It was a clever and original mystery tale simply evoked by one sentence written by Greene: "I saw a man walking down the Strand, whose funeral I had only recently attended.We have to get them from India when they""re just baby chicks...You""ll have to teach him to talk." She instructs the clerk to deliver the bird when it arrives.As she writes down her address, a handsome, virile, bachelor attorney named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) [Mitch""s name recalls the director""s own name, Hitch] bounds up the shop""s stairs and mistakes Melanie for a salesclerk: "I wonder if you couldhelpme?" She plays along accommodatingly as an employee.They were all so...what shall I say? Intellectually devised....Every one had a definite central heme.Brains, you know....Most prologues, Mr.Kent, are utterly commonplace.But yours, yours have meaning.What was it Ruskin said? ""That intangible something.""" Nan interrupted, asking: "What ever happened to that boyfriend of yours? Is he still a bootlegger?" Vivian""s comment about a book titled ""Slavery in Old Africa"" inspired another ""unit"" idea in Kent - an astonishingly racist premise:"I can see it now.It is most noted for the director""s struggle with Irving Thalberg at MGM, the studio that eventually released he film and wanted it to be of acceptable, commercial length.The scene was a shabby hotel room, where Gennady Zosimov (Ion Caramitru) in a blood-stained T-shirt with a presumedly-dead hooker on the bed, was desperate and distraught, speaking to Russian godfather/mobster Anatoly.