Word: harold
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That was the most violent sign to date of a common syndrome in the Midwest these days. Psychiatrists have a time-honored name for it: cabin fever. Many snowed-under Midwesterners are "behaving like irritable children," says Northwestern University Psychiatrist Harold Visotsky. Adds University of Illinois Psychologist Christopher Keys: "Family groups feel more crowded. People who live alone feel their loneliness intensified. The cards are stacked against everyone...
...that's all just a sort of framing device. What really interests Novelist Harold Robbins and the kind of people who make adaptations of his work is sex. The synopsis maker starts to get into trouble here because the bed hopping is so preposterously cross-generational. Angelo begins by having it off with the younger Hardeman's mistress, Lady Ayres (names with metaphorical overtones seem to be a Robbins specialty), as a kind of warm-up for his affair with Betsy-not the car, but the fourth-generation Hardeman (Kathleen Seller) after whom the vehicle is named...
...Harold Sankman Skokie...
...racecar driver whom Olivier hires to supervise the building of the "Betsy," acts decently even if he projects no personality. Lesley-Anne Down, late of Upstairs, Downstairs, is not only ravishingly beautiful (and we see much of her), but speaks with that enticing British accent, which in a Harold Robbins film guarantees class. I have never seen Robert Duvall give a bad performance before, but here he acts alternately demented or disinterested. He rattles off paragraphs of exposition without a change of expression, and during several "tense" confrontations, his eyes wander. Even his moustache looks half-hearted...
...will probably be rock-bottom for Laurence Olivier; let us hope in the future that he accepts projects that will not mock the accomplishments of a heroic career. Maybe a legion of his fans could from a club to intercept and screen all scripts before they reach him, discarding Harold Robbins and Ira Levin in the process. But then again, in accepting the role of Loren Hardeman, Olivier accepted the challenge of a role unlike any he had done before. At age 70, Laurence Olivier still has enough daring to teach us all a lesson...