Madge Meredith

            On Friday morning it rained and it was cloudy all day so I didn’t bother taking a bike ride later on. I just worked on getting caught up on my journal, worked on some stories, a poem and a couple of translations.

            I was translating part of the screenplay for Les Enfants du Paradis when I came across the word “borne”. There is a scene with a blind beggar on a street in Paris. He has a pet owl that is perched on a borne. I think that a borne is a vertical carved stone structure about the size of a child, and perhaps it served as a barrier marker between one quarter of Paris and another, but I couldn’t be sure. I decided not to try to translate it and just called it a “borne”.

            For lunch I had a can of tuna with salsa and plantain chips.

            I practiced my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” a couple of times.

            I boiled a potato and a carrot, heated up a chicken leg and some gravy and watched two episodes of Sea Hunt.

            In the first story Nelson is hired to recruit and train a team of divers to mine beryllium off the coast of Madagascar. Two of the men are former pals who, while they were diving together. One of the men, Doug is a married man. Paul is the other man, and when he sees Doug at the medical check-up he tells Nelson that the summer before when they were diving together Doug had left Paul tangled in seaweed without rescuing him. Doug says there was no seaweed. Nelson tests the men after explosives have been used to break up some rock on the seabed. A net is lowered and the men are to load rocks into the net. Everything goes well for a while until Paul suddenly becomes affected by rapture of the deep or nitrogen narcosis. He begins behaving irrationally and hallucinating and then attacks both Doug and Nelson. He hits Nelson over the head with a rock and then tries to knife Doug. Nelson recovers just in time to stop Paul. He traps Paul in the rock net and has it pulled up, but a diver is supposed to expel the compressed air that is expanding in his lungs as he ascends and in Paul’s condition he couldn’t do that. He had to be placed in a decompression tank on the boat for six hours. When Paul recovers he realizes that the seaweed incident from the summer before had also been a case of rapture of the deep.

            The second story is a flashback to when Nelson first left the navy to become a private diver. He was doing some research off the coast of California with Dr Kate Marlow from Marineland when he sees the coast guard hauling in a geological research boat that they’d found abandoned with expensive equipment aboard. There had been two divers on board but one of the them is found dead on the shore with the marks of an octopus on his body. In Nelson’s experience octopi do not attack people and so he is sceptical. We see the other man, Wilkes, in hiding at Rocky Point. He is the one that killed the other man. He killed him because they discovered oil and Wilkes and his unseen business partner want to sell the information for a fortune to other parties. They arrange by phone to escape but Wilkes plans to swim out to his boat on a certain night and needs a snorkel. He decides to steal one from a couple of divers but the man recognizes him and so Wilkes strangles him with a cord designed to leave the marks of an octopus. Nelson meets a man named Bennett, who represents the mining company that the missing divers worked for. They begin to investigate together and find the scene of the murder of the diver whose snorkel was stolen. Nelson finds some blue kelp, which does not grow in that particular area but rather around Rocky Point. Bennett does not think the kelp is important but Nelson insists on looking around. They dive together and when Wilkes sees them he dives as well to attack Nelson, who finds out that Bennett is Wilkes’s partner in crime. Bennett is about to shoot Nelson with a spear gun but Nelson sets off a flare that blinds him and the spear kills Wilkes. Nelson then goes for Bennett, removes his air hose and takes him helpless to the surface where he calls the police and he’s arrested.

            In the first story, Doug’s wife was played by Madge Meredith who’d just gotten out of prison five years earlier where she’d served two years of a five year sentence for complicity in the assault and kidnapping of her manager. It was found later that she was innocent and she was released. After retiring from acting she devoted her life to helping others who’d been falsely accused. 

            Dr Kate Marlow was played by Mari Aldon, who was born in Lithuania. She didn’t get a lot of work in films and did mostly television. She married Tay Garnett, who directed The Postman Always Rings Twice.