The Comedians **** (1967, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson) – Classic Movie Review 5,387

The Comedians (1967) is a distinguished and exciting film of Graham Greene’s great novel set in despotic Papa Doc Duvalier’s turbulent and violent Haiti. It’s an important serious piece of work for the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor screen partnership.

Producer-director Peter Glenville’s 1967 offering The Comedians is a fairly distinguished and reasonably exciting film of Graham Greene’s great novel about politics and conscience in the despotic Papa Doc Duvalier’s turbulent and violent Haiti. It is notable for its moody, rumbling screenplay, adapted from the novel by the author himself.

It has fiery patches though it never quite comes alight. But, even if Greene’s screenplay and Glenville’s direction are insufficiently buoyant and incisive, this is still an unjustly neglected film.

The intense acting work from the fascinating cast helps a lot, though Alec Guinness, as arms dealer Major H O Jones, romps ahead of the very distinguished competition (Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson), as he is the one who seems most in touch with the tortured landscape of Greene-land.

It proved an important serious piece of work for the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor screen partnership, and they are well employed here. Burton plays a tailor-made role, of a cynical Welsh hotel owner in Port-Au-Prince called Brown, who secretly romances Martha Pineda (Taylor), the wife of a foreign diplomat, Ambassador Manuel Pineda (Peter Ustinov), in Haiti.

James Earl Jones plays Dr Magiot, Roscoe Lee Browne plays Petit Pierre, and Cicely Tyson plays Marie Therese.

And there are superb cameos from old favourites Paul Ford and Lillian Gish as elderly American tourists, Mr and Mrs Smith, wanting to start a vegetarian resort business in Haiti. Raymond St Jacques is outstanding as police captain Concasseur, while Zakes Mokae, Georg Stanford Brown, and Gloria Foster are also notable in the cast.

The Comedians is shot by Henri Decaë in the Republic of Benin, formerly Dahomey, in West Africa, and scored by Laurence Rosenthal.

[Spoiler alert] Greene gives the film a more upbeat ending than the book – his own idea, he said, though the producers might have thought this would help a very serious film’s chances at the box office.

It is not nearly as well known as some other films from the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor screen partnership, Cleopatra, The Night of the Iguana or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all of them iconic. It is more like Boom, virtually forgotten. So it’s time for a re-evaluation, maybe.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5,387

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