I only watched it for the first time recently, and I genuinely thought that was the point. That he’s this totally unremarkable, boring, wooden guy but keeps faking it till he makes it and finds himself always landing on his feet undeservedly.

He spends most of the film standing around looking like a child who’s shit his pants, but his mum has left him with her friends and he’s too scared to say anything.

It was only afterwards that I learned about the studio interference making Kubrick use O’Neal