The film is adapted by Alan Bennett from his play The Madness of George iii. (The title was altered slightly so that we movie mutts won't think this is the second sequel to a first film about George.) Hytner directed the play's premiere for the (London) National Theater, and this production was brought to New York. For those who, like myself, were disappointed in the play, the film contains pleasant surprises, all of them resulting from differences between the two arts.

The story starts just before the onset of King George's first bout of madness, then follows his treatment by several physicians, his recovery and his resumption of power. Wound into this account, itself harrowing and pathetic by turns, are all the strands dependent on the king's condition. Political balance varies from day to day according to the color of the royal urine, which is supposedly an index to his recovery. The opposing leaders in the House of Commons, Pitt the Younger and Fox jockey to keep or get control, and they vie to maneuver the Prince of Wales, whose hopes rise and fall as his father's health falls and rises. (Some digs about royal-family behavior have present-day sting.)

All of the above, as material for drama, may sound remote and moldy to modern viewers. Shakespeare can grip us with stories of English kings, but even he had occasional troubles. (Take another look at King John.) Lesser dramatists, which all other dramatists are, have crammed theaters and libraries with plays about royal hugger-mugger that are torpid. There are usually two troubles with them. Only a really vitalizing art can make us empathize today with royal lives; and history isn't artistic--it insists on longueurs, and it doesn't always provide climaxes.

On the first score, Bennett's play does better than most. The fear and fascination of madness links kings and commoners. And Bennett's dialogue can glisten. He writes in chewy morsels that render period speech with a modern edge. Says the Prince of Wales: "To be heir to the throne is not a position; it is a predicament." Or the king to a doctor who had previously been a clergyman:

king: You have quitted a profession I have always loved, and embraced one I heartily detest.
willis: Our Saviour went about healing the sick. king: Yes, but he had not L700 a year for it.

Bennett can be nicely wry. In one episode Dr. Willis orders the king to read aloud, as therapy presumably, a scene from Shakespeare, and they light on the recognition scene from King Lear, in which the mad Lear recovers. (Bennett would have gotten more from this episode if he had told us that this was possibly the last time these words were spoken in George's lifetime. When his madness subsequently returned, Shakespeare's text was banned from the stage; only a prettified version was performed until George's death in 1820.)

But on the second score, even Bennett's clever style on stage didn't triumph over an integral burden of fact. Madness was not a play but a chronicle. There was no climax. Some things happened; then they stopped happening. Bennett tried to compensate by inserting, just before the finish, a flash-forward, which told us that the madness was going to recur and that our century would discover that the trouble was physiological, not psychological. But the flash- forward didn't make us forget that we had spent a long evening only to return to the situation where it all started.

Thus the play. Bennett's film adaptation omits the last-minute warning of more trouble ahead--along with other trimming--yet it's much stronger than the play. True, the film audience will now believe at the end that the king was permanently cured; so, in script terms, the film is even more of a chronicle than the play. Yet, paradoxically, it is more gripping than the play. The simple explanation: it is a film.

As film, Madness is strong proof that the immediacy of the human countenance, the almost palpable verities of costume and place, the ranges of vista, the enforcements of rhythm--all of them film prerogatives--can fuse and create genuine dramatic sustenance. It happened, for example, in Rosselini's The Rise of Louis xiv, and it happens again here.

I suggest no superiority of film art over theater art: I'm describing a difference. (To note one contrary instance of the theater's power: no film, however great, has done for me precisely what Mnouchkine's Les Atrides did.) A central beauty of the theater is that it can suggest physicalities, though it often fulfills them; a central beauty of film is that it can fulfill physicalities, though it often suggests them. In the case of Madness, helped marvelously by the deployment of Handel on the soundtrack, film fulfills.

Nigel Hawthorne, who was George in the National production, plays him again here. He was scintillating on stage, and he's even better here--because it's film. Skilled and vivid though his theater performance was, it impressed most in its marathon effect: Hawthorne did the whole long demanding role right there before us in one evening. On film, obviously, that effect disappears, and his acting supervenes. Here it scintillates even more brightly, shrewd, vain, pathetic, regal. And film brings us a Hawthorne quality that escaped me in the theater: his resemblance, in face and voice and speech and flavor, to Ralph Richardson. Wonderful. Film can certainly use such an actor. Is it too late for Hawthorne to have Richardson's latter-day career?

Most helpful among the others are Julian Wadham as Pitt, Jim Carter as Fox, Rupert Everett as the Prince (though he's not as fat as his father keeps complaining) and John Wood as the cobra Thurlow. Ian Holm is not his most incisive self as Dr. Willis. Helen Mirren, who plays Queen Charlotte, doesn't convince as the mother of fifteen children, nor does she consistently sound German, which Charlotte was. The costume designer, Mark Thompson, has seen the entire company ingeniously, as figures out of Zoffany and Rowlandson and (no ancestor, alas) Angelica Kauffmann. Andrew Dunn, the impressive cinematographer, serves both the director and the designer with perceptible relish.

A comparative study, international, immense, could be done of directors who have worked in both theater and film. Some broad categories are apparent. First, directors whose style is essentially unchanged in both arts--Kazan and Nichols, for instance. Second, those whose theater and film works are markedly different. A towering instance is Bergman: to judge by the three theater pieces of his that I've seen, his films allow him to shed gimmicks and concentrate on intensity. Hytner, much lower in the scale, is also in this second group, a director whose film work is distinct from his theater approach.

I've seen two of his theater productions, Madness and Carousel, and thought that, contradictorily, Carousel had less musical-comedy fluency than Madness. But the film of Madness displays new resources in Hytner--freedoms offered and exploited, motion understood as something other than action and speed, a comprehension of texture itself as a form of dynamics.