Word: hordern
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...kills them. Besides Price, who is at his most enjoyably fulsome, the large cast includes a bounty of fine British players: Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Milo O'Shea, Eric Sykes and, as those viperous but ill-fated critics, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Robert Coote, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley and Dennis Price. The movie is bright and, a good deal of the time, quite funny. It is farce as broad as Shaftesbury Avenue, but its high spirits are not entirely consistent with the great gobs of gore that Director Douglas Hickox leaves smeared about. Violence, under...
George (Michael Hordern), an unfashionable middle-aged philosopher, scarcely registers any of this. He is busy dictating lecture notes for a symposium on the subject: "God-good, bad, or indifferent?" His much younger wife Dottie (Diana Rigg), a prematurely retired musical comedy star, is concerned about the sudden obsolescence of moon lyrics and sees "great breakage" ahead. Her own has apparently already occurred. She is receiving questionable mental therapy (and even more questionable physical therapy) from the vice chancellor of George's university. It is to Dottie that Stoppard entrusts what may be his fundamental conviction: that a world...
Stoppard pushes this and related theses with antic wordplay, inspired zaniness and crackerjack wit. The evening would sag in spots if it were not for Hordern. What might have been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought...
...proceeds blithely across the blasted landscape. A gray, gluey mud sucks at his feet. The twilight surrounding him is some hallucinatory shade of orange. He pauses at a ruined shack and knocks on the door frame. "Good evening, sir," he says with elaborate politeness to Captain Bules Martin (Michael Hordern), the master of the house and a sometime surgeon. "I am the traveling BBC announcer, and here was the news." He squats in the mire, framed by a gutted television set, and begins to speak: "I am happy to report that after the recent nuclear misunderstanding, peace has finally been...
...makes How I Won look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model of subdued rage and satiric precision. "I always used to say 'For Christ's sakes, drop it,'" Mum tells Dad as they reminisce about...