I have to write an essay comparing and contrasting an Oedipus the King film with the play. I watched the 1986 BBC version of Oedipus the King, but I am a...

Instead
of the BBC version, I would suggest you take a look at two films from the 1960s:
(in Italian, Edipo Re), directed by Pier Paolo
Pasolini, and the King, starring Christopher Plummer, Orson Welles, and
Lilli Palmer, and directed by Philip Saville. Both of these, especially Pasolini's version, are
more cinematic than the 1986 one to which you refer, which is basically a filmed stage-play with
the one novelty of being performed in modern dress.

In Pasolini's film, not
surprisingly for him, there are several unusual, offbeat features. The story is told beginning
not asdoeswith Thebes in crisis and Oedipus already kingbut with Oedipus's earlier history and
childhood, showing his infancy, his rescue by the shepherd, and his youth in Corinth. The
emphasis is more visual than verbal. Sophocles tells the details not only in flashback, but in
the words of thethemselvesthe, the Shepherd, and of course Oedipus and Iocastaas they
recall...