Word: villains
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What would happen if Jim Jones hijacked the Love Boat? The villain of the show is Father Dunleavy, whose fanatical cult takes over the transatlantic luxury liner Festivale and holds its passengers hostage for $70 million in ransom. Like Jones, Dunleavy is said to be charismatic, sexy and demonic, but ABC is too smart to cast the role with an actor who might offend a Nielsen family. Instead, Dunleavy is played by Telly Savalas, whose bland manner and leisure suits make him seem more like a Las Vegas maitre d' than a satanic killer...
None of this works. Kane talks through her nose, and Beckley overacts. Dewhurst is physically far more formidable than her assailant and so does not seem menaced. Durning, a mild fat man who was perfectly cast as the comic villain in The Muppet Movie, jiggles too much when he runs to be credible as an implacable avenger. Moss grew years ago on Director Fred Walton's spooky trips...
...late Howard Hughes taken during his Chinese period," cracks Peter Sellers. Actually, it's Sellers in his newest movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Sellers, ranging between the Himalayas (actually the French Alps) and London's Limehouse district, plays the legendary Sax Rohmer villain as a 168-year-old man who steals jewels to crush them into an elixir of life. No, the chefs attire wasn't necessary to cook up such an outlandish plot. It's for the Chinese feast he's preparing for the Tower of London guards...
Howard is clearly unhappy with that possibility. For the true villain of his book is a criminal-justice system that fails to protect society from its marauders. There is, however, another villain in Zebra - one that Howard somewhat slights. In concentrating on the crimes, hideous as they are, he does not really grapple with the social ecology that may drive ill-educated, rootless men to acts of such brutality. Still, Howard's pronouncement echoes like a scream on a dark street: "California [has] a bad habit of letting its convicted killers out to kill again...
...about how to interpret the play. Kirsten Giroux's Goneril is a shallow, cold bitch-queen; Janet Rodger's Regan a bit more of a bitchy housewife. Henry Woronicz's Edmund swaggers like a comic hero, an illegitimate Petruchio. Harold Levine's Cornwall is a snivelling rat of a villain, more disgusting than threatening...