Word: denholm
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...wife, Joyce (Maggic Smith), never ceases to grind this fact into Gilbert's muddled brain. Gilbert vainly tries to advance himself as a chiropodist, i.e. someone who scrapes corns and fungus off the bottoms of other's feet, but he attracts the hatred of the local surgeon, Dr. Swaby (Denholm Elliott), who unceremoniously boots him out of his office. At this point Gilbert decides to go undercover...
Smothered by Murray's miserable performance. Murray's co-stars, evidently unaware of their tangential relationship to the film, deliver strong performances. Denholm Elliot plays Uncle Elliot, the quintessential Maugham man of society with impeccable charm and studied superficiality. "I spent my life with the great names of Europe," he says with the perfect match of weariness and savoir-faire, "and who comes to visit me." Less successfully, Catherine Hicks portrays Isabel with the pain and confusion one associates with "the drugs and all of that" that are the sum of our knowledge of Isabel...
...darkly clad figure of a sullen young man in his early 20s (Sting). This stranger begins deliberately accosting passerby on the rainy street with an "accidental" jostle and a subsequent "Why, you're the last person I expected to see!" Someone finally falls for this deception--Thomas E. Bates(Denholm Eihott) a harried middle-aged writer of mass-produced inspirational verse. His daughter Patricia(Suzanna Hamilton)has been severely brain damaged by a hit-and-run accident four years previously, and is now taken care of by her mother(Joan Plowright). Pretending to be an old friend of Patricia...
...film, adding to the disjointed impression. Sting's contribution as an actor, however, is excellent. He carries the Malcolm McDowell villainous schoolboy role a step or two higher in intensity: in fact, the two even resemble each other somewhat physically, especially in the cold glare of the eyes. Denholm Elliott characterized every feature of Thomas to perfection, and Joan Plowright manages to make her character warm and sympathetic under the circumstances...
There is plenty of tame local color, including what must be some of the least erotic whorehouse sequences ever recorded in an R-rated film. Unlike Novelist Theroux, Bogdanovich does not have a particularly keen descriptive eye; he goes for tourist snapshots instead of true grit. Except for Denholm Elliott, who offers a fastidious portrait of a typically down-and-out British colonial, the actors do little to help the proceedings. Gazzara is fairly blameless, given his flat role, but the miscasting of his con-man nemesis is a disaster. Had a strong actor played the villain, who recalls Harry...