Villain

For nearly 20 years, he played a "bad guy" - a communist sympathizer who'd sing the Soviet national anthem before each of his televised wrestling matches. As "Nikolai Volkoff," Josip Nikolai Peruzovic was the partner of the "Iron Sheik" in the former World Wrestling Federation, becoming possibly the most hated wrestling duo during TV wrestling's rise in the 1980s. But this week, Peruzovic is being inducted into the World Wrestling Hall of Fame and also is being honored by Baltimore County.

IN OUR celebrity-worshipping culture, where we are starved, it seems, for authentic heroes, a 26-year-old single mother has emerged as our latest cultural icon. Ashley Smith demonstrated an ability to simultaneously plead for her life and identify with the needs, emotional and spiritual, of the Atlanta courthouse shooter. And so he let her go and surrendered peacefully to police. And now she, like Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the American POW rescued in Iraq, is about to have her 15 minutes of fame.

It's 4 on a rainy morning at the All-American Diner on a deserted road outside Gallup, N.M. A bald, paunchy, amiable-looking restaurant supplies salesman (Kevin Chamberlin) is seated by a window, having a cup of coffee and reading a fishing magazine. He is jolted by the sudden appearance of an intense, sinister stranger (Ben Kingsley), who sits down opposite him and thrusts at him a clutch of drawings of mutilated corpses. Soon the salesman is rushing off to his car - but the stranger is already sitting in his back seat.

THERE'S something missing from these Olympics for American TV viewers, and it sure isn't Michael Phelps' heart, which is as big as the Chesapeake Bay from what we've seen so far. No, the something missing is this: the bad guys. Put simply, there's no one for us to sneer at anymore. All the villains are gone. There's no one for us to boo and hiss and get all worked up about, like in the old days. Once upon a time we had the Soviet Union to hate when the Olympics rolled around. And, boy, was that fun. Back when it was Morning in America and Ronald Reagan was padding around the White House in velvet bathrobes, the Evil Empire would show up at the Games with their glowering, thick-necked, dough-faced athletes - and U.S. fans would go ballistic.

Over the years, American cinema has played host to a variety of bad guys. From tomahawk-wielding Indians to goose-stepping Nazis, Cold War communists, Italian mobsters and Japanese fighters, celluloid public enemies have tended to reflect and define chapters of our nation's history. In recent times, a climate of political correctness has made movie enemies harder to come by. Communists no longer generate much fear. Japanese fighters have become the heroes of martial-arts pictures. Nazis are still reliably evil, as they were most recently in Hellboy, but stereotypical images of Native Americans, Asians, Italians, Arabs, Muslims and other ethnic, religious or political groups open filmmakers to charges of cultural insensitivity.

The name Alfred Molina isn't exactly synonymous with charisma. For three decades - in productions that range from the elegant Enchanted April to the bombastic Boogie Nights - the 51-year-old British actor has earned a reputation for performances that are inventive, intelligent and sometimes larger-than-life. But charisma? Not so much. "I belong to a very honorable tradition, and I'm very proud of it," said Molina. "The character actor tradition." That's why some movie mavens were puzzled by his being cast as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2, which opened last week.

Penny Johnson Jerald - better known as the morally bankrupt and power-hungry Sherry Palmer on the TV show 24 - was in Towson yesterday to deliver the commencement address for an elementary school graduation. She just hoped none of the students had a clue who she was. The Baltimore native doesn't think 24 is appropriate for children of such a young age. Sometimes she wonders if the show - with its gun battles and double-digit body counts - is appropriate for anyone. There are certain lines Jerald won't cross in her work, and she says 24 has occasionally come close.

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- He has a gentle manner, a long religious pedigree and a reputation for impressive scholarship in the Shiite world that holds sway in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. The United States calls Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah an inspiration for terrorism, the spiritual leader of the militant Hezbollah organization and a man who has American blood on his hands. Fadlallah, who wears the black turban of a descendant of the Prophet, embodies as few others do the vast chasm in world view between the United States and the Middle East, a clash in perception that is playing out in deadly ways across this region -- and especially in Iraq, where Fadlallah was born, studied and grew to leadership in the holy city of Najaf.

MORE THAN 40 years ago, in her book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson saved many species of birds from extinction by exposing the threat of DDT. At the time DDT was promoted as a miracle cure for pesky insects that caused diseases and reduced food/fiber production. Thanks to Carson, DDT was shown to cause far greater problems, and the cure was banned. Now a new threat to avian species that are already suffering from habitat loss and predation is emerging - industrial wind turbines, which many are promoting as a "cure" for global warming.

The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, by Caroline Alexander. Viking Press. 416 pages. $27.95. The rehabilitation of William Bligh is one of those quixotic projects that pit history against mythology, with predictable results. Remembered as a villain, the Bounty's captain was something closer to a hero: a humane commander who spared the lash, a brilliant navigator who guided an open boat full of castaways halfway across the Pacific to safety. He entered that boat at the point of a bayonet wielded by his erstwhile protege Fletcher Christian, who betrayed him and set him adrift in mid-ocean to face what looked like certain death.