1001 Nights Cast

At 11 p.m., across from the Carrs grocery store on Gambell Street and 14th Avenue—the heart of Fairview—a handful of shadowy men stand evenly apart, lifting their shoulders against a drizzly rain. Occasionally, a car stops, rolls down a window, and one of them slides into the passenger seat. Minutes later he is replaced by a new man who stands the same way, in the same place. From the Carrs parking lot, Anchorage’s disorganized criminal network looks ant-like efficient.

Money and politics are like fuel and flame. And gambling has always had a way of turning the heads of Washington state politicians. There have been times when its siren call lured some of our less principled public servants to their ruination. Envelopes of cash stuffed into the pockets of a few state legislators by shadowy men seeking to influence votes in favor of legalization of casino gambling led to the indictments of two prominent state legislators and a lobbyist in 1980 in the scandal called ‘Gamscam.’ The shadowy figures turned out to be federal agents running a sting operation.

Ordinary, clean-looking 22-year-old Sebastien (George Babluani), living with his Russian Georgian immigrant family in France, decides to break from his drab life upon finding a set of instructions which had been intended for an old man who’s just died. They sound intriguing and Sebastien has no idea where they’ll lead him. On a train, following the directions, he’s unaware that he’s being watched as he complies with the orders to secret messages in train station lockers, code words for rendezvous with shadowy men and strange phone calls ultimately leading to a secluded house in the woods. After some time, Sebastien falls upon a sinister gang of clandestine gamblers whose game involves betting on human lives. Sebastien is to find that he is Player No. 13…

Meanwhile a mist was hiding the dim work
Of Arthur’s men; and like another mist,
All gray, came Guinevere to Lancelot,
Whom Bors had left, not having had of him
The largess of a word. She laid her hands
Upon his hair, vexing him to brief speech:
‘And you—are you like Bors?’

‘I may be so,’
She said; and she saw faintly where she gazed,
Like distant insects of a shadowy world,
Dim clusters here and there of shadowy men
Whose occupation was her long abhorrence:

Colonel Gamble’s cavalry had scouts posted east of Gettysburg on the Cashtown Turnpike (present day Route 30) and Sargent Jones of the 8th Illinois cavalry saw a group of grey shadowy men walking toward him along the pike. He then borrowed a gun from another soldier and fired into a mounted man marching toward him. The men scattered and fired back, the battle of Gettysburg had begun!

And he went on climbing the hill, and left the rath, and there came to his mind some of the old poems that told of lovers, good and bad, and of some that were awakened from the sleep of the grave itself by the strength of one another’s love, and brought away to a life in some shadowy place, where they are waiting for the judgment and banished from the face of God.

And at last, at the fall of day, he came to the Steep Gap of the Strangers, and there he laid himself down along a ridge of rock, and looked into the valley, that was full of grey mist spreading from mountain to mountain.

And it seemed to him as he looked that the mist changed to shapes of shadowy men and women, and his heart began to beat with the fear and the joy of the sight.

The cover depicts a curvaceous, redheaded woman who is being ogled by a subway car full of leering, shadowy men. Our heroine is strap-hanging it—leaving us to speculate as to whether the men unchivalrously refused to offer her a seat or whether she, being a strong woman, has simply chosen to stand. We know she is a smart woman because she is engrossed in a book, while the men are either not reading at all or using tabloids and pony sheets as props to disguise their surreptitious lechery. The colorful jacket recalls the lurid illustrations of dime-store pulp fiction of the mid–20th century and, viewed with 21st-century sensibilities, it seems to promise something satirical or ironic within, a wry and clever drollery.

In The Chancellor Manuscript, a novelist named Peter Chancellor turns in a manuscript about shadowy men behind the scenes in the US Government doing evil things. When the real shadowy men behind the US Government doing evil things hear about the book…they think Chancellor is on to their real life shenanigans and try to have him killed. While this sounds like a comedy, it is in fact played quite straight.

Leone’s leaps between time periods, with multiple jumps forward and back, is never bewildering. He rarely opts for a gung-ho gimmick where the subtle establishing of a melancholy mood will suffice. The ambitious structure achieves exactly the levels of poetic resonance he’s aiming for, and his unsavoury, shadowy men become mythical characters. He’s helped considerably by Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score, one of his very finest and most stirring, which elevates the themes of misguided love, broken loyalty and mesmeric friendship even higher.