There are vanity projects, and then there’s Doctor Faustus—the kind of film that makes you wonder if Richard Burton didn’t just sell his soul to Lucifer, but to Columbia Pictures’ accounting department as well. Billed as the first theatrical adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s 1588 play, this 1967 curiosity is less an adaptation and more a student film with a Hollywood budget, a grand Oxford ego-trip captured in celluloid amber.
Burton co-directed this with his Oxford mentor Nevill Coghill, which is another way of saying no one on set was willing to tell him “Richard, old boy, this looks like a bad community theater production trapped in a lava lamp.” What we get is a film that attempts to blend Elizabethan poetry with Swinging Sixties psychedelia and ends up looking like a drunk uncle crashed a Shakespeare festival and refused to leave.
Richard Burton: Bargain-Basement Faust
Burton plays Faustus, the scholar so greedy for knowledge and power that he literally signs a contract in blood. The irony is thick: here’s Burton, one of the great Shakespearean voices of his generation, using those sonorous tones to recite Marlowe’s verse like he’s reading off the side of a whiskey bottle. He’s not terrible—Burton’s too talented for that—but he is bored, and there’s nothing deadlier than a bored Burton. Watching him conjure demons is like watching a man waiting for room service.
The central tragedy isn’t Faustus selling his soul to Lucifer. It’s Burton selling his credibility for the chance to plaster Elizabeth Taylor into a wig and toga.
Elizabeth Taylor: Helen of Troy, Silent, and Possibly Sedated
Let’s be clear: Elizabeth Taylor appears in this film solely because Burton wanted her in it. She plays Helen of Troy. She has no lines. She looks gorgeous. She looks confused. She looks like she wandered in from a Vogue shoot and got stuck on stage while someone shouted poetry at her.
When Faustus intones “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” the audience mutters back, “Well, not in this production.”
It’s stunt casting masquerading as gravitas, and while Taylor smolders in her silent role, the whole exercise feels like watching Cleopatra crash a Renaissance fair.
Mephistopheles and the Oxford Kids’ Table
Burton stacked the cast with Oxford students from the University Dramatic Society, which is admirable in theory but disastrous in practice. These fresh-faced scholars are asked to embody angels, devils, popes, and emperors, but they look like undergrads sneaking into a toga party.
Andreas Teuber, playing Mephistopheles, gamely tries to match Burton’s gravel and thunder, but comes off like a teaching assistant caught lecturing without his notes. Lucifer, Beelzebub, and the Seven Deadly Sins shuffle around like they’re auditioning for a Monty Python sketch that forgot the punchline.
The staging doesn’t help. Much of the film is shot like a theater production, complete with stiff blocking and actors staring into the middle distance as if the camera were another distracted Oxford don. The result: a film that feels less like cinema and more like a punishment for not doing your homework.
The Look: Hell by Way of Blacklight Posters
Visually, Doctor Faustus is a psychedelic trainwreck. The filmmakers clearly wanted to capture something visionary—hellfire, temptation, grandeur—but they ended up with something that looks like a half-funded art installation in a college basement.
The sets wobble between medieval austerity and groovy Sixties excess: think papier-mâché thrones, smoke machines on overdrive, and colored gels that make entire scenes look like they were filmed through melted Jolly Ranchers. The devils themselves look like they raided the costume shop after the freshman masquerade ball.
It’s hard to summon terror when Satan looks like he’s about to break into a jazzercise routine.
The Problem: Marlowe Meets Ego
The tragedy of this Faustus isn’t metaphysical—it’s artistic. Marlowe’s text is sharp, dangerous, a work obsessed with ambition and damnation. Burton and Coghill drain it of that danger by turning it into a bloated showcase for Burton’s baritone and Taylor’s cheekbones.
The play’s central horror—that knowledge, ambition, and greed can damn even the greatest of men—is buried under theatrical self-indulgence. Instead of dread, we get pomp. Instead of hellfire, we get set design that would embarrass Doctor Who.
Worst of all, the film doesn’t even have the manic energy of true camp. It’s not gloriously bad, just tediously bad, dragging Marlowe’s poetry into quicksand and then daring you to stay awake through it.
Final Damnation
In the end, Doctor Faustus (1967) is less about Marlowe’s genius than it is about Richard Burton’s ego and Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe. It’s a record of a stage production that never should have left Oxford, preserved for reasons only Lucifer could explain.
To call it a horror film is generous—its greatest horror is watching a play about eternal damnation reduced to an underlit pageant with Hollywood stunt casting. If hell is repetition, then surely it looks like this: Burton booming, Taylor pouting, Oxford kids in papier-mâché horns, and the audience damned to 90 minutes of boredom.
Rating: 2 out of 10 “thousand ships.” Watch it only if you’re writing a dissertation on the dangers of letting famous drunks direct their own vanity projects.
