Cinema: Mired in the Highlands

Often a good actor and sometimes a great one, Peter O'Toole nevertheless has little talent for concealing his boredom in film projects that seem unworthy of his skills. There is always one sure sign of his desperation: O'Toole begins to twitch. His right eyebrow arches, his mouth creases, one shoulder appears to rise several inches above the other, and his neck bobs back and forth as if a series of tiny explosions were occurring at the top of his spinal column. This invariably happens at moments of great stress, when the actor, not the character, has come to the end of his rope.

Brotherly Love is so bad a movie that O'Toole appears to be in almost continual spasm from beginning to end. Mired in the Scottish highlands, he plays a daft and decadent nobleman, improbably named Sir Charles Henry Arbuthnot Pinkerton Ferguson, who has an unholy craving for his sister (Susannah York). After causing no end of mischief—including crippling Susannah's marriage and shooting his left ear off with a shotgun—poor "Pink," as sis calls him, is packed off to a genteel asylum run by a kindly doctor named Maitland. Cyril Cusack, the fine Irish character actor, plays this role with a certain amount of bemused charm that makes the brother's plight slightly more believable and O'Toole's even more poignant.