The great Cossack warrior Taras Bulba has two sons in which he misplaces all his dreams and pride. One he must exile as a coward, the other he must execute as a traitor. I saw the movie with Yul Brynner doing his strut-magnificently thing, and Tony Curtis as the son he has to shoot. It seems the fault was that he educated the boy which caused him to think too much and decide war was silly, thereby attempting to negotiate with his enemies, the Poles, and then complicate things by falling in love with a Polish girl, played by German actress Christine Kaufman. Plainly the only thing to do was shoot the lad. Really, the film's only memorable moment was when the bullet-hole appeared in the middle of Tony’s smooth, polished breastplate. But it inspired me enough to take on Nikolai Gogol’s strange book, which was exceptionally unexciting most of the way although that might have been because the translation I read was very tedious. Still I managed to get through it somehow—it’s only very short.

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“We do what?”
 “Liquidate ‘em. Dispose of ‘em, shoot ‘em, give ‘em the wooden overcoat, the deep six, the perpetual freeze, the big sleep, the chop. You follow my drift?”
 “Chief, it’s marvellous, but you’ll never get official sanction…”
 “And who, by the great Lord Harry, is talking about official sanction?”
 “But if anyone… it’s against all the principles of the free world?”
 “And who, in the name of the four and twenty virgins who came down from Inverness is bothered about principles?…”
  When I read The Liquidator by John Gardner, I thought it terribly funny and terribly exciting. It was a James Bond spoof—the hero has all Bond’s class and womanising skills but none of his courage, nor his ruthless ability to kill. So he hires a hitman to do the jobs for him. No one else thought it was at all exciting or funny. Some years later, they made it into a movie with a strong cast and I thought it hilarious and very exciting. Nobody else did. I saw the film on TV years later still and it was still funny, and rather exciting. No one else thinks so. Oddly, the movie uses straight actors — Rod Taylor, Trevor Howard, Wilfred Hyde White (superbly doing the dialogue above) in the comedy roles, and comedy actors — Eric Sykes, David Tomlinson, John Le Mesurier — as the nasty villains. And Jill St John, ludicrously, turns out to be the master-spy. A lot of nonsense but it did have a Bond-style Shirley Bassey theme-song.  I still think it wonderful but everyone else has won because it's rarely shown and very hard to find a copy.