FILM REVIEW

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and Pearl Harbour (2001)

Over the next three days, I will be covering an international expo and conference on construction equipment and machinery in Mumbai. The mighty machines are good to look at and photograph. Meanwhile, here’s a review of two war films that Zero in on a common theme, for (not exactly) Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his Day of Infamy speech to a joint session of Congress, a day after Japan attacked the Pearl Harbour Naval Base in Hawaii.

Tora means Tiger in Japanese but here
it alludes to a torpedo attack.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a realistic docudrama about the events before, during and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. In contrast, Pearl Harbour is a love story dramatised around the events of that fateful day.

I saw veteran director Richard Fleischer's Tora! Tora! Tora! some 30 years ago, in an old, rundown cinema hall called El Dorado in the tourist haven of Goa, on the west coast of India. Except for one scene, I don’t remember anything about this film. In that scene a Japanese torpedo snakes its way just beneath the earth, past a tall tree, still standing, towards men and women who jump out of its explosive path. This could yet be a sketchy recollection. I need to eat almonds.

I certainly don't remember the roles played by the fine cast of Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, James Whitmore, and Jason Robards. But I do remember enjoying the film a lot.

Then, last evening, I watched the final leg of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour, which I had previously seen in two sessions (way I usually watch movies on television). The love tangle of Rafe (Ben Affleck), Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) on one hand and the Rafe-Danny friendship on the other does little to elevate the film even though the two related elements are the pivots around which the Japanese bombing of the Harbour takes place. The historical event, which forced America to enter the war, seems like happenstance.

What lifts Pearl Harbour above plot mediocrity is the special effects that make it a visually stunning film, in particular the destruction of the naval base and the US Pacific Fleet by modified torpedoes dropped from the air. In one memorable scene, a warship is shown tilting on its side before turning turtle and taking much of the crew with it. As we see in Titanic (1997), here too sailors slide down the broad deck of the ship and thrown overboard, into the burning sea.

A film like Pearl Harbour, with its historical import, does not require a review; a few observations will suffice. Here are some of mine…

1. I thought Jon Voight made a very good President Roosevelt in the wheelchair. The resemblance is striking. Voight’s FDR is shown smoking a cigarette though I haven’t seen pictures of the real New Deal president smoking one. I know he smoked.

2. One of the things that I don’t like about Hollywood films is the jingoism built into the plot of a film associated with war or an alien invasion. In this film, for instance, Rafe and Danny’s boss, Lt. Col. James Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), mouths lines to stir patriotic fervour among his motley crew of pilots flying to their death. I thought some of his lines were inane and served little purpose. But then, this is Pearl Harbour and America has a right to be super-patriotic. Towards the end Doolittle, Rafe, Danny and some of the survivors salute smartly in what I felt was an overdose of salutes.

The real General James Doolittle

Incidentally, General James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle was an American aviation pioneer and a lieutenant colonel in the USAF during WWII. He was assigned to Army Air Forces HQ and led 16 B-25 bombers on a secret mission to bomb targets in Japan. Spencer Tracy also played Doolittle in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).

3. Apparently, Baldwin’s portrayal of the distinguished general created a furore among those who knew Doolittle. I can partly see why. He appears out of sorts as the commander of a task force out to avenge the attack. He looks as if he is on a picnic. The depth and intensity of the character, in the backdrop of the horrific invasion, is missing. In fact, he looks little different from his character in It’s Complicated (2009) where he woos ex-wife Meryl Streep.

Alec Baldwin as Lt. Col. James Doolittle

4. Petty Officer Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has a bit role in the film. In spite of graduating from the academy, he is assigned a cook’s job. When his ship is attacked and his mates fall around him, an enraged Miller grabs hold of an anti-aircraft gun and downs a couple of Zeros — “Yeesss!”

Of the three main actors, only Hartnett shows intensity of character. Affleck and Beckinsale are rather expressionless. Their ordinary love story apart, Pearl Harbour scores high for its historical value and special effects, as does Tora! Tora! Tora!

BOOK REVIEW

British Comics: Commando, Love Stories, 

and All Girls

Evan Lewis has the links to this Friday’s Forgotten Books at his blog Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West where you’ll find many interesting entries. 

A childhood without comics is like a newspaper without the comics page.

Issue No.1, July 1961

Last Friday, I took a trip down memory lane and relived the many hours I spent reading the Hardy Boys with my childhood friends. Not surprisingly, I took a few blog friends with me on this nostalgic whirligig. We shared the joys of reading the adventures of amateur detectives Frank and Joe, and Nancy Drew.

A week later, I am still in memory lane, pottering around in the library of my youth, shaking the dust from some more books, and comics, I read as a kid. Of these I have fond memories of three kinds of comic-books I read back then—war, romance, and young adult.

These comics had four common features: their pocket size, impressive cover art, black-and-white illustrations, and speech bubbles. Otherwise, the themes and stories were as different as Daredevil and Donald Duck.

Commando: For Action and Adventure (originally known as Commando War Stories in Pictures), published by D.C. Thomson and Company of Dundee, Scotland, since 1961, remains my favourite war comic-book, though there have been several offshoots the size of your palm.

The Commando comics, numbering more than 4,000 including reprints in celebration of 50 years in 2011, are usually set during WWII and feature stories of bravery, friendship, patriotism, nobility, defection, and cowardice. Most of the time the enemies are the Nazis and the Japanese, who are depicted as very evil, but it is not uncommon to see an Allied soldier and a German soldier becoming friends and risking their lives to save each other. In a typical scene one enemy soldier will carry the other on his shoulder and run to safety. In one particular comic, two enemy soldiers discover, in the thick of battle, that their fathers knew each other, as friends or foes I don’t recollect.

My favourite Commando comics are the ones where the battle plays out in a different war theatre, such as North Africa, the desert sands of Arabia, or the battlegrounds of Indo-China. Likewise, I have a preference for non-combat troops like the French and Italian partisans who fought alongside the Allies.

There is no dearth of ideas for the storyboard and nearly every one of the 68-page comic-book seems real. The stories are fictional, of course, but they leave you wondering if the events really took place. The comics are known as much for their cover art in colour and black-and-white sketches inside as they are for the stories and their often exaggerated plotlines.

Their popularity is evident in the continuation of the series over more than 50 years, new reprints in a size falling between a pocketbook and a regular comic-book, and omnibus editions. These modern-day Commando comics sell for Rs.60 (a little over $1) in India. However, a few years ago, I was fortunate enough to buy a big lot for as little as Rs.5 (almost free in dollar terms), all original.

Unlike Commando, which I still read, I don’t have much recollection of the pocket-sized romance comics called Star: Love Stories in Pictures published by D.C. Thomson or Love Story Picture Library published by the Amalgamated Press, both British imprints. These romance comics also had covers in colour and illustrations in black and white. The stories and pictures were never erotic or vulgar and kissing was the maximum you could get out of a man and his gal. They were milder versions of M&B except they were in comic-book format.

D.C. Thomson, which used to publish the popular Beano and Dandy comics, also brought out a series of pocket-sized comics for young girls under the age of 16. These were known as Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and Debbie. In later years, some of these comics, Judy in particular, were merged with Emma and Mandy and it’s all very confusing. If I remember correctly, the comics were only titled as Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and Debbie and there were no real characters by those names. 

The comics told stories about the everyday lives of teenage girls, their trials, their triumphs, and their glories, with a moral in the end. The all-girls comics were around until the 1990s and I think they have long ceased publication.

Do you remember reading any of these comics? What are your memories of early comic-books?

VINTAGE PICTURES

The cover art of Frank Schoonover

The proof of the book is not only in the reading. It is also in feasting the eyes on the cover. Particularly, if the art is by an illustrator like Frank Earle Schoonover (1877-1972).

Schoonover, one of the foremost students of renowned illustrator and author Howard Pyle, had more than 2,000 illustrations to his credit and many of these adorned the dust jackets of well-known books and magazines that included stories of Hopalong Cassidy by Clarence E. Mulford, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Blackbeard Buccaneer by Ralph Delahaye Paine. 

Hopalong Takes Command oil on canvas
by Schoonover for The Fight at Buckskin
story (1905).

Schoonover worked in his studio in Wilmington, Delaware, where he earned the title of the Dean of Delaware Artists. His art collection, pertaining mainly to the early 20th century period, is preserved at the Delaware Art Museum. The museum was founded in 1912 as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in honour of Howard Pyle. It celebrated its centennial last year.

According to the Schoonover Studios Ltd, “Schoonover’s subject matter included cowboys, Indians, and Canadian trappers. His forms were simple and well defined and his moods powerful. Later in his career, his style became less rigid and more impressionistic. Schoonover was also an accomplished water colourist and muralist and an avid photographer. He used photographs as references for his illustrations to remind himself of the mood and character of the models.” 

The Golden Age illustrator was born in New Jersey, educated at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and died in Wilmington at the age of 95.

You can learn more about Frank Schoonover at Schoonover Studios Ltd and the Schoonover Fund.

Pictures: © Wikimedia Commons

Repeat offence

Worn Out: At Eternity's Gate
by Vincent Van Gogh.
© Wikimedia Commons

Since I don’t have an e-reader, yet, ebooks have not made an impact on my reading process. I still read books in physical form. The only ebooks I read on the laptop or desktop are short stories and short fiction, anything less than 50 or 60 pages, usually over two to three days. I don’t have the patience to read lengthy ebooks sitting at my desk. It is backbreaking and can lead to a stiff neck.

This post is not about the way I read books. It’s about the many authors I discovered and rediscovered in the first dozen years of this ebook century. While I cannot recollect each and every author I read over the past 12 years, I can tell you the ones who come back to me more often than others. I don’t know how that happens. My subconscious probably opens the door and allows them in.

I took a pencil and paper and wrote down, offhand, as many names of authors I could remember; authors new and old I read this century. I came up with a list of 24 names give or take a few worthy exceptions, like John Steinbeck, Brian Garfield, and Tom Sharpe.

I ran through the list of established authors and found that I had read several books written by most of them, with the exception of Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, and Jonathan Kellerman. These are writers I discovered quite recently and I haven’t read all of their books yet. They account for a sizeable number of unread books in my collection. 

Then I placed the authors according to the genres they write in. This is what it looks like, with a subjective recommendation for nearly each of the authors. The titles mentioned are not my favourites, they are some of the books I really enjoyed.

Fantasy & SF
01. Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
02. Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan at the Earth’s Core
03. J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Spy & Thriller
04. Tom Clancy – The Hunt for Red October
05. John le Carré – The Constant Gardener
06. Craig Thomas – Snow Falcon
07. Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins) – The Eagle Has Landed
08. Don Pendleton (Mack Bolan) – War Against the Mafia

General
09. John Irving – The World According to Garp
10. Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
11. A.J. Cronin – Beyond This Place (most would vote for The Citadel)
12. Nevil Shute – None that I can think of

Crime & Mystery
13. Mickey Spillane – Not read many
14. John MacDonald – Not read many
15. Ed McBain – Not read many
16. Agatha Christie – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (so far)
17. Elmore Leonard – Not read many. I haven't read his westerns
18. Lawrence Block – Not read many
19. Jonathan Kellerman – Not read many
20. Martin Cruz Smith – Gorky Park (Arkady Renko series)

Humour
21. P.G. Wodehouse – Blandings series

Western
22. Oliver Strange – The Range Robbers
23. Louis L'Amour – Flint

Classics
24. Thomas Hardy – A toss-up between The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure. Michael Henchard (in the first) and Jude Fawley (in the second) must be two of the most intense and pathetic characters in English literature.

Who are some of the authors who have stayed with you this century? Which ones keep coming back through the backdoor? Do you let them stay?

FILM REVIEW

Posse from Hell (1961)

There’s nothing like watching a good western on a Friday night. The next day is a holiday (if it's a second or fourth Saturday in my case), and you can wake up late. I did and here’s the proof of it, for Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

In a brief lifespan of 45 years, Texas-born Audie Murphy became a national hero and a screen icon.

Murphy is hailed as America’s most decorated combat soldier during World War II. His 33 medals include the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest US military award for bravery, and similar decorations from France and Belgium. He is believed to have killed some 250 German soldiers and wounded and captured several others during the war.

After the war, the charismatic First Lieutenant in the US Army returned home to a second blazing career, this time in Hollywood where he proved his acting skills in over 40 films, mostly westerns, over a period of 20 years. He died in May 1971. 

Audie Murphy with his medals.

I would never have known of Murphy, the war vet and son of a Texas farmer, if I hadn't seen Murphy, the actor, in Posse from Hell. Although I have read a few reviews of his western films online, I hadn't seen any of them until last weekend; not even the more acclaimed To Hell and Back (1955) based on a book he wrote in 1949 detailing his wartime experience or No Name on the Bullet (1959) nicely reviewed by Ron Scheer at Buddies in the Saddle.

Murphy, who played Jesse James in his last film A Time for Dying (1969), was before my generation which is no escaping the fact that I could have known him better through his many films. After all, I am familiar with the celluloid works of his many contemporaries like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Yul Brynner, and Clint Eastwood. I attribute my singular amnesia over Murphy to his death at the young age of 45, taking him away from public limelight before his time. Few Indians would have heard of Murphy whose films were not broadcast often on the now-extinct TCM India. 

 
Well, there is always a first time for everything. This film was written by the US author of westerns, Clair Huffaker, who wrote the book of the same name. Many of his westerns, such as The War Wagon (1967), were made into films. Huffaker appears to be something of a cult figure in western fiction.

Clair Huffaker

I caught Posse from Hell quite by chance. I was surfing YouTube for full-length western movies when this particular one, directed by Herbert Coleman, popped up. I clicked start and, in a few moments, I was transported into the middle of a broad street on a moonless night. Dark houses line either side of the street in the old western town called Paradise. Four riders come out of the shadows and dismount in front of a saloon. They enter the batwing doors, hold the saloon and its few patrons hostage, and then kill randomly. There is no escape. An angry crowd gathers outside, their guns cocked, ready to storm the saloon. The four escapees from a death cell kill the brave Marshal Isaac Webb (Ward Ramsey) in cold blood before getting away with their prize catch—money from the bank and a lovely girl called Helen Caldwell (Zohra Lampert). The killers have an evil motive: rape the girl. 

Banner Cole (Audie Murphy), the sheriff’s deputy, arrives on the scene, just in time to hear the marshal’s dying words: he wants Banner to find the murderers and recover the loot.

The deputy, as fearless as his boss, decides to organise a posse. But, before he does, he tells the whitemen bluntly that they are free to back out if they don’t have the stomach for the long and gruelling chase. Banner touches a raw nerve and a few men drop out. He then leads a six-member posse out of town whose folks think he is crazy.

The film ends in predictable fashion with Banner rescuing Helen and falling in love with her on one hand and gaining a friend for life on the other. 

John Saxon, Audie Murphy and Rodolfo Acosta.

A few observations, in no particular order, won’t be out of place here.

1. Banner comes to rely on the lone half-breed in the posse more than he does on the whitemen. Johnny Caddo, played by Mexican character-actor Rodolfo Acosta, remains loyal to Banner and sticks with him up to the end. On his part, the deputy sheriff acknowledges Johnny’s worth and rues his death in an ambush. By a coincidence, I have been reading westerns in which Indians and half-breeds are shown in a better light.

2. The friend Banner gains in the hunt is Seymour Kern (John Saxon), a clerk at the bank, whose boss needles him into joining the posse to bring back the money. The city-bred Seymour is dressed in a suit and has never used a gun or sat on a horse before. He learns to do both in the posse. He also learns to fight fear and cover Banner when he needs it most. The posse makes a real man out of Seymour, a role that a young Saxon does justice to. 

The three-man posse takes cover.

3. Banner is as hard on his critics as he is loyal to his men in the posse which in the end comes down to just three men—him, Seymour, and Johnny—who take on the trigger-happy devils in a do-or-die spirit.

4. On one hand, the film exemplifies courage, loyalty, and friendship; on the other, it exposes the cowardice and hypocrisy of a town whose deeds fail to match its words. Most of the men who were ready to storm the saloon refuse to join the posse for fear of their own safety. When Banner rescues Helen and sends her back to Paradise, a fate worse than her rape awaits her. The town is repulsed by the “used” woman but Banner provides more than a healing touch. The attitude of the town’s people reminded me of Hindi commercial cinema with its share of taboo and social prejudice. 

Posse from Hell lacks the sophistication of a Tombstone and Audie Murphy the glamour of a Clint Eastwood, but it more than makes up with its realistic plot and characters, and a touch of humour. I liked the scene where Banner pours spirit down Seymour's butt to give him relief from saddle rash (or that's what I think it is). Seymour has never ridden a horse before and Banner and Johnny look amused as he tries to mount his. The film is a traditional western as evident from Banner’s simple attire and a rather ordinary single-gun holster, the posse’s journey through barren and hostile landscape, and true-to-life gunfights where both heroes and villains get hurt. Murphy acts well as Banner Cole who, with his soft but firm voice, good nature, and doggedness, is likeable throughout the film.

A surprise element in the film was a young Lee Van Cleef playing sidekick to the gang leader though he is barely visible in the cameo role.

A good western to watch.

BOOK REVIEW

The Hardy Boys are back!

It’s down memory lane with the sleuthing brothers for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. 

The first Hardy Boys mystery.

Okay, this is off the top of my head. No Google, no Archive, no Wikipedia...

Chet Morton, Biff Hooper, Phil Cohen, Tony Prito, and Jerry Gilroy are friends of Frank and Joe Hardy, teenage brothers and amateur detectives of Bayport, a fictional town in the US. They assist their father, private investigator Fenton Hardy, solve many of his cases, though most of the time they are sniffing out their own mysteries and doing a good job cracking them, often with the help of their friends.

In the books I read, then, Frank is 18 and Joe is 17 and their girlfriends are Callie Shaw and Iola Morton. Iola is best friend Chet’s younger sister. Fat Chet is to Frank and Joe what skinny Jughead is to Archie, loyal and always hungry. Like Jug, he loves food. He usually carries a weighty snack and is acutely nervous when he tags along with the brothers to find out whodunit. The boys stick their necks out and get into trouble. They always solve their cases and make their father and the Bayport police department proud. 

Fenton Hardy wears a felt hat and a suit. He is a devoted husband and a caring father. I picture Raymond Burr, in his younger days, or Humphrey Bogart in the sleuth’s role. His wife, Laura Hardy, is a housewife and has a supportive role in the mystery stories. Frank and Joe have to take their permission to work on cases during school days, and even on holidays. Their cases frequently take them away from home. There is talk of finishing homework too. They are obedient boys. You really can’t miss the morals behind the stories.

I read the Hardy Boys in school, from the age of nine onward. I read over a hundred of the thick blue-spine hardbacks that had readable titles like The Twisted Claw, The Phantom Freighter, The Wailing Siren Mystery, The Sting of the Scorpion, and The Infinity Clue. The big typeface against the stark white page was easy on the eyes. The covers had striking colour illustrations usually depicting one of the key scenes from the story within. There were other early editions too but I don't remember reading any.

We were a bunch of friends who borrowed a Hardy Boys mystery a day from the local circulating library and took turns reading it, each having an hour or so before passing it on to the next impatient boy in the queue. We used a similar modus operandi to read Commando comics.

The Hardy Boys series were highly appealing to young and impressionable readers. Frank and Joe Hardy inspired young boys like me to become detectives when we grew up. For some reason, the army was another thrilling option. Neither came true in my case.

For years I thought Franklin W. Dixon was a real writer. He turned out to be one ghostwriter too many. Like the group of writers behind Carolyn Keene who wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries. The boys and the girl were created by Edward Stratemeyer who founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book-packaging enterprise (now that little bit I got from Wiki).

Since the 1980s both the YA series went through a lot of changes. The Hardy Boys were reinvented as the Hardy Boys Casefiles which, I suspect, might have been kept away from young teens because of their “adult” content, meaning a fair dose of murder and violence. Later, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were brought together in a combined series. By then, however, the series had lost its originality, and I, my interest. There were some film adaptations too. I haven’t seen any.

Now the original Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series are back, in small, compact, hardback reprints with their original cover design intact. They adorn the YA shelves in new bookstores in Mumbai. I scan the familiar titles and hold a few of the books, for old times’ sake, and I am happy that they still hold. One of these days, I am going to read a few of the books that first cultivated my reading habit.

FILM REVIEW

Six Days Seven Nights (1998)

A slightly different take on a largely forgettable romantic comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Harrison Ford as Quinn Harris and Anne Heche as Robin Monroe, for this week’s edition of Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

Robinson Crusoe stormed out of the Ziegfeld movie theatre in New York and phoned Daniel Defoe who at that precise moment was wiping Indian ink off his writing table. He was in a foul mood for he had spilled a large quantity of the infernal liquid on his first draft of Captain Singleton.

He picked up the instrument. “Hello! Who is this?” he said, sounding very annoyed.

“Mr. Defoe, sir, it’s me Crusoe, from NYC.”

The frenetic voice of his own creation at the other end startled Defoe.

“What is it, Robinson?” he asked in a somewhat measured tone.

“Mr. Defoe, sir, I have just been to see Six Days Seven Nights and it’s not fair, just not fair.”

“What’s not fair, Robinson?”

“Quinn Harris had Robin. Chuck Noland had Wilson. I had no one!” he cried.

“Calm down, Robinson. What the hell are you blabbering about? Who is Quinn Harris? Who is…Whatshisname?”

“Chuck Noland, sir, from Cast Away.”

Defoe was bewildered. “Robinson, can you be more specific? Who are these people? Did they write the two books you mentioned?”

“No sir. Six Days Seven Nights and Cast Away are not books, sir, they are movies. Quinn Harris, a pilot, is the hero in one; Chuck Noland, a logistics guy, is the hero in the other.”

“What about it? What has it got to do with you?”

“It’s like this, Mr. Defoe. Their story is very similar to mine. They were both marooned on a deserted island. Bad weather caused their planes to crash. I, myself, as you know, was the victim of a shipwreck and I almost didn’t make it to…”

By now Defoe was irritated again. He cut in, “I am not quite sure about the first part, Robinson. However, you need not remind me how you landed on the Island of Despair. You know I put you there.”

“Indeed, I do, sir. Without you I should not have become famous and come into a good amount of money and bought my own island.”

“Then what’s your bloody problem, young man?” Defoe looked down and watched the spilled ink soak up the manuscript and blot out the words. He cursed under his breath.

“Did you say something, sir?”

“Nothing, Robinson. Get on with your story.”

“Like I was saying, Mr. Defoe, Quinn and Chuck are stranded on an island, in different times, of course. But they are not alone. Quinn has Robin and Chuck has Wilson.”

“Who the hell are Robin and Wilson?”

“Oh, did I not tell you, sir?”

“I am sure you did not,” Defoe almost shouted.

“Robin is a beautiful girl in Seven Days Seven Nights, sir. She is the editor of a New York fashion magazine. She is in the plane with Quinn when it crash-lands on the island. They don’t like each other at first but seven days on the island is all it takes them to fall in love with each other.”

“Very touching, Robinson. And who might Wilson be...their dog?”

“Good lord, no sir! Wilson is a volleyball. He belongs to Chuck. He is the only friend Chuck has on his island in Cast Away.

When Defoe did not say anything, Robinson said, “Remember the two films I mentioned? You thought they were books.”

“Yes, I remember well, Robinson. Go on.” Defoe said, resigned to his fate and that of Captain Singleton. He wondered how he might revive the story of the exploits of the English pirate.

“Well, Mr. Defoe. You see, both Quinn and Chuck spent far less time on their islands than I did…Quinn a mere seven days, Chuck just four years…and yet they had someone to talk to, someone to fall in love with. I, on the other hand, spent twenty-seven years in isolation on the island, not a soul about me and only god in heaven.”

The line between New York and London went quiet for a few seconds.

“Are you still there, Robinson?” Defoe asked at length. He could hear deep sobs at the other end.

“Yes, sir.”

“Look Robinson, I am sorry. But you were not alone. I gave you animals...let me see, a dog, a couple of cats, sheep, goats, some fowl, and Friday.” Remember him?”

“I do, Mr. Defoe, you also gave me savages. Remember them?”

“I do, Robinson, and you lived to tell me about it.”