Harold Robbins’ “The Adventurers”

May 06, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I came home from working at UG Monday evening and knowing that I didn’t have to work the next day, decided to relax and see a movie. I went through my collection and as soon as my eyes caught “The Adventurers” from the Harold Robbins novel of the same name, I knew what I was looking for.
Last Monday was the third time I saw this film. I have read all of Harold Robbins’s books and have seen all the screenplays adapted from his work. None of them does justice to his novels, except The Adventurers, even though The Carpetbaggers comes very close. But I still like the book in preference to the film.
Not so with The Adventurers. It went beyond Robbins. This is a brilliantly crafted adaptation in which the director is the real star. I have philosophical reasons for choosing it. That movie had a deep effect on me when I first saw it. It still does. It remains one of the films I like best.
At a time when President Jagdeo’s post-presidential luxuriating package is the focus of political gossip and at a time when the PPP has moved away from the ideals it was born with, The Adventurers is a movie that you must see.
The Adventurers is about the betrayal of the dreams of a new world by those who promised it to the poorer classes of a poor country and as the drama unfolds halfway through the film, the parallels with the PPP rule are eerie and graphic. I saw it when I was 21 years of age and at that time I was enchanted with communism and Fidel Castro.
I could date my intellectual questioning of revolution from that viewing of The Adventures. As I entered university, grew older, read philosophy books, Fidel Castro and communism waned from my mind. Today I think Karl Marx was hopelessly wrong on many of the essential tenets of philosophy. And I consider Fidel Castro a monster dictator.
Set in a fictional Latin American country, the moral of the story is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One dictator is overthrown by a zealous revolutionary and as the new leader inherits the palace, he becomes another tyrant. The cycle goes on.
Those who have consistently voted for the PPP and now find that President Jagdeo from age forty-seven will enjoy a life of prodigious comfort at the expense of one of the poorest economies in the world, should see The Adventurers. Mr. Jagdeo and the PPP could easily be substituted as the main characters of the plot.
One senior Kaieteur News journalist asked me last Sunday evening how could the PPP have spent so long fighting for the fundamental values on which a free society rests yet behave exactly the same way as dictatorships in the seventies and eighties. It is the story of socialism, its revolutionary leaders and the failure of power to tame itself.
Will those who voted for the PPP still do so after the mountains of resources that Mr. Jagdeo will extract from this poor country after 2011? What reason is there to vote for the party of this President when the facts are there for the entire world to see? Mr. Burnham did not give himself these favours and privileges yet PPP leaders paint a nasty portrait of Mr. Burnham.
So why if he was so bad he didn’t pass a Bill to live in luxury after he would have retired or resigned. Mr. Hoyte could have done the same before he faced the electorate in the 1992 elections. Here is where Mr. Jagdeo and the PPP become barefaced.
Unlike Mr. Hoyte in 1992, Mr. Jagdeo does not have to compete in another election, so he figured he could go ahead with his splendorous financial hand-out after he leaves office.
The PPP, on the other hand, will claim during the campaign that its presidential candidate was not the one who provided himself with a monumental ocean of resources so why should voters punish him for something he did not do.
But the voters have to be asinine, idiotic and moronic not to question the PPP’s presidential candidate on his attitude to what Mr. Jagdeo has given himself. Whoever will be the PPP’s point man for the 2011 elections is not known as yet.
What is public knowledge, however, is that there are persons in that party that would like to have the nomination.
From every corner of Guyana, where they are, PPP voters should ask their leaders to publicly state their position on Mr. Jagdeo’s post-2011 goodies.

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Harold Robbins’ “The Adventurers”

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