Rescuing me, Dick pushed through the throng and seized my arm. “Jim—come and meet Fritz Lang…”

He plunged into the press of dinner jackets towards a group of some twenty guests gazing down at what seemed to be the scene of a small accident. An elderly man in an oversize tuxedo sat on a straight-backed chair turned sideways to the wall. He slumped in the chair like an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy, buffeted by the noise and music, the light-show dappling his grey hair a vivid blue and green. He looked infinitely weary, and I thought that he might have died among these garish film people. When I shook his hand and briefly told him how much I admired his films, there was a flicker of response. An ironic gleam flitted through one eye, as if the director of Metropolis had realised that the dystopia he had visualised had come true in a way he had least expected.

*   *   *

Lang’s resigned humour came to mind as we finished our rum collins at the Copacabana Palace and set off for the congress hall where the festival of scientific and documentary films was being held, an adjunct to the main festival, which the organisers had decided to sponsor as a tribute to Kubrick’s science-fiction epic. A crowd of film fans pressed around us when we climbed into a taxi, and Dick momentarily brightened until we realised that almost all of them were pickpockets, brothel touts, and voodoo pitchmen.

“Hey, mister, you want voodoo? Real good voodoo?”

“Mister, you want to watch a guy fuck a chicken?”

“Only ten years old, mister. Real clean girls.”

We shut the windows on a forest of arms. “Well, Dick,” I asked, “do you? It’s not exactly your everyday BBC wildlife film.”

“Wait and see—you may be surprised, Jim. Even you.”

Offering Dick my moral support, I sat in on his lecture and the panel discussions which he chaired, fascinated as ever by the sight of him working his audience like a seasoned music-hall trouper. Yet his performance seemed oddly subdued, as if he were trying to shrug off the repertory of television mannerisms he had cultivated so carefully since the Cambridge days. Now and then, as he acknowledged the audience’s laughter, he glanced at them in the same weary way that Fritz Lang had accepted my handshake. Rio was filled with old actor-managers trapped within their images of themselves.