Billy Budd **** (1962, Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan, Peter Ustinov, Melvyn Douglas) – Classic Movie Review 2265

Director Peter Ustinov’s impressive and graceful 1962 film stars an exciting young Terence Stamp (aged 24), who was nominated for an Oscar for arguably his best-ever role and finest performance as the beautiful, blond, innocent seaman Billy Budd. He won the 1963 Golden Globe for Most Promising Male Newcomer. Honourable mention, though, should be made for The Collector (1965), for which Stamp won Best Actor as the Cannes Film Festival, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, for which he gained a Best Actor Bafta nomination, one of the film’s four nominations – no wins.

In this version of Herman Melville’s story, Billy is the new crewman aboard the British naval vessel HMS Avenger (changed from Bellipotent in the book) in 1797. Budd’s optimism is steadfast, enchanting the crew, but he has no success in his attempts at befriending the devillishly nasty ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, played by Robert Ryan as his most sadistically chilling. Claggart orders Squeak (Lee Montague) to find a way to put Budd on report and implicate him in a planned mutiny, and brings the charges to the Captain, Edwin Fairfax Vere.

Ustinov’s impressive, high-minded historical dramatic adventure is an admirably serious work as a parable about good and evil, innocence versus corruption. In a remarkable tour de force, Ustinov co-adapts, co-produces and directs Melville’s tale with great authority and a poetic vision, and also stars too as the fair-minded Captain Vere, who finds himself manipulated onto the horns of a dilemma as to what to do with Billy.

Magnificent though Stamp is, Ryan steals the show in a brilliant display of pure malice and demonic evil. Ustinov’s and Robert Rossen’s screenplay is based on a 1951 Broadway play version of Melville’s novel by Louis O Coxe and Robert H Chapman. Robert Krasker’s black and white cinematographer impresses as startlingly beautiful, but it harmed the film’s box office chances with the competition from colour films.

Also in the cast are Melvyn Douglas, Paul Rogers, John Neville, Ronald Lewis, David McCallum, Niall MacGinnis, John Meillon, Ray MacAnally, Robert Brown, Cyril Luckham and Thomas Heathcoate.

Melville wrote poetry for 30 years until he returned to fiction with Billy Budd in late 1888 but it was unfinished when he died in 1891 and was forgotten. It was found in a trunk of the writer’s papers in his granddaughter’s New Jersey home in 1919. Melville’s widow helped complete it, and it was finally published in 1924, but it wasn’t until Melville’s original notes were found that the definitive version was published in 1962.

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