Word: sebastians
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Anthony Quinn does his thing in Guns for San Sebastian-he sweats and grunts with apelike ardor over food, wine and women; he fights like a tiger and suffers like a saint. When Quinn does his thing, it is usually very well done indeed, but the kind of film he does it in is another matter...
Minus Malvolio, Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the old plot slides surprisingly well into the with-it world. Viola's whim of dressing in men's clothes, inexplicable in the original, fits in quite naturally with the mod look; she and her brother Sebastian wear identical outfits of zippered yellow tunics and rust trousers, and of course their moptops are the same length. The updated plot involves a singing group known as the Apocalypse, one member of which has just been drafted. Viola, calling herself Charlie, fills in for him; when Orsino, here known as Orson, feels...
...impinges on 1968-in the aluminum façades of antiseptic buildings, in the whir of computers, and in the human automatons who face their drab jobs with all the relish of zombies. That at least seems to be the view of Sebastian, a film that attempts to analyze the mind-numbing effects of a Pentagonal bureaucracy on a brilliant civil servant...
...Oxford don, Sebastian (Dirk Bogarde) is whacking bad at human relations but so cracking good at puzzle solving that the government employs him to find a cure for the common code used by enemy agents. When hiring new girls for his staff, Sebastian confronts them with questions like "How many words can you make from thorough!" And "What is Naitsabes spelled backward?" A Queeg in mufti, he compulsively fingers a rubber ball as he orders his overworked underlings to "switch your gorgeous minds to overdrive." From time to time, Sebastian mutters antiheroic cliches to himself, like...
...title role, Bogarde provides added proof that he is a film actor with an extraordinary range of sensibilities. He is immensely aided by a strong supporting cast, notably Lilli Palmer as a sad-eyed, burned-out leftist, and the omnipresent John Gielgud as Sebastian's chief. But good actors need more than each other in order to make a film work, and in the end Naitsabes spelled backward is only a promising idea mishandled. Dab wohs...