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They say that bogey, if alive today, would play this dashing P.I. But we see a more brutish swashbuckler--perhaps Nick Nolte--playing Clarke as he infiltrates a Bedouin village in the Sudan to extract an young girl kidnapped by her estranged father so he could sell her on the slave market. Clarke and his rescue team, hired by the girl's uncle, snatched the four-year-old victim last year the very week that her camel-riding, sword-carrying father was prepping her for female castration. Whew! but it was just another job for Clarke, 51, nominated by the World Investigator's Network of detectives as Investigator of the Year and veteran of the CIA's shadowy Air America in Southeast Asia. Clarke specializes in kidnap rescues, is considered one of the world's top five detectives, and is the subject of a documentary, "Missing...Presumed Alive". In Hollywood, he investigates newcomers who try to score big movie financing by dropping big names. Often as not, before a studio takes a meeting with a stranger, it already has in hand a thick file produced by Clarke.