Decline
Harvey's career began to decline from the mid-1960s. The 1964 remake of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage was a failure, as was The Outrage (1964), director Martin Ritt's remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic Rashomon, despite the presence of Paul Newman. Harvey reprised his Oscar-nominated role as Joe Lampton in Life at the Top (1965), but the film was not a success.
Harvey returned to Britain to make the comedy The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966). His last hurrah was his appearance in the spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic (1968), which he took over after the original director Anthony Mann died during shooting. In 1968, in settlement of a dispute with Woodfall Films over the rights to The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Woodfall cast him in their version as a Russian prince. He performed as cast, but was never seen as the Prince in the finished film. The only part of his performance remaining in the final cut is a brief appearance of him in the background of one shot, as an anonymous member of a theatre audience. Thereafter Harvey played out his career largely in undistinguished films, TV work and the occasional supporting role in a major production.
In The Magic Christian, he recited Hamlet's soliloquy, almost nude and very thin. A promising project, Orson Welles's The Deep (1970) with Jeanne Moreau, was never finished. One performance from this period was in a 1971 U.S. horror film television episode, titled "The Caterpillar" on Rod Serling's Night Gallery. He was also guest murderer of the week on Columbo: The Most Dangerous Match in 1973 as a chess champion who murders his opponent.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)