Mark Lee, Jordan Stokes, and Matthew Wrather consider a classic: John McTiernan’s 1990 classic of espionage and suspense, The Hunt for Red October, starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery.
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Further Reading
- The Hunt for Red October: Wikipedia, IMDb, Novel, Film
- Tom Clancy
- State Anthem of the Soviet Union
- Competence Porn on TV Tropes
- Barthes’s Effect of Reality (we called it the “reality function”)
Congratulations, Pete! BOOM!!!
Errr…in a good way.
I haven’t seen the movie since it was in theaters and don’t have much association with the Clanciverse. So, the one useless contribution I have was what now sounds like a post hoc rationalization, was a claim I read that the accents were reflective of the diversity of dialects and local languages across the Soviet Union.
It’s a nice idea, but “Sean Connery did his best” makes it clear that was accidental art.
I should dig out the CD, though. I’m pretty sure I have it (if not, probably a cassette in a lost box…) and haven’t listened to it in many years.
For the record: the book you’re referring to with the tree is Sum of All Fears. A giant log falls off a timber carrier and eventually collides with/cripples a missile submarine. I went and double-checked and was disappointed to find there’s no “BOOM” or “BONG”, just a relatively-restrained:
“The entire length of USS Maine reverberated like a base drum as one of the logs struck the fiber glass dome.”
And now I’m annoyed by the copy editing that allowed “base drum” (which I don’t think is a thing) for “bass drum” (which is what I think they probably meant).
BOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOING!
Maybe they meant “base” in the Shakespearian sense:
“The entire length of the USS Maine reverberated like a really crappy drum…”
I lost respect for Clancy’s much vaunted verisimilitude and military knowledge when in “Clear and Present Danger” he refers to Fort MacDill. MacDill is and always was an Air Force Base and went by MacDill Field when the Air Force was still part of the Army, so it has never, ever been a “Fort”. This is a clear mistake on the part of Clancy who bases his secret anti-drug clandestine operation there. At that point I realized that like most authors, Clancy was just pulling things out of his butt and could not be trusted with factual information.
I got into a long involved flame war with a Clancy apologist who theorized that “Fort MacDill” was a joke name for the base by Army soldiers based there since it was the home of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) which had Army and Navy components to it. He would never admit that Clancy got a technical detail incorrect. He had an almost scriptural reverence for the writings of Clancy.
Based on the podcast, I probably would enjoy “Cardinal of the Kremlin” but I’m not sure I’m up to over 800 pages of Cold War skulduggery which might be better spent reading John LeCarre instead.
Randoff with the truth a little, didn’t you comrade?