Word: rhett
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From childhood Alan Bates has had an urge to play a romantic hero-a Rhett Butler, perhaps, carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairway of Tara. Instead, for most of his career he has been the antihero, borne along, as he puts it, "on the new wave of English writers -kitchen sinks and psychology." He was the funny but menacing brother in Harold Pinter's play and movie The Caretaker, the father who half mocks his helpless, brain-damaged child in the filmed version of A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, and the attractive...
...Soviet virago, titillatingly mannish yet secretly craving French perfume and Melvyn Douglas. Such, at least, was popular mythology-women, even in their supposed emancipation, have often been, as it were, prisoners of the male imagination. Always there was the secret, insistent vibration of sex: rebellion ends when Rhett Butler kicks down the door...
Through it all, there weaves a plot of sorts. Will the English land secret shipment of snuff on Rhett O'Ricks dock? Will Rhett stay sober enough to that Miss Glory Morning can marry him? Will Johnny Profane remain true to Chaste DeBluesaway despite her miniscule breasts? Or will her father the Mayor foreclose the Wrongway Inn instead? Not quite the ideological origins of the American Revolution, to be sure...
...cast can both sing and dance--no small achievement. However, there's a certain needed element of farce that could be more in evidence than it is. On the male side of things, Peter Kellogg plays Johnny with appropriate ingenueity and Michael O'Hare is an authoritative enough Rhett (although he rather seems to disappear from the action during the show's second half). As Mayor DeBluesaway, Nick Wyman steals the show with imperious poise and a nimble baritone voice...
Director Billy Wilder once ecstatically claimed that Walter Matthau "could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara." For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur...