Akim Tamiroff playing out the Chilean miners’s dilemma....Rescued after 69 days in the bowels of the San Jose copper mines- his wife and mistress awaiting his arrival back at the surface.... Samuel Butler’s “Way of all flesh”
But it would be presumptions if the miner identified with HG Wells “Invisible man”, the Claude Rains doubling ...either way “30 lashes with a wet noodle” sandbags his soul when he ascends .
II
Alec Guinness as the ferry boat captain navigating his “unconscious” between Gibraltar and Tangiers Morocco for tango lessons with Yvonne De Carlo,(a stone throw from Hedy Lamar’s Casbah) his lady in “ vows” waxed at the dock railings...
III
Which role should he assume? emerging out of those copper mines deep in the belly of the San Jose mountains?
Who has the answer to his riddled existence? His duplicity massaging a double life ?
Mickey Rooney marrying twins? John Mansfield likewise, tripping the “light fantastic” eleven times?
The unanswered question mined deep below sea level .
IV
From the Old Oak Hotel on ‘H’ to the Kent theater on Coney Island Avenue where Gary Cooper was romancing two damsels in Carl Foreman’s quantum leap to “High Noon” .
Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical pulse . Stanley Kramer’s down to earth taste, he transcended his Bowery Boys gas bags , the kids trying to find themselves in the City that never sleeps..
Cyber bullying dormant for five decades ...his black listed credit” Gums of Navarone” playing out in post Vietnam paddy realities..
.
V
In the meantime our Sheriff wearing his “Red Badge of Courage” awaited the arrival of the train from Philadelphia and his mail order “bride”.
The stentorian Princess Grace in her regal state of mind disembarking ...her blue eyes searching for the celebrity ritual...
Marjorie Maine stepping forward, extending the posies .....“You can’t take anything for granted in these here parts ,mam,” she said, admiring the blossomy finery that only smart money could buy in suburban Philadelphia boutiques....
‘I’m waiting on the Sheriff,” said the Princess like she was riding shotgun .”I trust we didn’t get our faxs crossed. He’s too mature to be chasing gas bags and Bonnie&Clyde desperados. Settle down into retired contentment. Live longer with a wife and the comforts of tee vee,” said the blue blood, spoken with the self serving “lines” of the tart the Sheriff was admiring att her shaded Old Oaks window as he strode thru Main Street toward the station and the so called better class of women.
VI
“Turning in your badge for matrimony, Sheriff? asked a cow hand , batching it from the saloon doors ... beer in hand.... his eyes cast on Katy Jurado’s silhouette at her hotel window ..
Princess Grace would have none of this drift, her haughtiness and image, recoiling at re- inventing how the West was really won. Before the dot. coms and optic fibers torturing the back of the cowboy and quick drawing gun slingers like Alan Ladd’s “Shane”
VII
Meanwhile Alec Guinness as the tango dancing ferry skipper.... sultry Yvonne De Carlo teaching him the moves in Tangiers....the Captain. oblivious to the presence of his wife.... mother of his children.... awaiting his security blanket of a pension at the docking “Captain’s Paradise”....
VIII
Our duplicitous miner rescued from the abyss, his life restored in the guise of Akim Tamiroff Claude Rains Gary Cooper Alec Guinness portrayals....
Treading the thin line between domesticity and his senorita de amor underground.
The “underground” that never sleeps, October 16, 2010
