Or the meek superhero Captain Nice from the 1967 TV series of the same name. (Created by Buck Henry!)

Maybe they'll do a sequel to "And the Children Shall Lead" with Donald Trump in the Melvin Belli role…

I like it! The Wrath of Cohen. A perfect analogy to Allan Sherman's lyric about "the drapes of Roth."

Khan, not Kahn, please, I implore you! (the photo cutline's correct)

Why is she driving a 50-year-old Studebaker Wagonaire? And is that the most intriguing thing about this movie?

I saw that SNL when it first aired, and was going to write the same thing.

Yes, but at the point he murders Lester, he becomes the hyper-masculine gay guy who provides the prototypical "bullet to the back of the head," as described. It's sort of like Harry Mudd (Roger C. Carmel) in "Mudd's Women": The lie detector calls him out for claiming (concerning his occupation) that he's devoted his…

Don't forget that Sonny also had a conventional (unambiguously female) wife. (Both she and Leon appear on screen.) If she and Leon were both Sonny's wives in the sense accepted in the 1970s, he'd be a bigamist. Since that's never brought up, ipso facto Leon and Sonny must be a gay couple.

Don't forget Roy Scheider as "Doc" Levy (Scylla) and William Devane as Janeway ("Janey") in Marathon Man (1976). Their relationship was even more understated in the movie than in the novel (both written by William Goldman) but nonetheless unmistakable.

I do rather like the idea of Cocteau having directed a James Bond movie.

Oddly enough, I knew the soundtrack album (on 8-track!) very well for years before I ever saw the movie. It includes the complete Dave Grusin tracks - heard only in excerpts in the movie - plus several of his that weren't used, as well as the older S&G material, plus "Mrs. Robinson" in a version different from both…

I have to put in another plug for Charles Webb's novel, which came out in 1963. It's very economically told and is a very fast read despite having more detail than the movie.

In the novel, that's exactly the impression given at the end: They have no clue what they're going to do next. (Ben breaks up the wedding before its conclusion, but the emotions on the bus are the same as in the movie.) First Ben repeatedly yells to the astonished driver to "get this bus moving!", he does so, and then…

The "affair" line that Buck Henry gives himself, and the earlier "plastics" exchange at the homecoming party, are two of the very few pieces of dialogue that aren't verbatim from the Charles Webb novel or very close to it. The only other important change is that in the novel, Ben interrupts Elaine's wedding ceremony…

I was going by the scene where each renegade replicant is identified in turn, by name and photo. In that scene, Roy Batty is the only one who's not single-named.

In P. K. Dick's much-different source novel, he was Roy Baty and had an android wife, Irmgard (Deckard had a wife too, incidentally). When they changed Baty to "Batty" while making his character into a bad-ass for the movie, they could just as well have dropped the "Roy"; it is silly that he's the only two-named…

I would have liked to see two misguided stage adaptations I've known about for years: Lolita My Love (music and lyrics by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner), which closed during out-of-town previews in 1971, or Edward Albee's short-lived 1981 adaptation of Lolita (see www.nytimes.com/books/99/08… ). Also, Leonard…

Here's how Appel renders the verse beginning "L'autre soir":

Nabokov himself in 1956, in the entertaining afterword "On a Novel Entitled Lolita" in some editions, mentions that one prospective publisher interpreted the book as "old Europe debauching young America" while another thought the opposite. The whole afterword is well worth reading.

Damn. Well, it was 39 years ago.