Burning Daylight

Too bad the actors were greedy with their acting and the director must have been asleep. This movie looks more like a rehearsal for a bad stage play than actors performing before the camera.

Here we have three stories that deal with greed and deception and thats it. The point of any connection between the three stories is forgotten or is suppose to be summed up in the three book titles seen on a table between acts.

The movie really doesn't seem to have any goal and would have been a television show way back in the 1960's --- maybe.

I wonder why I watched all of it.

Three short stories by Jack London give us quite a picture of mankind and even more so of one particular specimen of womankind. All have to do with greed and the justification for it. It would be good to remember Jack London's socialist views in evaluating these stories.

Number one is the story of a pair of thieves who've just completed a robbery of socialite Adrian Cowan who has taken on the robber baron ethics of her father. A woman who enjoys her privileges and the rich girl toys that come with them. Sanzhar Sultanov and Christopher DiMeo play a pair of thieves who don't trust each other and plot against each other about the loot in jewels they've just made a haul with. Cowan wins in the end.

But she loses in number two as another robber Paul Calderon outsmarts her in an interesting battle of wits and nerve. Calderon gives an interesting explanation as to why he's turned to a life of crime.

In the last story young Rob Knepper who has made his fortune in the west has come east to entertain a business proposition whereby he's fronting for some robber barons in a stock swindle. When he realizes he's been taken and roped into the deal by Adrian Cowan he goes back to the rules of justice in the old west to get even.

Maybe there's a little too much philosophy and not enough action from material based on writings of the author Call Of The Wild and The Sea Wolf. But students of Jack London I think will like the trilogy.