King Lear (1988)
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Physical Media
Blu-rayThe Criterion CollectionUnited StatesRegion A2025UPC 715515308212
a member added 9/25/2026
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He tried to hire Richard Nixon to act in his modernized KING LEAR (1987). Nixon turned him down.
It opens with a voicemail from Menahem Golan, begging director Jean-Luc Godard to finish the film in time for Cannes. It features Peter Sellars (the theatre director) as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, trying to reassemble his ancestor's plays in a world where art was erased after Chernobyl.
Burgess Meredith, replacing a truant Norman Mailer, plays gangster Don Learo. Molly Ringwald is Cordelia. Godard himself portrays Professor Pluggy, wearing a wig made of electrical cables. Woody Allen turns up in the last scene.
Godard later said Allen's and Ringwald's contracts stipulated their names could not be used on the film or in publicity. Cannon had paid for two of the most sellable people in American movies at the time and was legally bound not to mention either.
Godard's King Lear ran under a week in New York and disappeared. France did not see it in a cinema until 2002.
The whole thing had been agreed upon at Cannes two years earlier, on a cocktail napkin.
About the Film
Jealous love leads to destruction.
- Directed By
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Runtime
- 91 minutes
- Released
- January 22, 1988
- Certification
- PG
- Country
- United States of America
- Starring
- Peter Sellars, Burgess Meredith, Julie Delpy, Leos Carax, Molly Ringwald
More Credits
- Genres
- Comedy, Drama
- Language
- English, French, Japanese, Russian
- Origin
- US
- Studios
- The Cannon Group, Golan-Globus Productions
- Written By
- Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Sellars, Norman Mailer, Richard Debuisne
- Produced By
- Yoram Globus, Menahem Golan, Jean-Luc Godard
- Cinematography
- Sophie Maintigneux
- Music
- Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach
- Also Starring
- Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Freddy Buache, Menahem Golan, Suzanne Lanza
- Budget
- $1,000,000
- Box Office
- $61,821
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One of my favorite Godards. Not that I understand it.
Well shit. Now I need to see this
Peter Cheney it’s not objectively good but it’s oddly compelling
I tried to watch it; it was crap.
I dutifully went to see it at the Nuart in Los Angeles. Godard’s cinematic humor and energy seemed to have gone slack to me. Godard has gone from depicting modern consciousness to focusing on his own consciousness, as in his last film, which literally takes place within his own brain. King Lear, in which Godard stars, is part of that process.
Godard’s career is an exercise in throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks. Most people figured out what he was up to when he did “Weekend.” But some people will just never give up on “art.’
Dont forget tout va bien
David Heatherly He’s definitely in the top ten of directors that people will insult you for liking.
My cinephile 81YO mother watched Breathless the other night and told me “Don’t bother” after telling me she’d watched it again for probably the first time in 60+ years. Give me Fellini and Bergman all day but some of the New Wave French guys aren’t quite my taste.
It’s a miracle it turned out so well. Ringwald wrote a beautiful piece about it in the New Yorker
You’re just throwing words and names at a wall.
An important filmmaker, but my god he’d be the last one I would’ve wanted to have lunch with. I just imagine it would be two or three hours of him monologuing about Marx, 1968 and why cinema is, gasp, an illusion.
Brian Rose Sounds like fun to me.
Typical Cannes.
Cannon films was a crazy venture, financing big names of Art Cinema (Godard, Liliana Cavani etc.) for mostly disastrous projects!
This all sounds horribly self-indulgent by all parties involved.
Love this film. Wonderfully absurd.
It’s free on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/OL7Ii-6Rdpc?is=AuuegcfBYiW1_yEd
You didn’t have to convince me
It played in LA in early 88
That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read.
Bizarre
This seems like complete shit.
I like how Quentin Tarantino lied about being an extra in this and is thus listed in the cast in Leonard Maltin”s Film Guide
I’m surprised Molly Ringwald
would be in a project with someone
like Woody Allen.
She has higher standards.
Aoaccd Lm The year was 1987.
Aoaccd Lm
Virtually every female actor who has ever worked with Allen says he is a wonderful director, especially for women.
Richard Alan Nanian has virtually every female actor who worked with him signed an NDA?
Thom Proctor
No. Not at all. Allen’s directorial career goes back more than 50 years. Also, an NDA makes people not disclose something. It can’t make people praise someone effusively.
Aoaccd Lm Given the year this was made, your comment is record breaking in its ignorance.
Aoaccd Lm at that time, working with him was a high standard, early 90s the scandal was personal, and nothing that had happened during any film production so that wouldn’t have been relevant. Looking back she def has regrets with working with Hughes, who should not have been writing “teen stories” so the bar wasn’t set high for her anyhow. 😆
the reasons for mailer’s truancy are themselves very funny
Godard was highly influential w/ A bout de Souffle, and you can see where sorta birthed “coool” in movies, but i’m glad i never saw that “nixon” film
Drove from Philly to NYC )either the
Quad or the Film Forum) to have one of the most excrutiating film experiences of my life.
Beautiful and fascinating film.
Very, very strange movie. It certainly has little if anything to do with King Lear, or even Shakespeare. I’m not entirely certain what it had to do with anything. And yet somehow I still got the idea that Godard was actually trying to say something.
Love this film. I have the Criterion DVD and have had the Xenon VHS for about 30 years.
Godard farts on Sellars’s face
I saw this at Seattle’s Neptune Theater on a total whim. I was 18 years old and I’d never seen a Godard film. I didn’t understand a goddamn thing and I had a wonderful time.