Word: rattigan
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Screenplay by TERENCE RATTIGAN...
Here are Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, two players of skill and intelligence, lending dignity and a measure of passion to a sort of pocket pageant that could bring out the worst in any actor. Rattigan's script-an adaptation of his play A Bequest to the Nation-is a damp recounting of the infamous romance between Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, a liaison that scandalized Georgian London and threatened, for a time, Britain's naval might...
Finch and Jackson are clever enough to fight their way through the musty veneer. Finch is both salty and regal, gently flamboyant without ever becoming grandiloquent, a trap that Rattigan's script sets for him at every turn. Because Jackson is an eminently subtle actress, her Emma Hamilton is not merely a creature of fire, but a vulnerability imperfectly concealed beneath layers of scar tissue. The supporting actors are stalwart, except for Michael Jayston, who suffers from a kind of congenital insipidity...
Something Missing. Before that time, the theater settled for the old teacup comedies, some Eliot and Rattigan works and some stunning performances of the classics by Guinness, Olivier and Gielgud. Taken singly, the plays that London offered were often first-rate achievements by first-rate actors and directors. Taken together, there was something missing, an ennui in the audience and on the stage itself. "Apart from revivals and imports," complained Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1954, "there is nothing in the London theater that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for five minutes." Looking back, Director Peter Brook says that...
More than 20,000 odometered miles later, the Rolls turns up in Genoa. Climbing aboard are a U.S. gangster (George C. Scott) and his moll (Shirley MacLaine), both battling Scenarist Terence Rattigan's notion of dialogue for ugly Americans. "So it leans," cracks Shirley at the tower of Pisa. The fun picks up when Scott returns to the States to eradicate a business associate, leaving his two snazzy chassis in the care of Bodyguard Art Carney. On a swimming expedition, Shirley and the Rolls are left unguarded just long enough to entertain Alain Delon, utterly persuasive as a gigolo...