Creator

A not unlikeable dog's dinner of a campus comedy, centring on Nobel prize-winning professor O'Toole's attempts to recreate his dead darling wife in his garden shed. Despite workaday direction, a slightly forced optimism, and the centrifugal force of Jeremy Leven's untogether script (adapted from his own novel), the cheeriness and enthusiasm of the playing carries it through. The film comes on like a dumb 1970s version of a Shaw play, with O'Toole running his University Research Department like a happy Captain Shotover, appropriating funds and equipment with carefree abandon and forever inviting his assistants to search for the 'Big Picture'. Hemingway plays the 'Life Force', a free spirit with a permanent orgasm who agrees to provide an egg for O'Toole's experiment. Spano's gadget-obsessed assistant gives outline to O'Toole's paternal qualities, and David Ogden Stiers' small-minded colleague provides the foil for O'Toole's flamboyant irresistability. It's a Peter O'Toole show, and it's worth it for his craggy-stoned face alone.