The following Tuesday, Paula Latham was the last drop. I have no idea how that came about—it was the way they organised it. When I parked, exhausted as ever, outside her parent’s home, she remained in the car. Paula was a shy girl who hardly ever spoke.
    “Don’t touch me,” she said.
    Although somehow she suddenly looked more touchable than she ever had previously, I decided not to touch her. “Okay.”
    “You got the others, but you’re not getting me,” she said grimly.
    “Huh?”
    “Janie is a tart. Nothing she would do would surprise me,” she went on.
    “Nothing happened between me and Janie,” I said desperately.
    “Oh no? Then why does she insist, after that first night, of being dropped off first. And then there’s Sammy. She hates you. Why do you think that ever since the time she was taken home last, she’s not played again?”
    “You mean it’s because of me?”
    “And Cherie says you’re a bastard.”
    “Oh no.”
    “So then you went for big dumb Eva…”
    “I did not.”
    “Can’t you imagine how insulting it is?”
    “Insulting?”
    “Being left to last!”
    There was no talking my way out of that. She slammed the door of the car while I blubbered a dozen lame explanations simultaneously, before I realised that none of them would have helped.

​

The Harder They Fall was notable mostly because it was Humphrey Bogart’s last film, and he was already dead when it was released. The book on which the film was based was written by Budd Schulberg, and mostly, it concerns the various personalities that the author met when in the fight game but the film singled out just one story. Bogey plays a publicist for a fight-fixing crook, Rod Steiger, who navigates a Neanderthal with no punch and a glass jaw to the heavyweight championship bout and then arranges that he take a dive. The dimwitted fighter refuses. Gradually, Bogart undergoes a crisis of conscience at the heartless corruption all around him, and the film ends when he finally decides to expose it all. A fierce attack on boxing, it was so near the truth that a former champion thought it based on his own life story and sued the producers.
    The film is very violent and yet strangely its weakness was that Bogey played a pacifistic character who does no physical harm to anyone. The nearest he gets is that the end of the film when he tries to frighten Steiger by slamming a wardrobe door in his vicinity. Maybe he, like the character, was completely worn out by life in the end.