Product Description

Studio: Kino International Release Date: 11/11/2003 Run time: 138 minutes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34652 in DVD
• Brand: Kino Video
• Released on: 2003-11-11
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 145 minutes

Customer Reviews

Heroes
"Galileo" is one of those movies people serious about cinema more or less "have" to have or see, less for its cinematic achievements than for its pedigree. After all, how many films start with a play by Bertolt Brecht, based on a translation by Charles Laughton, directed by a preeminent film maker (Joseph Losey) with a cast that includes luminaries like John Gielgud, Tom Conti, Edward Fox, Michel Lonsdale, Colin Blakely, Margaret Leighton, and on and on? The results are almost secondary. What matters is who participated.

Fortunately, "Galileo" offers more than a laundry list of Big Names. While it is not a hallmark of cinema, it is an entertaining, frequently lively and at the same time, tragic look at the interplay between private conscience and public responsibility. People familiar with Brecht's work need no introduction to this, one of his most famous plays. Those unfamiliar with his name can enjoy a largely straightforward, suspenseful exposition on Galileo's complex relationship to the history of science.

With the large exception of Topol, in the lead role, the cast is extraordinary, providing one plum moment after another. John Gielgud offers a witty walk on as an apoplectic cardinal, while the scene between Galileo, Cardinal Bellarmin (Patrick Magee) and Cardinal (eventually Pope) Barberini (Lonsdale) is a playful feint, a series of verbal parries and thrusts, dextrous, but deadly serious. My favorite scene, however, is the famous "dressing of the Pope" sequence in which the Cardinal Inquisitor (Fox) convinces the Pope to force Galileo to recant.

Viewers who know Losey's work only through his movies may be surprised at the idea of him directing such a project. Aside from the fact that he had a parallel career in the theater, however, he was also the director of the play's first production, in Los Angeles and New York in the forties, starring Laughton. His adaptation of some of Brecht's "alienation effects" is, for the most part, simple and clean, such as using superimposed titles instead of Brecht's on-stage signs announcing the forthcoming action, or having Galileo occasionally speak directly to the camera. There are even one or two trademark "Losey" moments, such as the fraught, nerve jangling scene between the Inquisitor and Galileo's daughter. As with the director's more famous work, there is nothing explicitly violent in the scene, even at a verbal level, yet you sense the implicit threat in every moment.

Most of the time, however, the director is clearly serving the playwright, and when the results are this successful, no one should complain.

Unfortunate Film Version of An Unfilmable Play
American Film Theatre sought to finance film productions of famous plays through theatres and patrons who subscribed to the film series, and between about 1973 and 1975 was successful in filming a wide range of material--but less successful in marketing it. This was partly due to the material itself, which tended to lack broad appeal, and partly due to the slim budgets, which often showed in terms of production values. But it was also due to critical reaction: while critics tended to applaud the effort, reviews were usually mixed, and audiences tended to be put off by the faint reek of highbrow snobbery.

Written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, GALILEO is widely recognized as one of the stage's great masterpeices, but it is uniquely theatrical in nature, the sort of play you see and immediately realize can never be adequately filmed. The AFT certainly gives everything it has to the project--including a gifted cast including Topol, Tom Conti, and John Gielgud--but the result is predictable.

The story concerns Galileo (Topol), who falls into a series of ethical traps when he makes the discovery that the sun does not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun--and runs afoul of the all-powerful Roman Catholic church of the era, which teaches that the earth is the precise center of the universe and will brook no dissent on the point. Like the play, the film is an intellectual exercise in questions of morality, ethics, personal integrity, relative truth, and absolute truth; unlike the play, it plays out at a fairly slow crawl and without any of the play's sense of excitement.

The DVD quality is so-so and the film comes with a number of bonuses, most of them relating to AFT, as well as an interview wit Topol. On the whole, I cannot recommend the film, and I do not advise any one who has not already seen a good production of the play to watch it--because it might put you off seeing anything by Brecht on the stage. And that would be a pity indeed.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

The strength of a conviction!
Joseph Losey made a successful stage in Broadway, 1947 with this personage starred by Charles Laughton. That fact proves Galileo was always for him an emblematic icon, a true hero in the best sense of the term.

That is why we should not surprise ourselves this talented filmmaker would undertake this issue in 1974 with praising comments.

Topol made the best role of his lifetime with this penetrating and incisive portrait about the life and hard challenges that Galileo Galilei had to face against the Holy church's points of view as well as the Holy scriptures.

The untamed investigative spirit of this passionate scientist who, based on the main Copernicus's statement always rejected the idea the Earth was the center of the universe always collided against the ferocious mental barrier of the establishment by then.
Joseph Losey was indeed one of the most irreverent and questioners filmmakers ever born. In this sense, this issue came to him like ring to finger at the moment to make a poignant adaptation of Bertold Brecht' s play with amazing results.

Edward fox as the Inquisitor, Michael Londsdakle as Bertelmi Cardinal and John Gielgould as the Pope are terrific bestowing this work the deserved status that still owns. The movie has surmounted the test of time to become one the most sincere and emblematic films around the freethinking ever made.

A classic and a must in your collection. Don't miss it.