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Show Here's looking at David Soul By Ian Harmer HOLLYWOOD He's had a rough time in the press lately late-ly because of an incident that he wisely prefers not to talk about, but things are looking up for one-time TV cop David Soul. This week, he gets the second sec-ond of three NBC outings as the central figure in a small-screen small-screen remake of the ancient Humphrey Bogart movie classic, clas-sic, "Casablanca." And if viewer reaction warrants war-rants it. Rick Blaine, owner of the Cafe Americain, will make a more permanent metamorphosis met-amorphosis from dark cynicism cyni-cism to blue-eyed, blond optimism opti-mism come the fall. Kveryone connected with the series is at pains to point out that "no one's playing Humphrey Bogart here," and Soul probably has the biggest investment in the drive to nail any false assumptions. He said: "The first time I was offered the part, I turned it down. I've seen the original several times, and I hold it in exactly the same reverence as everyone else who remembers it. "But the fact is that the 1940s were an interesting and challenging period, and Casablanca' Casa-blanca' captured it perfectly. "It was a time when life was cheap and people were on the run, and Rick and his cafe represented something that was in short supply... personal commitment. "We're talking entertainment entertain-ment here and it's not our job to make political or moral judgements. But an actor needs to believe in what he is doing, and the historical set- ting and the location of the story is an opportunity to David Soul develop characters and situations situa-tions in a way which isn't tried too often on TV." Soul promises that more attention will be paid to the written word in "Casablanca" than was often the case in "Starsky and Hutch," an ABC ratings winner that frequently had about as much weight as today's "The Dukes of Hazzard." But he makes no apologies for the series that established him not just as an actor but as a million-selling recording artist, and he says he looks back on it fondly. He said: "No one understood under-stood the relationship between those two cops better than Paul (Michael Glaser) and I, and sometimes the scripts we were given to work with had a childish approach to it. "Paul and I developed a spontaneity which, so long as it was kept in check, could turn good scripts into better ones and bad scripts into good. But sometimes it got a little out of hand." |
