Doctor 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.

Marlow's play about the man who sold his soul to the devil for 27 years of pleasure is not the most cheerful of topics. But the horror element is well-played in this classy production with Burton as the title character and Liz Taylor as Helen of Troy, the "face that launched a thousand ships."

Mario Nascimbene's spooky score gives an appropriately dark mood to this great masterpiece of a story.

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.

Shortly after I picked up a copy of Marlowe's play, I spotted the film in a video store. Having read the play first, I wondered how the film would portray it.

It did pretty well. The film apparently wasn't a high-budget item, but it conveyed the essence of the play. And, as important, it used the basic Marlowe play. That adds a touch that a more "modernized" film wouldn't have. In that, it shares a legacy found in many Shakespearean films.

The Faust story is well enough known so that there are no plot twist surprises. It may not be for everyone, but it's worth a view. Richard Burton makes a fairly believable Faust.

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.