Having directed Charles Laughton in the 1947 world premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, filmmaker Joseph Losey was the logical choice to direct the screen adaptation of the play for Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre production. Losey, who earned a graduate degree in English literature from Harvard, also shared with the German playwright the disdain of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had prompted Brecht’s hasty return to Germany and Losey’s blacklisting in Hollywood. All of this gives a certain personal edge to the story of the seventeenth-century Italian astronomer, whose theories ran contrary to the edicts of the Catholic Church and who consequently was forced to renounce his ideas about planetary movement—ideas to which he nonetheless held fast until the end of his days, certain that time would vindicate him.