OT Re: [Sca-cooks]Was poppyseeds? now "The Shadow"

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Kirsten Houseknecht:
>can you elaborate on the scene with the benevolent association? i have never
>seen, or read, the origonal "Shadow"
>Kirsten Houseknecht

I may have allowed you to become confused.

In Anthony Burgess's novel, "Earthly Powers", which is one of those 
20th-century-spanning novels concerning an English writer (based 
largely on W. Somerset Maugham, with a little P.G. Wodehouse WWII 
intrigue thrown in) who is approached by the Vatican, in his capacity 
as brother-in-law and an old friend of the recently-deceased Pope, to 
write his official biography. Included in that story (or remembered 
as an incident in the Pope's life, anyway) is an account of his 
amazing religious conversion of a high-ranking officer of the SS, 
which included a certain amount of rather gruff and unimaginative 
torture (mostly, literal arm-twisting). What made it notable (and a 
peculiar combination of horrifying and gratifying) is that after a 
certain amount of this treatment, by which time the SS officer is 
loudly praising God and announcing he has seen the light and is 
surely saved, it is the judgement of the priest that the treatment 
continue for a while longer, to assess the faith of the new convert. 
In short, to assure that his new belief system is genuine and deep, 
and not just lip-service. After all, Xtians are supposed to be 
willing to suffer for their faith.

(Please note that this is not really about religion at all.)

In the 1994 (I think) movie, "The Shadow", the filmmakers had to find 
a way to reconcile the incredibly complex plot of the old pulp 
magazines for a 90-minute movie. The original story features a 
WWI-era fighter pilot and mercenary crashing a plane in the 
Himalayas, to be saved by Buddhist monks in a remote monastery, 
healed of his injuries, and taught something of their disciplines. 
These include, for purposes of the story, a deep sense that pacifism 
does not necessarily bring peace in and of itself, although 
unnecessary violence is to be abhorred, and the ability to control 
other people's perceptions of him: Gibson's stories called this the 
ability "to cloud men's minds", but for practical purposes it means 
he can become invisible, and appear, under the right circumstances, 
intangible, leaving only his shadow as a visible trace. After some 
years of this training, he returns to home to a 
Prohibition-and-organized-crime-strangled New York, and determines to 
use his skills to effect change. One of the first things he does (I'm 
not completely sure why, unless he simply needs money and a veneer of 
respectability) is to find a dissipated millionaire and effectively 
take over his identity, giving him 24 hours to leave the city, and 
never return, or be killed. He then sets up several bases of 
operations, establishes a virtually feudal network of people who owe 
him favors, or their lives, to act as his agents, his eyes and ears, 
all over the city.

For the movie, as I said, they had to simplify this somewhat, keeping 
the story more like that of the radio stories, and the way they did 
this was to entirely eliminate the Kent Allard fighter 
pilot/doppelganger character, and have dissipated millionaire Lamont 
Cranston (apparently an opium addict) set himself up as a warlord and 
opium runner somewhere in Asia. You could still do that in places 
like China, to a great extent without much hindrance except from 
other warlords. He becomes the legendary Ying Ko, The Butcher of 
Lhassa, and after a brief expository sequence in which he allows his 
trusted bookkeeper to be slaughtered in order to take out an enemy 
(yes, he is a bad man), he is dragged from his bed by invisible, 
semi-tangible "shadows", and brought before a priest.  The priest 
announces that the shadows were his disciples, and that Cranston's 
reign of terror has ended. The only alternative to death is to 
embrace a new philosophy, and become the student of this priest, who 
will, he says, teach him to defeat the blackness in his soul and use 
his aggression to atone for the wrongs he has done.  Cranston is 
offered no choice in the matter, and it is made quite clear that he 
is merely a tool in the greater battle between good and evil, but 
that this tool has changed hands permanently. Since he is naturally 
opposed to this whole re-orientation to a life of fighting evil 
rather than promoting it, a certain amount of persuasion, and 
persuasive techniques, are applied, we assume. The priest has this 
cool, very cheesy, animated flying purbah dagger that would have made 
Ray Harryhausen very jealous indeed, and you get the deep impression 
that the Tulku would not have paid much attention if Cranston had 
said, "Praise Buddha, I renounce my evil ways," in the first five 
minutes.

Which is what always reminds me of Don Carlo, the SS officer, the 
friendly mafiosi, and the dark little room in the church cellar. They 
say the Lord works in mysterious ways...

Adamantius