Word: alec
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Venus's-Flytrap. Fittingly enough, Philip (Alec McCowen), the hero of The Philanthropist, is a philologist. In Act I, Philip is insouciantly embroiled in a drawing-room-cum-bedroom farce; in Act II, he is mournfully bogged down in a talky self-analysis of considerable pathos. This makes for a jarring discrepancy of mood without any compensating illumination of meaning. Act I is fun and naughty games. In it, Philip ends up in bed with a Venus's-fly-trap of a girl. His fiancée Celia (Jane Asher) pairs up with a cynical aphorist...
...glittering virtuosity, this performance is very close to those of Gielgud and Richardson in Home. The Queen has not yet dubbed him Sir Alec McCowen, but the theater has its own list of knights, and he is one of them...
...trying to "adjust to the day of the common man." A deliberately disarranged pocket flap may, he thinks, be a "secret signal that, from the top, elegance is seen to be undemocratic." However awful Charles' clothes are, concedes Cutter Dallas, he "usually avoids the depths" of Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home and President Richard Nixon...
...ALEC GUINNESS as King Charles I gives a performance of such finesse that Harris' Cromwell, by contrast, seems all peevish bluster. Cromwell can retain audience sympathy only when he strikes out against painfully over-drawn bogies of pure evil, such as the dissolute Lord Manchester (Robert Morley). Though Hughes takes pains to paint Cromwell as a sexually vigorous masculine dynamo (we even have one shot of him the bracing a long spear), there is more life and sexuality in the tender parting of Charles and his queen (Dorothy Tutin) than in either of the cardboard domestic scenes between Oliver...
...rate Finney seems to have a wonderful time flying through the air in his nightshirt, being mean to people, being frightened by the ghosts, being nice to people, and generally dominating the movie. Another person who looks like he's enjoying himself is Alec Guinness, who hilariously overplays his role as Jacob Marley. It must be great fun for an actor who is used to understating his comic roles to be able to show anger by shooting up ten feet into the air and rattling huge chains and padlocks draped around his body. And, luckily, he hardly has to sing...