The Military Police had a lock-up just outside town from where, apparently, drunk and disorderly soldiers could be collected and conveyed back to Canungra on a fairly regular basis. It was just a guardhouse divided by a cyclone wire fence and the only difference was that the MPs half had a door and a window and the prisoner’s half did not. By then I had worn myself out protesting my innocence and sat resignedly, waiting to be duly collected. That didn’t happen.
    We three sat there for a day. In fairness it must be said that both Duffy and Weedman told our guardians that I was not with them, but no one was about to believe anything they said.

Irving Stone, they tell me, was a very rich man who was able to employ a bunch of researchers, editors and ghost-writers in order to produce his books. Maybe it’s a vicious rumour, but they sure read that way. Big on facts, big on subject, big on number of pages, zero on characterisation; the remarkable ability to write a book on an absolutely fascinating subject and somehow make it boring.
    Two important works limp ponderousely toward us in this fashion, their victims Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh. Don’t read them unless you are a desperate fan (of the painters, Stone for sure has none of those).
    But thank god for Hollywood, for both books were bestsellers (dust gatherers by the million) and as a result terrific films were made from them.
    First, The Agony and the Ecstasy, of which, in the book, there was plenty of the former and none of the latter but gladly the movie confined it’s two and a half hours entirely to the period in which Michelangelo was actually engaged in painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The detail of how he was conned into doing it, how he was inspired, the nuts and bolts of how he went about it and all the trouble he caused everyone along the way, all of it is simply divine. Charlton Heston played the man, and did so in a remarkably (for him) restrained fashion, always hunched and insecure, ruffled and dirty, trying to look small and insignificant, great at grovelling to his patrons but prone to explosive anger whenever his art was under threat. Luckily he had Rex Harrison to work off, who played the warrior pope Julius with gusto and fine pomposity, but a man not lacking in culture and humanity—a pretty difficult task but the two worked in very well together. The best scenes have Michelangelo up on the towering, amazingly complex scaffold and Julius below, calling: “Michelangelo, when will you make an end?” to which comes the reply: “When I am finished.”
    The skill of it, enhancing the epic grandeur and superb colour photography, is the symbiotic relationship—both men need each other, both know it and both hate it. They argue about money (the Pope needs more conquests and cardinals to supplement his coffers and never pays Mickey), about the content, how long it is taking (eleven years when it was supposed to be two), and their respective disregard for their own health, but both know their immortality is tied to that ceiling and they joust verbally without ever losing their enforced mutual respect for each other.
    The other odd thing was that the film’s title sequence included a documentary, designed to help out all those Americans who didn’t know who Michelangelo was. An astonishing insult to everybody.