|
It's interesting, now
and then kicks with a little bit of gun play... but not much. Bit of sex, bit
of travel, and money is never really a problem. If you like the old black and
white movies of the 1930s and 40s with their èmigrè stars and
European settings (like Night Train To Munich), you'll like this novel.
Furst has enough of a feminine feel to his writing to capture the escapist
romance of such dramas, yet is masculine enough to make the brute action fit
the political realities of the time. And what was the time? The old class order
in collapse, phony aristocrats and nouveau riche and fantasy artists of all
persuasions everywhere filling the sidewalk cafes and salons of the old
Parisian art mavens. In 1938 you could be anyone you wanted in Paris,
especially as the cultural mood craved fantasy. Movies cut across all classes,
all minds. French Foreign Legion films such as Beau Geste, Le Grand
Jeu, or La Bandera formed a sub-genre within action-romance drama
which exploited the cross-cultural milieu of multiple nationalities and exotic
locations.
So there's a lot of
old movie noise in Furst's head when writing this novel. It could be an
expression or even a symptom of mass hypnosis therapy. Our sense of the past
has become pure fiction. Movies today, the Bible yesterday: all is
mythology.
parable of the good
movie star
To some extent,
Mission to Paris is a play-within-a-play in the sense that the protagonist
Fredric Stahl has to go into acting mode both on stage and off. He arrives in
Le Havre mid-September '38, disembarks the Ile de France, and is promptly
chauffeured to the Hotel Claridge in Paris in a new Panhard Dynamic (steering
wheel in the middle) laid on by the local Warner Brothers rep. As a Hollywood
movie star, he's as politically important as, say, a Cardinal from Rome; as he
soon comes to realize, Hollywood is like the Vatican, a state onto itself,
quite possibly religious, certainly propaganda. Naively he believes he can
avoid the post-Depression politics of the new Europe... but as the groupies
start queuing up for a piece of his action -- including the Ribbentropburo, the
political propaganda service of the German Foreign Ministry -- he quickly
learns that there are many ways to get screwed. The Nazis, for example, have
their local advocates and domestic spies everywhere.
Who is Stahl exactly?
He's forty, originally from Vienna, has an Oscar nomination or two, yet his
career is stagnating. Why else would he have been shipped to Europe to make a
movie about the French Foreign Legion? The title is sotto voce ironic:
Après La Guerre. Of course there's always a war somewhere -- in
this script it's Syria (a French possession), with Stahl's character Colonel
Vadic trying to reach Turkey with a fake countess who he just might be in love
with. Off stage, Stahl is hustling the costume designer, a sexy German
èmigrè called Renate Steiner. In the end, their fate is very
similar to that of the lovers in the movie, so it's a case of life imitates art
when it's usually the other way around. Yet there's nothing phony about it,
although at times the reader might wonder when the cameras are running and when
they're not, especially in the Hungarian interlude. Sometimes the fiction
overpowers the reality of the situation, the location, the suspension of
disbelief. Yet --
There is danger, there
is tension, always political, always moral. Stahl can always walk away, abandon
the movie, return to the US... which might mean the end of his career, but at
least he would be alive. He seeks advice from a consulate officer (Second
Secretary) called J.J. Wilkinson and ends up as a spy almost by accident. The
Nazis want him to come to Berlin, adjudicate a "mountain film" festival, will
fly him in, give him 10,000 dollars and the Bismarck Suite at the famous Hotel
Adlon... and a woman, should he need one. She turns out to be Olga Orlova, a
Russian actress and established German star, a favorite of Hitler and Goebbels.
Deep water film buffs/scholars will immediately recognize the character model:
Olga Checkova, known on screen as Olga Tschechowa, who famously played a
double-agent in Asew (1935) and, it seems, in real life.
And the protag Stahl?
Some males might think he's a bit of a fop, like a guy who carries a tennis
racket and no balls. As Cicero said about Caesar: "Methinks he wears his girdle
too loose." Yet it would be unfair to dismiss Stahl as an American cultural
mercenary invented in Hollywood by old Europe. He's very believable and Furst
has certainly done his research on the type. Paul Muni is one Warner Brothers
actor who hailed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; other actors come to mind...
Charles Boyer (French), Edward G. Robinson (Romanian)... even the
writer-director Billy Wilder. When Wilder fled Nazi Berlin in 1933 he hung out
in Paris for a period at the Hotel Ansonia, a haven for other proscribed German
film figures such as Peter Lorre and Franz Waxman; in fact he directed his
first film in Paris, Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed) before heading for
Mexico and crossing into Hollywood.
The action is full of
movie types: Moppi, Stahl's old boss from their days in Barcelona, who could
easily be Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon or Kiki, the rich ingenue
art model and party girl who could be Jean Harlow or Danielle Darrieux in just
about anything.
Furst writes with a
sense of elegance -- fluid, baroque, yet always within the American tradition
of verbal economy. He's good. He isn't one of these writers who goes into
"performance voice", who just lets it all hang out like a comedian in full
improv mode. He writes tight like a movie, scenes that advance the action
without a lot of verbal impressionism (where poetry is substituted for action).
Here, his voice tilts towards high culture, with just a hint of Henry James,
say, laundered through Graham Greene. The language captures the time when
Hollywood English was stage English, hit me daddy five to the bar iambics,
where everyone sounds like a butler even if he's a count from Vienna or a bum
on Sunset Blvd. The art of declamation is still part of the style, the
microphone still in the distance.
Warner Brothers made
51 films in 1938 and Après La Guerre wasn't one of them... but in
this fictional world, perhaps you could call it a "lost film".
Mission To
Paris: strong, escapist fare, yet authentic within its historical context.
The ending is perhaps better managed than Spies of the Balkans, Furst's
previous novel, although both share a strong period atmosphere. If you like
planes, boats and trains fiction, you might like this --
Mission To
Paris at Amazon:
USA
|
Canada
|
UK
|
Australia
*Check out LR's
novel
RADIO
BRAZIL »»
|
