WHEN it comes to movies, the Mahogany Ridge regulars can tell you a thing or two. One film, however, that we don't have much to say about is David Lean's epic Doctor Zhivago.
It's not for want of trying. Some years back it seemed as if it was running on a permanent loop together with Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey on one of the TV movie channels. Many's the regular who'd return from an evening at the Ridge, collapse in front of the idiot box and tune into Lean's classic.
However, with a running time of three hours and 20 minutes and little in the way of Bruce Willis-type explosions, it tends to drag a bit. So we'd fall asleep after half an hour and wake up in the middle of 2001. One moment, we'd be wondering if Julie Christie was going to take her clothes off. Next thing there'd be this guy messing about in what looked like a bicycle wheel floating in outer space. Very confusing, I don't have to tell you, and all we could tell you about Doctor Zhivago is that is has something to do with Russia.
Doctor Zhivago's now back in the news - not the movie but the Boris Pasternak novel. According to The Zhivago Affair, a new book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée based on declassified CIA documents, it has an interesting Cold War history.
Pasternak completed the novel in the 1950s but couldn't get it published in Russia as it was deemed subversive, reactionary and anti-communist. He did however give his manuscript to several people and, in 1957, British MI6 agents learnt that a copy was in the luggage of a man flying via Malta. There, the aircraft's departure was delayed for a couple two hours while agents secretly removed the manuscript from a suitcase, photographed each page and then returned the work.
The film eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, where according to a CIA memo, it was considered a golden opportunity to expose the intellectual repression of the Soviets. So the Americans printed thousands of copies of the novel - much to the anger of Pasternak's Italian publisher - and smuggled them back into Russia where, the CIA claimed, there was "tremendous demand on the part of students and intellectuals to obtain copies". The rest, as they say, is history and the Soviets are gone.