As the first director of Bertolt Brecht's 1947 play Galileo (in which Charles Laughton played the lead role), Losey was the logical choice to helm the screen adaptation for Ely Landau's American Film Theatre production. Written and produced in the shadow of the anti-Communist witch hunt that ultimately caused both Brecht and Losey's permanent exit from the United States, this story of the seventeenth-century Italian astronomer – forced by the Catholic Church to recant the scientific discoveries that ran counter to religious doxa – had an obvious timeliness. But in typically Brechtian (and Loseyesque) fashion, this Galileo is no hero. Oscillating between narcissism and cowardice, Galileo instead illustrates the necessity, and difficulty, of ethics – a problem as relevant in 1947/74 as 2008. The overtly theatrical nature of performance, dialogue and mise-en-scene in Galileo combine to establish an aptly Brechtian frame between screen and audience.