(Who says dads can’t nurture?)The latest summer blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan, while a large cut above the others and a different kind of action movie, juxtaposes violent shooting scenes against the solitude of a mother grieving for her son and dying men calling for their mothers. In Deep Impact, Tea Leoni’s character makes peace with her estranged father as the East Coast is engulfed by a giant tidal wave.Armageddon’s Bruce Willis imagines his daughter in a wedding dress during a nuclear weapon crisis. The bad guys end up getting smacked by the train and their karma goes up in a fireball. It’s enough to make a superhero cry.In Lethal Weapon 4, Mel Gibson’s character feels the baby kick in his wife’s belly moments before they are chased over railway lines by van- driving villains. Driven perhaps by the billion-dollar success of Titanic, which blasted into box office history thanks to myriad frenzied female fans, and even earlier by Apollo 13, whose astronauts had time to think about their wives while hurtling off into space, studios may hope to lure more women to the testosterone-driven action genre by adding a dash of family values to their protagonists’ lives.
This summer, Mel Gibson, Ben Affleck and even Godzilla took time out from their action-packed days of saving or destroying the world to address family responsibilities. In recent months, a spate of action movies gracing American cinemas have interspersed wham, bam, shoot ‘em up scenes with more tender moments of familial reconciliation and pregnancy Is Tinseltown softening? Hardly.
IS THERE money in morality? Its least likely purveyor, Hollywood, seems to hope so. “There was a history of high blood pressure in our family and I can’t really see why the KGB would wait six years to kill him when they could have done it as soon as he returned from Britain On the other hand, I do not exclude the possibility.”. He told Kolosov he was getting headaches he never had before the injections but the doctors said he should expect to “feel worse before he felt better”.Shortly before he died, Konon also spoke of a palmist in Britain who had predicted he would “wear handcuffs, but not for long” and that when he returned to his “country of origin” he would be “in danger from seeming friends and unethical doctors”.Trofim is more sceptical. The book argues that it is possible the KGB murdered Konon to shut him up.Kolosov especially is inclined to believe this. He says his friend was healthy when he came back from Britain.But soon he began complaining that KGB doctors were calling him in and giving him injections for supposed high blood pressure. His death came “prematurely, when he was at the height of his creative powers”, said the short official biography that was the only document Kolosov, despite having been a KGB officer, could extract from KGB archives when researching Dead Season – End of a Legend.
When the Pole blew the whistle on the Portland spy- ring, his controllers should have warned him not to go to Waterloo Bridge, he said. Finally, it maddened him that the KGB, thinking he may have been turned while in prison, did not trust him, and followed him and bugged him in Moscow, even though he was supposed to be a hero.Six years after returning home, Konon collapsed while walking in the woods outside Moscow and died on 9 October 1970. Like Kim Philby, who became depressed when he saw the reality of life in the Soviet Union for which he had betrayed Britain, Konon grew disillusioned with Communism, because he had the yardstick of his Western experience by which to measure it.Also, he was bitter about the way the KGB had handled him. When he was in prison, a British publisher sought to buy his memoirs.
The offer was discussed in Moscow and when the head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, grasped that the money could buy “75 Volga limousines”, he gave permission for the book to be written But Konon had to accept KGB censorship. Other books came out, including one in which the KGB put words in Galina’s mouth and even paid her for the honour, and all plugged the line that Konon was a hero.The truth, say Kolosov and Trofim, is that he was angry. He was treated like a hero at first, being given a bigger flat for his family, according to Trofim. A special section of the KGB museum was devoted to Molodiy, who obviously could no longer be active but who got well-paid work as a consultant.Konon contributed to the propaganda about his career. By his own account, he was in entertaining company, for, although he was in a single cell, he fraternised with some of the Great Train Robbers. The authors of the book gleefully publish a snobbish letter from a certain Geoffrey N Draper to Lonsdale, cancelling his membership of the Royal Over-Seas League because of his changed circumstances.But he did not remain long behind bars.
