Review: Can a story channel Bogie? Lights, camera, action!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 21, 2013
Bogie could have been at the dinner party in this story, striding through the scene in his white dinner jacket, cigar in one hand, drink in the other, stopping to talk out of the side of his mouth to Uruguayan officials and narrator Roger Bowman. Although a contemporary story, the tone of the narrator and the foreign locale reminded me of Casablanca! But for all that, the plot was right out of the news, with an interesting and modern Iranian angle and a rather chatty Mossad agent. Bowman, a California private investigator, and his wife fly down to Montevideo to celebrate with a friend, only to find a dead body in their bed in the hotel upon check-in. (They stayed in the hotel anyway, just in a new room. Hmmm.) Heavy on the dialogue and Roger's narration, the story could have used more Montevideo atmospherics. Descriptions of the landscape, the food, smells, traffic, sights and sounds, etc., would have given the story greater authenticity. I really liked Roger's comparison of the South American city's pollution to its corruption and wanted more from this storyteller.