To watch O’Toole and Orson Welles on the BBC’s “Monitor” program, in
1963, as they ruminate at length on “Hamlet” and his father’s ghost, is
to realize what a real talk show is, or what it could be, when the
airwaves were still haunted by the grand talkers. What takes you
slightly aback, however, is not that O’Toole seems willing and able to
discuss seventeenth-century Catholic doctrines of the afterlife but
that, with his dicky bow, dark shirt, and thick-rimmed black spectacles,
he looks like a man in disguise. His face and frame were those of an El
Greco saint, caught between temptation and penance; scan his
filmography and you see how seldom he made an impact in modern garb, and
what elegant shelter he sought in period dress. Twice he played King
Henry II, in “Becket” and “The Lion in Winter.” He was Don Quixote; he
was King Priam, trembling at the sack of Troy; he was Tiberius,
attending the even greater disaster of “Caligula.” He also played Conan
Doyle, in “Fairy Tale: A True Story,” which only reinforced one’s
disappointment that he was never fully unleashed as Sherlock Holmes. His
résumé does list four appearances as Holmes, but those were in
low-rent, animated versions for TV, and, for once, the voice was not
enough; we needed to observe him in his finery, unfurling the long
limbs, the languor, and the dread of boredom that we associate with
Baker Street, not to mention the neurosis that twitched below the skin
of the sleuth. Sometimes unmade films, like unmade beds, tell stories of
their own.
- Anthony Lane
And then he actually quotes "Crossing the Bar." I didn't know whether to be slightly horrified or even more deeply in love with him. Jesus, I didn't know anyone still even knew that one anymore. (Well, I looked up his age, and he's 51 -- which surprised me, I'd always thought he was younger than me. ((Who isn't, these days.)) He's still got the perpetual too-smart-for-the-room glibness of the eternal Wunderkind. ((Why no, I know nothing about that style composed of verbal tics. Why even ask?)) )
descensus Averno facilis est