Word: non-hero
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...drama, set in a bleary backwater of academe, does not focus on a caustic wit who tosses poisoned darts at the world around him. Quartermaine's Terms is Gray's gentlest and most compassionate play. No stiff upper lips need apply. The drama's hero, or non-hero, might be called "Mr. Cellophane," after a song in the musical Chicago. People see right through him. They scarcely remember his name, though "St. John [pronounced Sinjon] Quartermaine" (Remak Ramsay) seems fairly emphatic. He dozes off in mid-conversation and totally forgets one of his own classes...
...Actor's Nightmare is an In joke. The simple non-hero is named George Spelvin (Jeff Brooks), a theatrical pseudonym for an actor playing a secondary role in a play. Spelvin has unaccountably wandered into stage company that he has never kept. The time is the present, but the other actors arbitrarily inform him that he is Edwin Booth's understudy in Hamlet and must go on tonight since "Eddie" has been injured in a car crash...
...SEEM to have passed the anti-hero phase in Hollywood. Dustin Hoffman has abandoned Benjamin Braddock and Ratso Rizzo for Ted Kramer. Even in "B" films like American Gigolo, the misfit hero is not glorified for his sins at the finale but redeemed, primped for "normal" society. But Wise Blood is not a Hollywood film, nor is it about normal society. In Huston's hands, Hazel Motes becomes not a hero or an anti-hero but a non-hero, one of us living out the internal battle between Jesus and Satan...
Among the Russian champions, Spassky represents the calm, collected and efficient competitor that Reuben Fine includes in the "non-hero" class, able to do well in fields other than chess. Fine also notes that the easygoing Spassky is a depressive personality, perhaps because in childhood he endured the siege of Leningrad and spent some years in an orphanage. Spassky's father left the family when Boris was very young, and the future champion was raised by his mother. Fischer, too, was deserted early in life by his father and raised by his mother. Her name, incidentally, was Regina...
...pointless liberties that Southern takes with his own book make the movie adaptation as unrecognizable as it is unbearable. The book's humor generated from its non-hero, a round little gnome named Guy Grand who indulged in marginal lunacies to relieve the boredom of his billionaire empire. Southern wryly drew the bead on the linearity and arid dullness that typify the lives of everyday Americans by dropping a rich nut in their midst...