Brook's film starkly divided the critics:
Pauline Kael said "I didn't just dislike this production, I hated it!" and suggested the alternative title
"Night of the Living Dead". Yet Robert Hatch in
The Nation thought it as "excellent a filming of the play as one can expect" and Vincent Canby in
The New York Times called it "an exalting
Lear, full of exquisite terror". The film drew heavily on the ideas of
Jan Kott, in particular his observation that
King Lear was the precursor of
absurdist theatre: in particular, the film has parallels with
Beckett's
Endgame. Film critic
John Simon described King Lear as "catastrophic". Critics who dislike the film particularly draw attention to its bleak nature from its opening: complaining that the world of the play does not deteriorate with Lear's suffering, but commences dark, colourless and wintry, leaving (in Douglas Brode's words) "Lear, the land, and
us with nowhere to go". Cruelty pervades the film, which does not distinguish between the violence of ostensibly good and evil characters, presenting both as savagery.
Paul Scofield, as Lear, eschews sentimentality: this demanding old man with a coterie of unruly knights provokes audience sympathy for the daughters in the early scenes, and his presentation explicitly rejects the tradition (as Daniel Rosenthal describes it) of playing Lear as "poor old white-haired patriarch". ==References==