Word: opium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wiry, wearily patient American named Darrell Berrigan. An expatriate newsman and longtime resident of Bangkok. Berrigan got his newspaper last year through an orientally inscrutable tactic-he wrote a magazine article charging that Thailand's chief cop, General Phao Sriyanond, was also Thailand's biggest opium smuggler. General Phao was impressed. With characteristic Thai logic, he apparently reasoned that any newsman intimate enough with the country's boatmen, taxi drivers, prostitutes and businessmen to put together such a report would make an ideal editor. Phao hired Berrigan to edit his newly founded Bangkok World-printed in English...
They are on the side of justice, but not always of the law. Some are rough and tough, others are ingenious and devious. Though there are no rating toppers among them, TV's private sleuths have as hard-cored a group of addicts as a Bangkok opium den. Their perverse charm lies, often as not, in their bland amorality; there is no nonsense about fair play...
...wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm." But he is an idealist. "He was determined to do good, to people, to countries, to the whole world." His naivete horrifies Greene's Englishman, a middle-aged newsman named Fowler (Michael Redgrave), whose pipedreams are provided by opium, and whose pipe is prepared by his pretty little Vietnamese mistress, Phuong. (Phuong is in the picture, but the opium is not.) Aside from Phuong (Giorgia Moll), the Englishman's principal passion is his uninvolvement, but the American wants to be mixed up in everything-particularly, Fowler decides, if it happens...
...that arcs from Laos to Indonesia, then let the film gather dust for a year. Last week viewers could see the results-and understand why nobody bothered to rush the go-minute show to the screen. Southeast Asia offered some striking individual shots, such as a closeup of an opium smoker, and picturesque views of Thai boxers, golden Burmese temples and the stone splendor of Cambodia's Angkor Wat. But in trying to do too much-a travelogue plus a report of things social, economic, political, religious, anthropological-it did almost nothing well. Instead, it frequently suggested a melange...
...times the French cult of revolution seems "indistinguishable from the Fascist cult of violence." Enemies of the church, French intellectuals have hankered for a substitute religion and found it in a kind of futurism." Revolution. Aron says, serves as a refuge from reality for Utopian intellectuals; Communism is their opium...