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Customer Reviews of The Man in the Glass Booth

A psycho-fable of the highest merit
Yes, yes I know all the fulminations comparing this film to the play. I haven't seen the play nor read the novel, so I'm judging purely by the film, which I rate at the very highest. OF COURSE the movie is "contrived" as Leonard Maltin's movie guide has it, that's what fables do (talking wolves, trees that sing, clouds that weep and preach a moral), they present contrived situations in order to elucidate. This psycho-fable unearths the ghoulish byplay of fire and ice in all of us, Jew or Bosch, whichever side of the barbed wire of things you stand. Schell's acting is superlative, and the LANGUAGE is English at its nightmare-wittiest. To summarize: you can't like "Doctor Strangelove" and scorn this film: they're two sides of the same rifle butt.

Dr. Theodore Voelkel
Winchester Mass.

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Robert Shaw will turn in his grave
If one has ever read the original play of "The Man in the Glass Booth" or at least the novel of the same name by the gifted writer and actor Robert Shaw, the film version by Arthur Hiller can only be regarded as a total disaster. Every ambivalent or critical aspect of Shaw's play has been cut out or made far too obvious, so that everybody gets the message- no thinking required. The film takes no risks. Hiller, in an interview of this DVD says (in nearly every second sentence) that he wanted to make the film "more emotional" than the play. A big mistake. And he is not honest to Shaw as he insists. However, he claims that Shaw, who had (understandably) removed his name from the credits called Hiller after the films release and loved it. One should doubt that. Shaw's two biographers, French and Carmean, tell a different story, namely that Shaw had never seen the film version. They also both reported that Shaw argued with Maximilian Schell, whom he disliked, on the set of "Der Richter und sein Henker" ("End of the Game"), where Schell was, of course, defeating the film version. Schell, in "Glass Booth", gives a performance that can only be described as total overacting, why does someone nominate this for an Oscar? He is as good as in "John Carpenter`s Vampires"- they should have cast Donald Pleasence, who was in the original stage production directed by Harold pinter. Do yourself a favour and get the book!

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Maximilian Schell should have won the Oscar for this in 1975
Thirty years ago, under the aegis of the ambitious "American Film Theatre," Arthur Hiller directed a movie based on a novel by writer, director and actor Robert Shaw. (Yes the same salty seaman who was eaten by a "great white" shark in the movie "Jaws"). Whatever one thinks about the plausibility of an enormously successful wealthy entrepreneur, who is also a schizophrenic personality, torn between the morally opposite identities of a sadistic concentration camp commandant, and a Jewish holocaust survivor, Maximilian Schell as "The Man In the Glass Booth," gives an explosive performance, so extreme and so riviting, that I can't imagine another actor, with the possible exception of Klaus Kinski, successfully realizing this incredible role. It is almost unfair to the other fine actors who inhabit this film, that they can be little more than foils in what is for all practical purposes a one man show. The story is divided into two acts, the first half taking place in Arthur Goldman's luxurious Manhattan penthouse apartment, and the second half in an Israeli courtroom. Even if you do figure out his true identity before the climactic courtroom scene, it won't take away from your astonishment, I promise.