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:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)