Sally said:
And Avon's reactions to being vulnerable - to risking those formidable defences of his - are more interesting than most of the others. In a good h/c story, he's - to put it mildly - rather less than willing to *be* comforted (another reason why Blake is the comforter of choice, since
Blake
is the only one who IMO can *make* Avon do what Avon doesn't want to do). In fact he sees it as a new and improved form of torture in itself, poor angel ...
This is a quote from Richard Schickel's "Matinee Idylls"--well, HE thought he was writing about Charles Laughton playing Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty [!!!!] Dustin Hoffman observed recently that the really scary thing about Laughton's Bligh was that he was the brightest man aboard the Bounty, maybe the smartest man in any theater where the movie played, and he's not exaggerating by much. One feels the hopelessness in trying to outthink or appease him; he's always a step ahead of everyone. Worse, he believes any sign of human frailty on his part, any sympathetic acknowledgment of it in others, will be understood as exploitable weakness, a chink in the armor of command that could bring him to disaster.[...]We do, perhaps, tend to forget the movie's second act in which, cast adrift with a handful of loyalists in a small boat, he navigates them across some 3,500 miles of ocean to a safe harbor and proves himself to be, as well, an inspired leader. Here we see the useful side of cold intelligence, deployed finally against a worthy enemy-- irrational, unpredictablenature--begin to see that it is HUMAN nature he should never have been asked to contend with.
-(Y)