Word: villainized
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Then there are the songs. "The Parish Boy's Progress" has nothing to sing about, but that has not stopped Composer-Lyricist Lionel Bart. Starveling orphans chant about Food, Glorious Food. Oliver asks Where Is Love? Fagin warbles, "Can a fellow be a villain all his life?" Well done? Indeed. Appropriate? In doubt. Putting trust in sounds and forms, Bart has obscured the message of "that great Christian," as Dostoevsky once called Dickens. The "demd horrid grind" is gone. In its place is solid, canny entertainment. Purists and sociologists will object as loudly as Christmas audiences will applaud...
...search for a villain, if it fails elsewhere, can always rely on the speculators to conveniently stand as whipping boys for public indignation. The moral implication always runs, "Had it not been for their greed..." But even the speculators can be excused. Greed and avarice are fairly common human motivations, and it is a bit foolish--as well as futile--to ask financiers to exercise exemplary moral restraint...
...What was the name of the villain in The Fugitive...
...again. In a dynamic and open society, losers are blessed with enormous opportunities to weather defeat by switching to new directions of adventures. The comeback is an especially American dream. Yet that itself only indicates a desperate need to win. Whole libraries could be filled with American novels whose villain is success, or a misunderstanding of what success means...
...supple mime of wisdom and Stephen Elliott's Gloucester is a man of probity incarnate, woefully abused. Barbette Tweed's Cordelia is appropriately sweet and good; Patricia Elliott as Regan and Marilyn Lightstone as Goneril are properly serpentine. Only Stacy Keach disappoints, by failing into smirky stage-villain mannerisms as Gloucester's bastard son Edmund. His performance misses the point of Shakespeare's transcendent vision which makes earthly villainy pale before the terrors meted out to men by fate...