body at the hands of temporal power – is simultaneously the moment of most complete spiritual victory, in which the martyr demonstrates that there exists a loyalty which no earthly authority can compel, coerce, or extinguish.

Glenville introduces the theme of martyrdom long before Becket’s death, tracing its origins in the moment Becket accepts the office of Archbishop with a quiet and unmistakable awareness of where it will lead him. When Henry places the burden of Canterbury upon him, Becket does not receive it with the satisfaction of a man who has been rewarded but with the solemnity of one who has been conscripted, and Glenville shoots the scene with a stillness that separates it from the warmth and noise of the court life that surrounds it. From this point forward Becket carries the office not as a privilege but as a cross, and Glenville frames his subsequent acts of defiance – his refusal to yield on clerical jurisdiction, his willingness to absorb Henry’s fury without retreat – not as the stubbornness of a proud man but as the steady, costly steps of someone who has already accepted that the path he is on has only one destination. Augustine’s insistence that it is the cause rather than the suffering that makes the martyr is already present here: Becket is not seeking death, but he has chosen the thing that will bring it, and Glenville ensures the audience understands that he has done so in full knowledge and with open eyes.

Glenville demonstrates the theology of martyrdom with particular force in the exile sequences, where Becket’s years in France strip away every worldly comfort and attachment that might have given him a reason to compromise. Separated from England, from the court, from the friendship with Henry that had given his earlier life much of its colour and warmth, Becket is reduced to the bare essentials of his office and his conscience, and Glenville uses this isolation to show that what remains when everything else is taken away is not bitterness or self-pity but a clarified and almost serene commitment to the honour of God that needs no external validation to sustain it. The Church has always understood that the martyr is formed before the moment of death, shaped by a long discipline of dispossession that makes the final surrender of life feel less like a catastrophe than a culmination, and Glenville renders this process with considerable psychological precision, showing an exile who is not waiting to go home but gradually becoming someone for whom home is no longer a category that has much meaning. When Becket finally returns to England, Glenville ensures that the audience reads his homecoming not as a reconciliation but as a man walking deliberately and without illusion toward the fate he has long since made his peace with.

Glenville reaches the theological heart of the film’s treatment of martyrdom in the Cathedral sequence, where Becket’s murder at the altar transforms a political assassination into something the film insists on treating as a sacred act of witness. The setting is not incidental: Becket dies in the house of God, at the place of sacrifice, and Glenville frames the killing with a liturgical deliberateness that echoes the Catechism‘s understanding of martyrdom as the most perfect conformation to the death of Christ – a death that is simultaneously the nadir of human cruelty and the apex of spiritual victory. What distinguishes the scene theologically is Becket’s composure: he does not flee, does not bargain, and does not appeal to the knights on personal grounds, meeting his death with a stillness that Glenville presents not as resignation but as the final and most complete act of a man who has, over years of conflict and exile, become entirely free from the fear of temporal power. The scarlet of the cardinal’s robes, so rich in the film’s earlier court scenes, finds its deepest meaning here, the symbolic willingness to shed blood in defence of the faith made suddenly and terribly literal, and Glenville closes the sequence in silence, allowing the weight of what has happened to settle without commentary, trusting the audience to recognise that what they have witnessed is not a tragedy in the ordinary sense but something the Church has always called a triumph.

Director: Carol Reed
Length: 2 hours 18 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

The Agony and The Ecstasy (1965) follows the prolonged and tempestuous conflict between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo, whom the Pope has commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel despite the artist’s insistence that he is a sculptor rather than a painter and his deep resistance to the project from the outset. Michelangelo abandons the work early, fleeing to the hills of Carrara, but returns with a vision of overwhelming ambition – the entire sweep of Genesis rendered across the vast ceiling in a scheme so complex and physically demanding that it will consume years of his life and very nearly destroy his body. Julius, impatient, militarily distracted, and chronically short of funds, repeatedly pressures Michelangelo to finish, and the two men engage in a battle of wills that is as much a clash of two colossal egos as it is a negotiation between artistic integrity and institutional power. The tension between them is genuine but not simple – Julius recognises in Michelangelo a greatness he cannot fully control and does not entirely understand, while Michelangelo recognises in Julius a patron whose ambition, however tyrannical, is the only force capable of bringing his vision into existence. After years of physical agony, creative crisis, and sustained conflict with the Pope, the ceiling is finally unveiled, and its overwhelming beauty silences every objection, including Julius’s, in a moment that presents artistic creation as an act of devotion surpassing any merely institutional expression of faith. The film closes with Julius near death and Michelangelo already turning his restless eye toward the next impossible undertaking, suggesting that the work of art has outlasted the conflict that produced it and will outlast the men who fought over it entirely.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Beauty’

The Church teaches that beauty is not a superficial or merely decorative quality but one of the three transcendental properties of being itself, inseparable from truth and goodness, and that to encounter genuine beauty is therefore to encounter, however partially and obliquely, the God who is their common source. Saint Thomas Aquinas identified beauty with three conditions – integrity, proportion, and clarity – understanding by the last of these a kind of radiance by which the inner form of a thing shines through its outward appearance, making beauty not a surface quality but a depth, a disclosure of the real. The Catechism (§2500) affirms that sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation of evoking and glorifying the mystery of God, and that the Church has therefore always regarded the great works of sacred art not as cultural achievements alone but as forms of theology, ways of knowing and communicating divine truth that exceed the capacity of words. Pope John Paul II developed this most fully in his Letter to Artists (1999), describing artists as those who are uniquely placed to express the inexpressible and to open windows onto the infinite, insisting that every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and reaches toward something deeper, touching on a mystery that surpasses the merely human. It is worth noting that this theological seriousness about beauty is reflected in the Church’s own material culture: the splendour of its liturgical vestments, the gold of its altarpieces, and the overwhelming ambition of its great cathedrals are not expressions of vanity but of the conviction that nothing is too beautiful to offer to God, and that the cultivation of beauty in worship is itself an act of devotion. The concept finds its ultimate grounding in the doctrine of the Incarnation, for if God chose to enter the world in a body – in matter, in form, in the visible and tangible – then the material world is irrevocably sanctified as a medium of divine self-disclosure, and the artist who works with that world with honesty, skill, and reverence is doing something that the Church has always understood as genuinely sacred.

Reed establishes the theology of beauty at its most raw and unmediated in the sequence where Michelangelo, having abandoned the Sistine ceiling and fled to the hills of Carrara, receives his vision of the Genesis scheme not from study or calculation but from the sight of clouds breaking apart over the mountains to reveal forms of overwhelming grandeur and light. This is the film’s most theologically precise moment, and Reed shoots it with a simplicity that trusts the image entirely – a solitary man, stripped of his workshop and his ambition, encountering in the natural world a beauty so excessive and unexpected that it can only be received rather than sought. The Catechism‘s understanding that genuine beauty is a disclosure of the real, a radiance by which something of God’s own nature becomes momentarily visible through the surface of creation, is rendered here not as doctrine but as dramatic experience, and Reed ensures that the audience understands Michelangelo’s subsequent return to Rome not as a capitulation to Julius but as the response of a man who has been given something he has no choice but to deliver. John Paul II’s insistence in his Letter to Artists that every genuine artistic intuition reaches beyond what the senses perceive toward an inexpressible mystery finds in this sequence perhaps its most vivid cinematic illustration – the artist as a man who has seen something he cannot un-see and whose entire subsequent life is organised around the effort to make it visible to others.

Reed deepens the theology considerably in the long sequences depicting the physical ordeal of the ceiling’s creation, where Michelangelo’s broken body, his paint-stained face, and his ruined eyes become inseparable from the beauty being produced above him, insisting that the work and the suffering are not two separate things but one. This is the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering rendered in the most visceral possible terms – the artist whose hands crack and bleed, whose neck is permanently bent from years of looking upward, whose entire physical existence is consumed by the work – and Reed frames it in a way that deliberately echoes the iconographic tradition of the suffering servant, the body given over entirely to a purpose that exceeds and survives it. Aquinas’s condition of integrity – the idea that beauty requires the wholeness and completeness of a thing fully realised – is present here in a paradoxical form, for the integrity of the ceiling is achieved only through the disintegration of the man who painted it, suggesting that the most complete acts of beauty in the Catholic tradition are inseparable from sacrifice and that the Incarnation, in which God entered fully into the fragility of human flesh, is the ultimate pattern of this truth. Reed never allows the suffering to become merely dramatic; it is always in the service of the theological argument that nothing of genuine beauty, in the Church’s understanding, arrives without cost, and that the greatness of the Sistine ceiling is morally as well as aesthetically inseparable from the agony that produced it.

Reed brings the entire film’s theology of beauty to its culmination in the unveiling sequence, where the ceiling is revealed to Julius and the assembled company for the first time, and the response it provokes – silence, tears, and finally the Pope’s own wordless acknowledgement that he is in the presence of something that has defeated every objection he might have raised against it – becomes the film’s most complete statement of what the Catholic tradition means when it speaks of beauty as a form of revelation. Reed shoots the moment with great restraint, resisting the temptation to overwhelm it with music or dramatic reaction, trusting instead in the simple and devastating fact of the ceiling itself, and in the gradual transformation of Julius’s expression from impatience and scepticism to something that can only be described as adoration. The Catechism‘s affirmation that sacred art evokes and glorifies the mystery of God is given here its most emotionally powerful expression – not as a theological proposition but as a witnessed event, a room full of people being brought, without argument or instruction, into the presence of the divine through the medium of paint and plaster and years of human suffering. Most tellingly, Reed frames Julius’s response not as aesthetic appreciation but as an act of worship, his proud and combative nature finally stilled by an encounter with a beauty that is not in his power to command or contain, embodying the Church’s deepest conviction that genuine beauty does not merely please the eye but lays claim to the whole person, humbling the will and opening the soul to a truth it could not have arrived at by reason alone.