GALILEO (1975)

For two years in the mid-1970s, the American Film Theatre produced a number of films based on well-regarded stage plays, featuring name stars in the leads. Some, like Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance (with Katherine Hepburn) and The Iceman Cometh (with Lee Marvin), were basically shot as if being performed on a stage, with camera movement and close-ups included to make it more film-like. Some, like this adaptation of Bertolt Brechet's play from 1945, are a little less stagy while retaining a play-like performance. The opening shots are from the catwalks above a theater stage where we see technicians prepping the performance space on a stage, but after three choirboys sing an introduction, the rest of the movie is more or less naturalistic (except when those boys keep returning to provide exposition or commentary). We begin in 1609, when Galileo is a famous math teacher who is already a believer in the Copernican heliocentric theory of our cosmos (with the sun at the center rather than the earth) which goes dangerously against church wisdom. The town fathers of Padua back him as long as he helps keep their coffers full with money from his inventions. We see him sell them the idea of the telescope without bothering to tell them that it had already been invented elsewhere. By 1610, headlines state that Galileo has "abolished Heaven" because people using telescopes have discovered celestial phenomena that prove his heliocentric theory is correct. When the church begins to attack him, he assumes that having demonstrable truth on his side will let him win the day, and even the official Vatican astronomer says that Galileo is right. But the church declares his theory to be heretical, and that unrestricted research is dangerous. Will Galileo recant, as he is asked to by the Pope? 

This is largely a kind of greatest hits version of Galileo's life, featuring a string of incidents separated sometimes by several years, beginning when he was in his 40s and continuing to 1642, the year of his death. My summary may make it sound a bit too educational (i.e., boring) but it’s not. Chaim Topol (Tevye in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF) embodies Galileo quite well; he's earthy, intellectual, and very human, especially at the end when he expresses his sorrow for recanting because he was afraid of the physical pain that might have been in store for him. The large supporting cast includes Colin Blakely, Michael Gough, Tom Conti, Edward Fox, and in what are essentially cameos, John Gielgud and Clive Revill. Revill and his wife Georgia Brown, in the most theatrical scene, are troubadours who get a musical number during an April Fool's Day revel in which they sing about Galileo's troubles ("Independent spirit spreads as do diseases"). At 150 minutes, it does drag a bit in the middle, but as experiments go, this is worth watching. It's a shame the American Film Theatre films (which were presented as Fathom Events are today, for just a couple of days at a time) didn't continue, because this one (directed by Joseph Losey) got the mix of theatre and cinema almost right, even of not all of them did. [Blu-Ray]