Doktor Faustus

It was an ambitious undertaking for Richard Burton, to film Christopher Marlowe's classic Dr. Faustus with an untried amateur cast. I'd say he got a mixed bag of results.

Well, they weren't all that amateur, they were the members of the Oxford Dramatic Society and quite a number of them went on to have substantial careers in film and theater. Fans of the Doctor Who series will recognize Ian Marter who played Harry Sullivan during the Tom Baker reign as the Doctor, he's probably the most well known of the cast.

Of course there's Elizabeth Taylor who plays the brief part of Helen of Troy who in legend is ultimate in feminine beauty. She has no dialog, but she makes her presence known.

Faustus, a man who devotes his entire life to the pursuit of knowledge and somehow feels he's left a lot out of his life. Piety and service to God ain't cutting it any more. He makes a deal with Lucifer himself and even gets one of the fallen angels, Mephistopheles to act as a personal servant and conveyor of Faustus's wishes to the Prince of Darkness.

Of course he gets what he wants, but there's a day of reckoning and Faustus just simply doesn't want to cough up the soul. What do you expect from a guy who constantly refers to himself in the third person? Faustus is rather full of himself.

From what little research I did, Richard Burton made a concerted effort in this film to perform it close to Marlowe's own vision. There seems to be a few versions of this out there and it's all open to speculation.

It was an ambitious undertaking, not entirely successful, but not a total failure either. And Elizabeth Taylor looks pretty good in it.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Richard Burton and Nevill Coghill; Screenplay by Coghill, from Christopher Marlowe's play; Produced by Richard Burton and Richard McWhorter for Columbia Pictures. Photography by Gabor Pogany; Edited by John Shirley; Music by Mario Nascimbene. Starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Andreas Teuber.

Pretentious big-budget repertory theatrical tries to use sumptuous sets and photography to create a fantasy classic, but it turns out to be a pithy Burton ego trip, eminently forgettable and one of the weakest cinema incarnations of the Faust legend.

I saw this movie donkeys years ago, and was captured by it. In my book Richard Burton can do no wrong, and this is no exception. E Taylor added a nice bit of fluff as Fausts love interest, (how ironic). The movie was very deep and thought provoking, I would highly recommend it to any one with literary appreciation. I appreciated the fact that it was done in black and white, it just added to the Gothic nature of the movie. I found the special effects also quite appropriate, (the worms in the skull, etc). This is indeed a classic movie, and I will make every effort to add it to my collection. In the mean time I would invite anyone who loves a good classic drama to hunt out this fine, old film

One thing about Richard Burton...the movies he makes are never mediocre. They are either very good or very bad.

I'm not sure on which end that Doctor Faustus falls. It wasn't exactly what I expected...Burton's adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's play on the legend of Faust. The sets and much of the cinematography is masterful...the problem is the script, which is done completely in Old English and in virtual iambic pentameter, which makes it very hard for the average person to understand.

Cerebral and altogether too-literal transcript of Christopher Marlowe’s venerable play – the end result is opulent yet claustrophobic, not to mention dull.

Burton the producer/director certainly made inspired choices for his collaborators – production designer John De Cuir, cinematographer Gabor Pogany, composer Mario Nascimbene. Burton the actor, then, is riveting as always (particularly the monologue towards the end) – but real-life spouse Elizabeth Taylor is simply ludicrous as Faustus’ object of desire (in various disguises including Helen of Troy)! The remaining cast is largely made up of Oxford University drama students (the University itself, of which Burton was a former graduate, partly financed the film!): of these, only Andreas Teuber’s bald-headed, monk-clad Mephistopheles manages a striking performance.

The “Mondo Digital” review had likened this to the cult horror films made by Hammer, Roger Corman and Mario Bava: judging by the campy Papal sequence (with a host of fey clergymen on whom Faustus plays childish pranks) and an equally tacky conjuring act before a medieval court, I’d say that Burton and Coghill probably drew more on the decadent work of Federico Fellini or Pier Paolo Pasolini than anything else! Anyway, the experimental nature of the film extends to the baffling over-use of a pointless ‘foggy’ effect; its depiction of lust, however, emerges as traditionally naïve – with frolicking satyrs in a garden setting and decorous female nudity (including Taylor herself for one very brief moment).

Ulimately, DOCTOR FAUSTUS is to be considered an interesting failure – a personal tour-de-force for Burton but which, perhaps, needed a steadier hand…say, Joseph Losey (with whom the two stars would soon work on BOOM! [1968], curiously enough, a similar and equally maligned blend of fantasy and theatricality).