Writer: Stirling Silliphant
Director: Arthur Hiller
Director of Photography: Jack A. Marta
(Details from http://www.imdb.com - click on the episode title above for more cast and crew)
This episode may be light on Buz (why couldn't they write some episodes like this when he was recovering from the hepatitis?) but there are some beautiful moments of dialogue in it, and the gorgeous Lois Smith.
Screencaps are from the Infinity release of the series.
Okay, I have to have some Buz to start off with, since he’s absent for most of the episode. Here Buz is checking out for the day, or for lunch perhaps, since he has a lunch pail. (Lunch pails – do people still have them? They’re so American!) He’s working for McCulloch Chainsaws. They seem to make engines and things too.
And oh gosh, that 1950s architecture! It’s like all people are thinking about is the space race and cars with big fins and such like. It’s glorious!
Tod is on his way to pick up Buz. Beautiful reflections on the ground.
Oh Tod, that checked jacket… He’s looking good, for the time, but I can’t take it seriously.
Buz is looking good too, but a bit more beatnik and fancy free. He’s so fancy free he jumps over the fence instead of going round. He looks so happy to see Tod, too. He’s tossing his lunch pail in the air and beaming. Why’s he so happy?
Here’s our first hint of what’s going on – Tod has a ‘Scott Racing Division’ jumper in the car. Buz looks askance, and says something we can’t hear. Buz shakes his head at Tod’s silly jumper and bites into his apple, because he’s a fruity kinda guy.
They seem to excel and cars-and-planes shots in this show. They make a kind of ballet of it.
Tod is worrying about an item of clothing he’s put in Buz’s charge.
‘You won’t forget, huh?’ he asks.
‘Do I ever forget?’ Buz replies.
‘I’m the anxious type. I need reassurance, okay.’
‘Okay, okay. Have the second button sewn back on and don’t crease the sleeves, just roll them.’ (It’s sweet, these laundry details they worry about ;-))
‘Right,’ Tod says. ‘I want to look sharp when I come back Saturday night. You think you can scout up something by then?’
‘Now, there’s a vote of confidence.’
‘I’ve been through that whole plant.’ (looking, or doing, Tod?) ‘Now, where you are, it’s teaming. Not like where I am, hidden away in advanced research and development.’ (He’s telling Buz he’s got the classy job, because he went to Yale.) ‘So what are our chances, tiger?’ (Squee)
‘Well, there’s some live ones in sub-assembly and pre-planning looks, er, pretty promising,’ Buz tells him.
‘Stick to sub-assembly,’ Tod tells him. ‘Pre-planning types are too intellectual.’
i.e., he wants sex, not chatter.
So Tod makes for the plane with all his stuff, and we wonder just what he’s going off to. I hope Buz doesn’t work through all of self-assembly before he gets back...
Cars and planes again as Buz drives away. You get to see some nice car-plane ballet. This would be better as a video clip than screencaps.
It’s all a bit of a mystery. Tod is waiting to meet ‘Sandy Mason.’ He lights up a cigarette as soon as they’ve taken off. Ugh, smoking and aircraft… Bad mix.
We learn that Tod raced stock boats about three years ago, but the proposed type of racing is all new to him.
Sandy’s flying the aeroplane. He’s an odd duck. He welcomes Tod through to the cockpit, but doesn’t speak.
Some of that glorious Route 66 photography using the patterns in the land and the sky to make a lovely image.
Tod muses as he stares with a look of bemusement at Sandy Mason (John Larch).
‘Flying out to Site 6, it came to me that the volcanic rock below was no more desolate than the man sat across from me,’ he says in a voiceover. ‘And it came to me too that whoever fights the future has a mortal enemy. A faceless enemy, because the future has no being of its own. It steals its being from each man and once it’s tricked him of his secrets it appears outside him, waiting, a predator he must meet.’
This reminds me of some of Peter Hale’s musings in Hell Is Empty, All The Devils Are Here. Glorious writing. This is a Stirling Silliphant script, as is Hell Is Empty…
And so the plane comes down out of the no man’s land of the air, and we get to see more glorious Route 66 scenery, the machine cutting across nature, but so small in the face of it.
You couldn’t pay for the sky to be like that, and that motionless drift of smoke in the background. The ballet of the aeroplane manoeuvring into position and the chevvy driving up is arranged, and I have to believe the director of photography or whoever positioned them before that wonderful sky like that – but my god, you just don’t get landscapes like that here.
Tod gets up into the back of the very new and shiny and prominently displayed Chevrolet pickup. It all sounds mysterious as the men talk.
Tod is getting ready in his room. The first of the many through-windows and through-screens shots (I haven’t screencapped them all.) I know there’s a certain necessity in these shots due to shooting in real locations and wanting to have uncut scenes of people walking in or out of a room. But I think there’s also a subtext going on here – the mystery of these engines that are being developed, the mystery of Sandy and his closed-off nature, the relationship between him and his daughter and his ex-wife. This is all about veiled feelings that parallel the secrecy of the prototype engines, and all these shots through glass and screens echo the obscurity of motive in the episode.
Tod alone on the balcony, listening to the thrum of boat engines. There’s a lot about solitude in this episode. Tod is the least alone of all of them, really.
Keel (Russell Johnson) walks Tod down to the boat, telling him about Sandy.
‘Relax. This is an easy run. He’s not wringing anything out today but you,’ Keel says reassuringly. ‘He’s going to see how you read the river, that’s all.’
‘Read the river?’ Tod asks.
‘Yeah. This is all the Colorado here, backed up behind the Parker Dam. Covered some cottonwood trees, and a few volcanic hills which have since become reefs. Sandy needs a new track for testing. A longer run than we’ve been using. At least ten miles where he can flat get with it once he decides to open her up. So – you read the river.’
‘And he reads me,’ Tod says with a degree of apprehension.
So, Tod gets in the boat and ready to go…
It’s all about speed and beautiful vistas and the sound of engines…
Tod gets into the driving seat and has a go. He looks like he’s enjoying it.
But then he sees an upturned boat and cuts the engines.
‘I said half-throttle!’ Sandy yells at him.
‘They’re drowning!’ Tod protests.
Sandy makes him give his lifejacket to the pair in the water and tells him to run the boat back to dock.
‘You run it back at half-throttle. You don’t stop, you don’t turn, and you don’t pick anybody up. Clear? And when you get there you turn this over to Bob Keel. Tell him to send out one of our regular boats to pick us up. Not this one! You and I, Stiles. We’ll have a little talk when I get back on the shore.’
And Sandy dives in, and leaves Tod to take the boat back.
Tod cuts a dejected figure in the bar, having got into trouble on his first time out.
Keel comes and finds him.
‘Well, I always say you can’t go through life carrying a snake bite kit, so – cheers,’ Tod tells him, lifting his drink. ‘Incidentally, if you’ve run into any diamondbacks today I’m buying.’
Keel tells him Sandy’s outside. As Tod leaves for his execution Keel reminds him about his drink.
‘Well, that’s only good for snake bites,’ says Tod. ‘I don’t know what you take for rib crushers.’
Another one of those through-the-window shots as Tod leaves, screencapped from the Shout Factory version. Tod's isolation as he goes to face his doom.
Sandy makes Tod walk after him while he chews him out.
‘…but I swear to you, Stiles, either you follow my instructions without question, without blinking an eyebrow, or I’ll anchor you at the base of Parker Dam. I don’t have words to waste, I don’t have time to waste. Ten years I’ve worked on this, and tested it on all the computers. And now it’s going to be tested at Site 6 this week, and two weeks from now in a marathon, and with your help, in spite of yourself. Clear?’
I like the way he’s so angry he’s a little garbled. I assume the script didn’t say ‘blinking an eyebrow,’ but it’s realistic that in anger he would.
Poor Tod. He’s justifiably angry at being expected to help when no one will tell him what’s going on.
When Tod asks him to explain what all the mystery is about Sandy barks, ‘An engine, Mister. A marine engine they’ve been dreaming about for years. An engine that’ll obsolete every outboard motor on every boat in every country. An engine that’ll wipe out the competition. An engine that they’ve been dreaming about for years. My engine. So you remember that. You remember it’s cost me ten years and this company a lot of money. You remember it’s cost me more than time. Things I don’t like to talk about. So when I say jump, Mister, you jump, or else you pack your bag and you go back to L.A.. Your choice.’
‘I like it here. No smog,’ Tod replies just as crisply.
So Sandy tells him to be on the dock in the morning, and goes into his room and slams the door. Whew… He does ranting very well.
They’re shooting Tod through windows again, so he’s obscured a little by reflections. I like this. Standing outside, looking in through the glass, you have the moment to realise that he’s all alone here, until the camera cuts in to a close-up shot so that we can share more closely with his experience.
When we see him closely he quickly puts on his, ‘I spy a honey,’ expression. We see from Tod’s p.o.v now, as a svelte lady walks past the window. This time she is through the glass.
When she comes in she seems strangely duplicitous. She kisses him before speaking, then tells him she’s on her honeymoon and she’s saying thank you. It is the woman who was ‘drowning’ out in the lake. She’s soft-voiced and doe-eyed and sounds a bit dim, and wants to ignore the fact that it was Sandy who dove into the water to rescue her.
‘They say my beef stroganoff is the best east of the Rockies,’ she tells him. ‘Does it bother you we’re west?’
‘Is there enough for three?’ Tod asks doubtfully.
He’s too befuddled to be able to work out what’s going on. But she tells him ‘Bill’ had to ‘drive into Needles.’ So she’s seducing him with a little beef and post-wedding jollies…
His eyes are firmly fixed on her posterior as she walks away, and he calls that he doesn’t know her name. But Keel is coming in, and tells him she’s ‘Jean Cory’ (Elizabeth MacRae), and she’s not married, ‘except to her job.’
Poor Tod. It was all an attempt to seduce a look at the engine out of him. She was one of Keel’s top students at MIT. Now she’s the assistant chief engineer for one of their competitors. Well, you’ve got to give the girl her due for getting to that position in 1962.
So, Sandy had a right to be angry at Tod. The ‘drowning’ was all a ploy.
‘Tod, the lake is thirty miles long,’ Keel tells him. ‘We own only a few sections on this side. We can’t build a wall around it. Now, we don’t have any – er – beef stroganoff? – up at the shack, but there is a fairly respectable beef stew on the card, and some home baked apple pie. How about it?’
Poor Tod. He’s gone from an affair with a blonde temptress to beef stew with Keel. Thus is the way of the world. I wonder if Buz is doing any better?
Tod brings dinner to the boss. A peace offering, perhaps? It’s a nice gesture, but the guy on the door (John Astin) is unwilling to let him disturb Sandy. Tod tries anyway.
‘Come on in, kid,’ Sandy says kindly when Tod knocks. It looks like the white flag has been accepted.
‘You know something?’ Sandy asks. ‘You’re the only person except for my wife that had the fortitude to make me eat by bringing it in here and putting it down in front of me.’
It’s only later we find out more about his wife…
Sandy shows Tod his engines (no, that’s not a metaphor.) ‘They weigh a hundred pounds apiece. Take a guess on the horsepower,’ Sandy says.
‘They look like forties, but they perform like more sixties,’ Tod says.
‘One hundred,’ Sandy tells him proudly.
Tod is shocked. ‘That’s not possible. I mean, I’m no engineer but I know that a ratio of one horsepower to one pound of weight is some kind of a dream.’
So this is what it’s all about. The dream of super efficient boat engines.
Sandy has such a beautifully organised workshop. My dad would love it. He despairs at my tools. I never know where anything is.
‘Nearest marine engine to this is four times as big, four times as heavy,’ Sandy says happily. ‘Know something else. Once we test these out and we tool up, we could deliver them for fifteen hundred dollars each, with a lifetime guarantee. You know what that’ll do to the competition? Put it right off the map. Then, we’ll see. We’ll see who’s the old man of the mountain around here.’
You can see his single-minded dedication as he speaks that last line. It’s almost monomania.
Next morning in the boat. Tod seems to be late again. Is this to make the shot more dynamic, to show him running in, or is it to show how dedicated Sandy is, that he’s always there first? Because I don’t feel that Tod would be late after what happened yesterday.
Sandy gives Tod all his instructions for the run.
Keel and the others are watching from the shore as they make their run. They look like meerkats watching for danger.
Some Tod and Sandy in the boat (these are mostly non-verbal shots).
And speeeeeed!!!
And Tod gets a faceful of water. This shot is here for no other reason than to show Tod getting a faceful of water.
‘What do you think?’ one of the watching men asks.
‘Ninety, maybe more,’ Keel replies.
‘Wow. Boy, he did it!’
‘Yeah,’ Keel says soberly.
‘You should be turning handsprings,’ the other guy says. ‘After all, you helped him. Where would he be without the finest metallurgist in the country? Just tell me that, Bob. You know what this means?’
‘I wish I didn’t,’ Keel says with deep meaning.
I wish I did. I’m not sure why Keel’s so troubled, unless it’s just because he knows Sandy is too obsessed with it.
A taxi turns up at the lakeside with a girl in it. She looks troubled too. Keel tells her, ‘Should have held the cab, Miss. This is company property.’
‘They told me in Los Angeles he was here,’ she says simply.
It’s Sandy’s daughter Dana (Lois Smith, looking interestingly beautiful). Keel finally recognises her, and reminds her of who he is, and asks how her mother is…
And this is where Sandy runs up, gleeful over the boat run – and sees Dana, and stops. You can see the awkwardness between them.
Sandy gets Tod to get Dana anything she needs, in a typical gesture of the father who is married to his work. Then he disappears again, back to work.
Sandy welcomes Edward Crane off the plane. I think he’s the money behind this whole venture.
‘I guess it’s the times, huh,’ Crane starts off in a very Silliphantine way. ‘In eighty years we’ve come from Edison’s light bulb to hundred megaton sunbursts. But in our understanding of our personal natures we’re still in the horse and buggy era – so that when we see a man, a friend even, choking on his own personal brand of bitters, we tend to swallow our tongues.’
We learn that the drive that Sandy has put into this engine is in part to blind himself to the fact of his wife leaving him.
People will be trying to poach Sandy from the company soon. Sandy is loyal, but Crane offers him more money anyway, to make sure they keep him. But he tells him that if he wants to accept another offer, he can.
‘We want you with us, Sandy, but we want to see you free – and happy again,’ he says.
This guy seems to have his head screwed on right.
Dana now has a trailer, and here we are looking in on her through a veil as she uses music to block out the world. She’s listening to the radio at top volume, her face empty and sad.
Tod asks her, ‘Do you always play that thing so loud?’ and she gives him the excuse that she hasn’t heard American Jazz in so long. She’s been in the African Congo.
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Briefly she is unveiled as Tod opens the door to leave the caravan. As it closes again she blurts out, ‘I was lying,’ her words as sudden as the flash of the open door. ‘I play the music loud. I keep trying to drown out the other sounds. They don’t drown.’
Tod is caught by Dana’s words. She’s finally opening up to him. She called back to him so that she wouldn’t be left alone.
‘When I saw him last, I was ten,’ she tells Tod. She wants Tod to tell her what her own father is like – but Tod doesn’t know much about him either.
‘He was strong. Very strong,’ Dana remembers. Her voice is perfect for the part. It is hesitant, almost childlike, as she talks to Tod. ‘He could open a jar of strawberry jam with one twist of his wrist.’ (Aren’t all our fathers like that?) ‘Once at night he came in my room – he thought I was asleep – and he tucked the comforter in at my feet. When he left I couldn’t even pull it out, the way I always liked to do, the way I liked to poke my toes out free.’
I like this – the hint of the father who protects so tight that it stifles the daughter, but she remembers it with a loving feeling.
Keel comes up, and Dana is still veiled behind the screen, still an outsider to all that goes on at the lakeside. He has come to say that her father was on his way over but couldn’t come because of an emergency in the shop. The veil is all the tighter. She casts her eyes down for a moment, perhaps toward the radio she uses to drown out the sound.
‘He’ll catch you later,’ Keel says – but this is already ten years later, for her.
Sandy isn’t in the shop. He’s a figure alone, silhouetted on the bank. There is a lot of loneliness in this story.
As he walks down to the water I’m struck by wondering what all this means to him – the lapping water and the sky and the plants around – away from the stark, man-made surroundings of the workshop. There’s a sense that he’s being stripped back now, taken briefly away from it all by the presence of his daughter and sent back to thoughts of other times.
As he stares into the water he’s struck by the memory of his wife, who appears as a reflection beside his – unsteady, unreal, untouchable, behind another veil of sorts. He remembers her telling him that she was leaving, for the good of Dana. There is a sense that she loves him, but she knows she will never have him, because he is obsessed with his work.
‘I look into your eyes and I see the future. All the horizons – and you, alone are the furthest one. You don’t need anyone, darling. You don’t need me. It breaks my heart to admit it. Goodbye, Sandy.’
‘Norma,’ he says, softly, desperately, but she fades away.
A Frenchman interrupts him and gives him his card, perhaps drawn to him by his stripy t-shirt, thinking that he is a fellow countryman. I mean, put a string of onions round his neck and give him a bike, and he could be a French onion seller in that top.
He’s a competitor from last year’s race. He’s here early, fishing. Fishing for more than just the piscine species, I would imagine, considering the thick envelope he gives Sandy.
And Sandy’s left just as alone by the water – or perhaps more alone, because we’ve seen his wife and why she left, and the loneliness that is internal as well as external.
Gomez *ahem* Sorry – Benson is on the door again as Tod comes to the workshop.
‘Nobody tonight. That's what the man said,’ he tells Tod. But you can tell by Tod’s face he’s not feeling patient.
Tod starts to beat on the door, and Benson tries to stop him. Dana has been playing her radio relentlessly at top volume, and Tod’s about ready to snap.
Sandy tells Tod to go and tell her to turn it off, and shuts the door in his face – but Tod pushes in after him.
‘Oh, another hot head, huh?’ Sandy snaps. ‘Well two in the room make it a steam bath.’
‘There’s a girl up there that’s scared to death of being alone,’ Tod shouts. ‘Now, I stayed with her all day today. I don’t mind that. I’ll stay with her till she stops shaking. She says the last time she saw you was ten years ago. There’s no emergency here in the shop, so what’re you trying to do to her?’
Sandy tosses the envelope the French man gave him over to Tod. In it is a contract. They’ve offered him ‘half of Europe.’
‘Are they buying you or your engine?’ Tod asks perspicaciously.
‘Do you know what’s right or what’s wrong?’ Sandy shouts.
‘Yeah, I usually do,’ Tod replies. Tod can be a smug git sometimes.
‘Congratulations. I don’t,’ Sandy shouts. ‘Not any more. There was a time I’d have told the boss, you don’t have to pay me any more money to make me stay. There was a time I’d have thrown that character from Europe and that contract right into the river. But now? Now I’m wondering just how long it’s going to take me to learn French. Somewhere, somehow, a simple, beautiful thing, a single morality, a single set of standards was smashed like an atom into ten million separate pieces. And now. Now what’s right for a man can be wrong for his business, and what’s right for his business can be wrong for his country, and what’s right for his country can be wrong for his world.’
And he pleads with Tod to get Dana to turn down her radio. He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. This man keeps up such a pace of anger through this speech that I’m out of breath just listening.
This is the second time they’ve referenced nuclear developments in this episode, too. I feel like there are things I’m missing here, though. What does he mean with all the right/wrong stuff? Does his engine have bigger implications for his country’s security or something?
But anyway – there are Tod and Sandy, drawn out. Tod has a strong sense of right and wrong. He makes decisions and he sticks by them. What he believes is right is a guiding light for him.
Sandy seems to know everything, but in fact he’s adrift. He doesn’t know where to go or where to turn. His only guide has been his obsession, and now he doesn’t know where he is.
This time we see Dana without the screen, and Tod reaching out to switch off her radio. Her barriers are down, and he’s going to tell her the truth.
‘Your father said please,’ Tod tells her. His face is full of pity for her.
‘He’s not coming, is he?’ she asks.
‘No,’ Tod replies.
‘He still hates her that much?’
‘I think you should know where you stand,’ Tod tells her. ‘He doesn’t want to see you, tonight or any other time.’
Dana’s stepfather was a lawyer. Dana tells Tod about the power of escheat.
‘Under the power of escheat the unclaimed property of a citizen reverts to the state. What power have we for unclaimed people?’ she asks.
A wonderful few lines, revealing such loneliness…
Oh, look! Buz is back, and he has a car full of girls!!!
He stops to ask someone, presumably, where Tod is. Buz, I'm so happy to see you – but what are you wearing? Is that double-breasted, with brass buttons? Do you think you’re a sea captain?
So, Buz goes to knock Tod up, looking mightily pleased with himself. (I mean that in the sense of knocking on someone’s door, obviously. I could never mean Buz intended to – No. Let’s not go there.)
Tod wonders who the jaunty knocker is.
If I knew anything about manga or anime or whatever it is that inspires these things, I might have Tod saying, ‘O hai, Buz!.’ But I won’t pretend to even begin to have a clue, so I won’t. And as it is, Tod just waves distractedly at him.
Buz is not impressed by Tod’s lack of reaction.
‘Well – you might act a little surprised,’ Buz protests. ‘I mean, don’t strain yourself. I wouldn’t want to rock the boat, not today, but you might force a what are you doing here?’
‘What are you doing here?’ Tod asks, suddenly realising that Buz is not meant to be here at all. He says he’s sorry he couldn’t get back, but ‘between the tests and this thing today and Dana – ’
‘We had a date Saturday night, remember. You could have called. … Who’s Dana?’ Buz asks. (I’m sorry, but my slash alarm is going off so strongly here.)
Tod seems more worried about his suit than explaining about Dana to Buz. He wants to know why it’s in the car.
‘You do remember our last conversation, don’t you?’ Buz asks. ‘You said, two live ones, and stick to the sub-assembly. Well, in the car, with your suit, mad for life – two grape crushers. Now, the way I figure it, er, we can, er, drive up to Vegas. I mean, after the race. It’s not that far. If you don’t wanna roll dice, well, you can walk around and, er, roll those sleeves of yours. What d’you do?’ he asks, snapping the subject back to Dana, ‘Meet her here in the desert?’
I just love Buz’s face through this monologue. I could watch him over and over.
Tod still doesn’t seem focussed. ‘As they say, this is it,’ he says distractedly, picking up his helmet. ‘Good to see you, tiger.’ *squee* ‘Vegas sounds great. I could use some.’
But Buz is still wondering about Dana. Here he is with ‘the two chicks I got incubating’ in the car and it seems Tod’s already encumbered.
‘For two weeks now, every minute I haven’t been on the lake with Sandy I’ve been with her, just, er, standing around trying to give her the strength to leave,’ Tod tells him. ‘We haven’t said ten words to each other since last week. Like, er, Wednesday night we just sat on the dock ’til sunrise. We didn’t talk to each other, but every time I’d start to leave she gets this look in her eyes, Buz. It’s desperate. Full of terror.’
‘Good luck,’ Buz calls to Tod as he walks away. He’s probably still wondering what on earth is hanging Tod up over this Dana chick.
But Tod spies a man carrying Dana’s suitcases out to a taxi. He’s been trying to persuade her to leave, but he wasn’t expecting it. Instead of walking towards the lake he turns and goes towards the taxi instead.
Dana is stepping out of her caravan with her bag in hand. (What ridiculous little symbolic picket fences they are either side of her. They’re about as much the protecting fence around a property as Dana’s family is a protecting ring around her.)
Tod calls to her, and she stops.
‘What do I tell him if he asks where you went?’ he asks.
‘He won’t,’ she says with certainty.
‘At least I know you’re not going back where you came from,’ Tod says.
She looks at him with a kind of mute question.
‘Ashes, Dana,’ he says. ‘You’re covered with the ashes of burnt bridges. You haven’t told me anything, but some things are beyond words. You came here looking for more than a father. You came here needing something. What it is, what it was, I still don’t know, but this much I know. Whatever it is you were looking for, you’re leaving without it.’
‘My mother’s dead, my stepfather too,’ she says with the internalised look of one remembering.
‘Does he know?’ Tod asks.
‘To him my mother died the day she left him,’ Dana says, although we know this isn’t true. ‘Is this the father I want? The father I have to buy back with the death of my mother? … I didn’t come running here, Tod. I slipped back, screaming. I fell back in terror. Because I lost my foothold in the world I knew. That slaughterhouse of a world I once loved.
‘In Mabulula’ (sorry about the spelling) ‘some soldiers had been drinking. They mistook Henri and the others for white mercenaries. My mother ran out to stop them and they machine gunned her too. Afterwards they were sorry about the mistake. They came to shake my hand and tell me how sorry they were about the mistake. Some – some of them were crying. I don’t know how they did that because I c-couldn’t – I couldn’t even close my eyes. Everything I saw after that stayed in my eyes for hours. Images that wouldn’t go away. But none of them could cover the one image. Henri and mother in the street of Mabulula.
‘In the Africa I knew the scent of the universe was in the air. On the savannahs you could fill your nostrils with the perfume of time. Unspoilt. Unchanged. After it rained I used to watch the rainbow bury its claws in the west. Africa and I had a treaty. An alliance of love. But now I understand nothing any more. Nothing.’
She does this speech beautifully. Just beautifully. She is a lost child.
So she gets into the taxi and she is driven away.
On the lake the boats are getting ready for the race. Everything is reaching its climax.
Sandy and the others are looking around, but Tod isn’t there. Sandy tells Keel to get himself a helmet and jacket.
And finally Tod runs down to the dockside and speaks to Sandy. We don’t hear what he says over the sound of the engines – a great choice, better than hearing it. Sandy is obviously being put through a dilemma, though.
And Sandy suddenly gets out of the boat and gives his stuff to Keel, and Tod gets in. Well done, Tod.
Sandy races up the board jetty, running his own kind of race now.
And Tod is suddenly the hero driving the speedboat.
Everything is the noise of engines and the feel of speed and spraying water.
And Tod is winning!! Tod is victorious! He catches the other boats from behind and pulls ahead as if they were carts and he was in the Corvette.
So we’re left with the image of the boats and Tod winning, and his voiceover.
‘Whoever fights the future has a mortal enemy. A faceless enemy, because the future has no being of its own. It steals its being from each man and once it’s tricked him of his secrets it appears outside him, a predator he must meet. But it can be met and it can be vanquished, if only you reach out for it with open arms and a hungry heart.
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