The Third Man

The Third Man

The Japanese public broadcast station NHK televised these days old movies through its satellite channel.

Last night, they telecast “In the Heat of the Night” featuring Sidney Poitier as a young and tough African American police detective, which is a work of 1967, a year precedent to the tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The other day, “The Third Man.”

Both the movies were highly appreciated when they were first released in Japan decades ago. Here my concern is on The Third Man.

Even in this day of computer graphics, the camera work and image structure of The Third Man never lose its color.

It is an American version of the original English story.

After the World War II, the English wanted romance in war-torn Vienna, but Americans wanted something different for a story in remote Vienna where their boys were stationed while leaving their girlfriends home. And, uncannily the Cold War was approaching.

Therefore, the last scene of The Third Man, meaning an unidentified and unreported principal, had been rewritten or remade for different versions of the film.

To satisfy American girls, US boys should have a broken heart in Europe. This pattern was also applied to “Roman Holiday” featuring Audrey Hepburn, in my opinion.

So, in the last scene on a winter cemetery path, Anne, a Czechoslovak, passed as if a stranger by Holly, an American paperback writer, who had been invited to Vienna to eventually and haplessly kill his old friend Harry, a kind of the independent mafia who had somehow fallen in love with Anne.

Vienna is a place where Adolf Hitler had spent five years as a poor young soul or nothing. Later he wrote that he got a sickening feeling when he recalled Vienna, a Babylon city of many races.

After the completion of War on or Operation in Iraq, will they be able to create a movie presenting a romance or a doom in Baghdad between an American man and an Arab woman or vice versa?

As the scale of a crime the third-man type of men would be engaged in is nowadays mega-multiplied, extraordinary efforts will be needed for peace after wars in Middle East even on screen.

Anyway, it will be a big hit in Japan again.

“SO THAT HE WILL BE ASHAMED"

Rich Devils, Poor Believers, and Crying Angels

Rich Devils, Poor Believers, and Crying Angels

Recently former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told in a TV program that he had not been aware of what Livedoor Company had been doing (therefore he didn’t give warning) but he would continue to support Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s reform policy.

In another TV appearance a few years ago, Mr. Miyazawa mentioned Mr. Bill Clinton’s book “My Life.” The former U.S. President, looked back at, reciprocally mentioned in the book his meeting and negotiation, in 1993, at a sushi bar in a Tokyo hotel with then Prime Minister Miyazawa who started his career as a bureaucrat in Finance Ministry of Imperial Japan in 1941.

Mr. Clinton’s memoir is a testimony of the highest-ranking public servant of the United States on how the United States succeeded in launching its economy into a higher orbit by leveraging its IT capability.

Therefore regardless of your likes and dislikes, it could give some insight by explicitly or implicitly mentioning or skipping something.

Mr. Clinton wrote that “At the end of the month, as the stock market closed above 10,000 for the first time ever, up from 3,200 when I took office…” It was 1999 that the U.S. economy seemed to get into the orbit under Mr. Clinton’s leadership.

He then attended at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, in the last year of his term of presidency. There he defined the term globalization.

“The multinational corporation and their political supporters had largely been content to create a global economy that served their needs, believing that the growth resulting from trade would create wealth and jobs everywhere,” he wrote clearly.

But he continued: “.., half of the world still lived on less than $2 a day, a billion people lived on less than a dollar a day, and more than a billion people went to bed hungry every night.”

A demon can look very knowledgeable and understanding as well as attractive. I am afraid that you might think so, if you are a poor believer in a forlorn country somewhere on the earth, being notified by a friend or a teacher that U.S. President knows how you live but supports large US companies that never hire you. Then, jihad may be a step closer to you.

I don’t trust the World Economic Forum.

(Especially, it is said that even the Clinton Administration supported, in various ways, Enron to which Livedoor has been compared often these days by Japanese media.)

If you succeed in reaching extraordinary stardom in any society and establish your own company to issue “one billion stocks” and have your admirers buy those securities at a dollar or 10 per share, you can make a fortune without substantial industrial activities. It is what Livedoor has done, making many customs believe that its president is a Japanese Bill Gates.

But, most alarming is a fact that old experts on economy and politics still cannot comprehend what the magic term “IT” implies, while dubious business men are lobbying and appealing with their name card presenting a glossy IT-related company name.

My advice is that you should not trust any super-wealthy IT expert that cannot design by himself a whole computer including hardware, software, and communications.

Proud experts will never respond to orders from the mafia or any terrorist-related groups.

“LORD, HOW CAN YOU STAND THESE TREACHEROUS EVIL MEN”