The Big Picture explores a question that has long fascinated readers and writers – the situation of people who disappear from their everyday lives to hide, take on new identities or are never seen again. In real life, the inventor Rudolf Diesel and the writer Ambrose Bierce both disappeared in 1913; in 1920, the ex-Labour MP Victor Grayson vanished in London, possibly abducted to prevent him exposing governmental corruption. In his short story Wakefield, Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the mind of a middle-class Victorian Londoner who drops out to hide for 20 years a street away from his old home, and in The Third Man Graham Greene (possibly borrowing the idea from Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios) created an antihero who fakes his own death. In Patricia Highsmith's twice-filmed The Talented Mr Ripley, a villain takes over the identity of a dead man, a device brilliantly used in Antonioni's The Passenger and...
- 7/25/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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