@Cross-cultural communication i106j@
106) Memories of Gene Hackman
Do you all know Gene Hackman? If you are close to my age (born in 1951), you probably know that he is an actor from Hollywood. If you like movies, you might say that he was a very unique and tasteful actor. He died in February 2025. Well, I first heard of Hackman when I was in my second year of medical school. At the time (the early 1970s), I was attending night classes at the YMCA English School in Osaka three times a week. Three different teachers were in charge of the classes, and one of them liked to get the students to debate, and one time, he gave us the instruction to watch the Hollywood movie gPoseidon Adventureh, which had just been released, over the course of two weeks, so that we could use it as the topic for a debate. I managed to find the time to go and see the film at a cinema in Umeda. It was quite an interesting film. The luxury liner Poseidon is hit by a tsunami while at sea and capsizes, ending up upside down. The main character is played by Hackman, who plays a young, dynamic priest. The film depicts the events that occur while he leads a few passengers from the bottom of the ship (actually the dining room on the upper deck) to the top (actually the bottom of the ship). The other passengers, under the guidance of the purser who was also in the dining room, decide to stay where they are and wait for rescue. They then die by drowning due to flooding caused by a small explosion on the ship shortly afterwards.
The priest played by Hackman always preached that gGod helps those who strive to find the answers, but not everyoneh. Well, I could imagine that this would be a point of debate. I don't remember the details of the debate, but I do remember that all the students had seen the movie and seemed to like it, and the class was very lively.
I had come to know Gene Hackman through this unusual opportunity, and I had grown to like the actor. I found a cinema showing a revival of a film in which he starred as a detective with the nickname Popeye, a few years before Poseidon (at the time, video recordings of films did not yet exist in the world), and I also came to like this film. Popeye is a detective in charge of drug enforcement, and in French Connection, the setting is Brooklyn, New York. After many days of stakeout investigations, the criminals are arrested, but most of them end up with only minor charges. The sequel, which could be called a revenge, is French Connection 2, in which Popeye travels to Marseille, France, the source of the drugs, and plays an active role. Have you noticed anything about the two settings? That's right, after that I spent three years as a resident doctor at a hospital in Brooklyn, and then, more than ten years later, I spent two and a half years as a general practitioner in Paris, France, although not in Marseille.
I studied English at the YMCA in preparation for the residency training in US, and it was in one of those classes that I first heard of Hackman, and that his works were set in Brooklyn and Marseille in France. Don't you think that this experience as a medical student somehow foreshadowed my future? Actually, I had forgotten about this anecdote for a long time, but for some reason, Hackman's friendly smile came to mind, and when I searched for it on a video service, I found that both gPoseidon Adventureh and gFrench Connectionh were available on Amazon Prime, so I watched them like crazy at the end of 2020. After watching these films, I thought about it and came up with this gfuture prediction storyh.
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