Friday, May 21, 2004

I'm a doctor, not a PR man.

I was watching "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" last night. In it, Captain Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) accidentally kills a fellow soldier and friend during combat. Unwilling to believe what has happened, he carries the body to a medic. The medic tells him, "this man is dead, Captain."

I hit rewind. Was that DeForest Kelley? It's almost as if he was saying, "he's dead, Jim." I couldn't tell. The medic doesn't get much screen time, and the movie was made ten years before "Star Trek."

Today I whipped over to IMDb to check it out. He's listed in the extended credits, and marked "uncredited," so I guess it was him.

It's odd seeing people in movies when they were young (or, in this case, alive). I can see a young man in a recent movie, and he's a young man. When I see a young man in an old movie, I'm looking at an old man when he was young. It's hard to see him as simply a young man. I can't shake the feeling that I'm looking into the past, that the people I'm seeing are actually old.

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