Word: conti
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...Harrison (Tom Conti) is paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash. Possessing a terrible lucidity about his sorry state, Harrison wants to die. Self-righteously governed by a rigid ethical imperative, the doctor in charge, Dr. Emerson (Philip Bosco), means to prolong Harrison's existence...
...hospital bed, Harrison is a lively tribute to the resilience of the human spirit under duress. A sculptor by craft, Harrison has a witty tongue, an agile intelligence and a wicked gift for logic and paradox; yet his plight makes his animated flow of mockingly funny words self-scalding. Conti makes the character an irresistible charmer whose naughty pillow talk seduces the nursing staff and even Dr. Scott (Jean Marsh of Upstairs, Downstairs renown), who loses her professional cool along with part of her heart...
...play is didactic and padded with anemic subplots. It lives through Conti. Quite apart from his resonant vocal range, he has wondrously expressive eyes, incendiary in rage, impish in mischief, grave in contemplation and stinging in pain. Few Broadway debuts are so auspiciously marked on the dateless calendar of brilliance. It is a measure of Conti "s achievement that we cheer his victory unto death and mourn the loss of the man in the same instant...
...much of his career Tom Conti has been called the British Dustin Hoffman. He looks so much like Hoff man that he once fooled even himself. "I did a film a couple of years ago," he says, "and there was a bit in which I was lying upside down, unconscious in a sailboat. The shot came up later on when I was watching the rushes and I thought. 'God! That's Dustin Hoffman!' " Conti also finds himself in odd positions in Whose Life Is It Any way?, but not for a second does the audience doubt whom it is seeing...
...Gelsey Kirkland? Can the public be persuaded to accept, as a heartwarming example of the human spirit's indomitability, her triumph over what appear to be terminal leg cramps on opening night of her first starring part in a ballet? Can another big crash-bang score by Bill Conti once again drown out a multitude of dramatic sins and carry this picture to the popular heights achieved by Director Avildsen's most recent work, the ineffable Rocky...