disappearance of her fried, but only a short time later she fears her friend will re-appear: she fears her friend will re-appear to take Sandro away from her. But then, soon enough, Sandro cheats on Claudia with that lovely Italian girl, who we met earlier in the film, cheats on Claudia at the palatial hotel; for further evidence of Sandro’s instability he purposely spilled the ink on that guy‘s drawing of a local architectural detail. Sandro obviously has some brains, as he has made lots of money giving financial assessments, enough to own beautiful homes in both Rome and Milan. But he is unstable. How could he chase after Claudia the very day Anna disappeared? How could he cheat on Claudia so soon after he wins her heart? He is driven by his passions, you see. You wouldn’t say Sandro is evil, but, rather, you would say he is a very unstable character. He’s a stereotypical Latin male and is therefore always looking to seduce females. You might compare and contrast him with the Celtic Emma Baudine – played by Siobhan McKenna - in Daughter of Darkness – which also starred a young Honor Blackman – she played a villain in the James Bond film Goldfinger. Emma, in Daughter of Darkness, is driven by something very dark and sinister. She starts out in a very sympathetic way with the audience. Her first two killings were not premeditated murders, though there’s some ambiguity with the second killing, but her third killing is definitely pre-meditated murder - she kills an English guy named Larry – but even after her third killing Emma still doesn’t lose all sympathy with the audience, because it is as if she is possessed by a demon, and you’re thinking it is the demon inside her which is responsible for the evil, not the lovely Irish lass / femme fatale, Emma Baudine. I suppose one could ramble on forever about how literature and movies and real life give us no end of examples of people torn between warring passions. Hamlet is torn between the desire to avenge his murdered father and the fear of the punishment given to regicides; Othello loves the woman he murders; MacBeth murders the king because his wife has been nagging him, implying he’s a wimp with no ambition if he doesn’t murder the king; Raskonikov thinks he’s a Napoleon, or at least some sort of being who is above the moral law in Crime and Punishment; he murders an old pawnbroker to lay his hands on her cash; but he can not escape his tormented conscience though he never thought, before he stuck an axe in her head, that he would be tormented by a guilty conscience. I was watching this movie called The Oxford Murders starring Elijah Wood – he was Frodo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was semi-pornographic in one scene - The Oxford Murders not The Lord of the Rings trilogy - though I suppose the film has no great artistic merit. Three Days of the Condor is far more of an artistic success than The Oxford Murders – it has great actors in it: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow – but it still has a huge flaw in that the film making team insisted that there be a scene where Robert Redford sleeps with Faye Dunaway. Perhaps someone was insisting that to sell more tickets to maximize profits they had to have a scene where Robert Redford sleeps with Faye Dunaway, even though it made no sense in the film. The beginning scene of Jamaica Inn is cool, as the mood being set in stormy Cornwall was well done, but I gave up on it after about 20 minutes. I really liked I See a Dark Stranger starring a very beautiful young Deborah Kerr. Trevor Howard was in it and he’s always good. He’s great in The Clouded Yellow, The Third Man etc. Really liked Tread Softly Stranger, starring a very beautiful young Diana Dors, and Hunted starring Dirk Bogarde and Jon Whitely. Yes, Daughter of Darkness, and The Sleeping Car Murder with Yves Montand, and Five Fingers (Cicero) Spy in Ankara are really good. 15 years ago I watched the 6-hour 1997 BBC production of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, starring Claudio Amendola, Roberto Escobar, Brian Dennehy, Colin Firth, Kristen Scott Thomas etc. - but Netflix doesn’t have it so I only saw it once. It struck me as perfectly made. The novel by Conrad can be a little tedious, as Conrad wrote in that odd style of his which can be considered great art in some parts of his novels but the prose nevertheless tries your patience in other places – he gives you extraordinary passages which could only have written by a great artist, but then, also, his prose can become very baroque and overloaded and really tiresome. So the film Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is something you might want to see before your read the novel Nostromo. I like the opening of Grand Slam, starring Klaus Kinksi, Adolfo Celi, Janet Leigh, Edward G. Robinson etc. I like the way you get those great shots of the New York skyline from the helicopter while that music from Ennio Morricone is playing. The Virginian had a great intro. The music starts up and you meet Lee J. Cobb, and then the cool James Drury and his horse come into the picture. Lee J. Cobb was in tons of great films, such as The Three Faces of Eve, Thieves Highway and On the Waterfront. I forget what the French title was, but the English version had the title of Going Places, a film starring a young Gerard Depardieu. It’s quite a bit different than The Virginian. It wasn’t shocking in the way so many slasher films are shocking - nasty violence delivered in a style designed to fascinate stupid juveniles. It was shocking in that it had high production values and some first-rate actors, but it really dragged you into a gutter; it took you places very far removed from the places a great film like Jean de Florette, also starring Gerard Depardieu, take you. Look at the characters in the films of Capra, Dassin, Wilder, Preminger, Lang, Hitchcock, Frankenheimer, Friedkin, Sirk, Zinnemann, Melville, Truffaut, Rohmer, Lelouch, Chabrol, Herzog, Stone, Tarantino etc., etc. The heroes or protagonists in their films are torn by conflicting passions. Look at Brando in On the Waterfront. He is a man torn between two courses of action. He can rat on the mob or he can refuse to rat on the mob. Look at Brando in Night after the Following Day. He tells one of his partners in crime that the caper is over, because another guy in their ring of kidnappers is a homicidal maniac – and in France they’ll cut your head off – cut your head off! - if you are involved in the murder of a kidnapping victim. Brando wants the ransom money, but he’s torn, you see, because the caper has gone sour, and though he wants the cash he also doesn’t want his head cut off by some French executioner, but then his pal convinces him the cash is just too tempting to not chase after, so Brando concedes the caper is on again, but then at the end of the film the kidnapped girl is murdered by the homicidal maniac, so Brando’s instinct to call off the caper was correct, but the lure of the cash clouded his vision. Look at Alain Delon who plays Julien Something-or-Other in Creezy, aka La Race de Seigneurs. You get those opening shots of a beautiful girl in bed. The director shoots her from a low camera angle to accentuate the most glamorous and aesthetic aspects of her face. Julien wants to keep his photogenic cover-girl girlfriend, but he also wants to advance his political career. In order to advance his political career he needs to spend lots and lots of time away from his clingy girlfriend working hard at politics, but if he wants to keep his girlfriend he needs to sacrifice his political career, by spending lots more time with her and lots less time furthering his political career. What a typical sort of trap! You can see that one coming from a mile away. Human beings are always finding themselves in these vicious traps, you know? There was a mountain climber named George Mallory, and he wanted to be the first to climb Mt. Everest. He also had a lovely wife and 3 adorable children. By being the first person to climb Everest he would satisfy one passion, and he would also have enough celebrity status to launch a writing career, by which he could make lots of money to support the family he loved. But his passion to climb the highest mountain in the world led to tragedy, as he died climbing Mt. Everest. Leaving a wife and three kids to climb a dangerous mountain, a huge peak which might easily kill you via avalanches, or kill you via a slip and a fall of thousands of feet, or kill you by freezing you to death, or kill you via oxygen starvation etc., etc., doesn’t look terribly intelligent! You might think bouncing off the hard rocks as you plummet down a mountainside, with all your bones and limbs and features being horribly mangled, would be an especially nasty way to check out; but I imagine death or at least the anesthesia of unconsciousness comes rather
quickly – the really nasty way to go is to be slowly suffocated to death under an avalanche, that sort of death is probably a million times worse than either death by falling or death by the luxury of freezing to death in a blizzard. In any event, if you are driven by an overpowering passion to take insane risks, what else can you do except surrender to the overpowering passion? People will say you are a dumb-ass if you risk your neck climbing mountains. Look at Hermann Buhl on Nanga Parbat and then on Chogolisa, where he fell to his death. But he was doing what he loved to do and we only know his name because of what he did on Nanga Parbat….Well listen to me ramble on. Getting back to Modern Drunkard Magazine – a periodical which stands up for your right to get falling down drunk - oh wait! – there’s no time for that. The Moderator is just shoving the last slice of pizza into his mouth, and washing it down with beer, perhaps his 4th or 5th or 17th beer, as he staggers