Return from the Ashes
In the winter of 1945, on a train bound for Paris, a small boy kicks monotonously at the outside compartment door of a crowded compartment--and then opens the door and jumps from the train. His mother howls in anguish, an unnamed passenger pulls the brake cord, the conductor comes and escorts the distraught mother to an empty compartment in the next car--and everyone else in the compartment wonders why one fellow passenger, a woman, sat mute and motionless throughout the entire shocking episode. And then someone notices the concentration-camp tattoo on her right forearm. The fact of the matter is that Dr. Michele Wolf (Ingrid Thulin) has seen--and experienced--such horrors that a little thing like a little boy jumping off a moving train to his death looks like the spilling of milk in comparison. And not a man or woman on board could possibly dispute that--especially not a Gentile.Michele arrives in Paris, books a room under an assumed name, and then calls the number of her old home. Her husband, Stanislaus Pilgrin (Maximillian Schell) picks up the phone and says hello, but Michele does not answer. And on the other end of the wire, Stan's companion, Fabienne Wolf (Samantha Eggar), Michele's stepdaughter from a previous marriage, urges Stan to hang up.Michele goes up to her room and recalls the years that brought her to this pass. She met Stan before the outbreak of war in Europe. He was much younger than she (thus making her what is today called a "cougar") and made his living, such as it was, as a professional chess player. Michele, as she would later admit, "bought" him--and Stan always resented having to take money from Michele, just as he resented having to live from prize to prize off his playing.Dr. Charles Bovard (Herbert Lom), a plastic surgeon at the hospital where Michele is on staff as a radiation oncologist, disapproved of the match, recognizing exactly the sort of man Stan was and is: a gigolo. He soon had reason to worry about far more momentous things: the Nazis overran the Maginot Line and occupied Paris. Soon they subjected all the hospitals to new employment regulations, which affected Michele directly, because she is Jewish. Stan offered to marry Michele in order to give her an identity apart from being a Jewess--but on the day of her wedding, a Nazi patrol arrested Michele and took her away.Now in 1945, Michele introduces herself first, not to Stan, but to Charles Bovard. She confesses to him some of the horrors she endured--including prostituting herself to the camp guards in exchange for rations in excess of starvation rations. Charles can and does understand her having to do what she needs to do in order to survive--but he is not sure about her plan to re-enter Stan's life. Nevertheless, he performs a reconstructive procedure to make Michele look as near to her old (pre-Holocaust) self as the consummately skilled Charles can manage--and then Michele allows Fabienne to see her at the hotel, this although Fabienne fails to recognize Michele for who she is.The reason for this failure is simple: Michele was reported dead in the camps. But she was never so declared--because under French law, dating back to the Code Napoleon, no one is declared dead until a coroner has a body to examine. This actually creates a problem for Fabienne and Stan: Michele is, quite simply, the surviving heiress of a large portion of the private wealth once owned by thousands of Jews who died in the camps--300 million francs' worth. If Michele could be declared dead, Fabienne would then inherit--but the law is clear: no body, no claim.So when Fabienne tells Stan of meeting a woman who looks remarkably like Michele at her hotel (recall that this is Michele, registered under an alias), and Stan meets Michele in her hotel and does not recognize her, he makes a shocking proposal to her: that she pose as Michele long enough to establish an identity, then feign her death so that the 300-million-franc legacy would be released. In return she would collect a "finder's fee" of 30 percent.Charles is shocked as Michele decides to play along long enough to see whether Stan will actually recognize that she really is Michele. Eventually Michele does reveal herself to Stan, who is only half willing to have her back, and to Fabienne, who, quite simply, hates her guts for coming between her and Stan. Michele, of course, establishes her claim to the massive Jewish legacy, but the tensions in the household rise to a breaking point, and Fabienne prepares to leave.But on her last day, Fabienne challenges Stan to undertake a plot to murder Michele by tricking her into opening a wall safe rigged with a gun. At first Stan refuses--but that night, Fabienne takes her last bath, and also takes champagne and barbiturates, a potentially fatal combination. Stan pumps Fabienne for a few more details on how to make the plot work--and then drowns Fabienne and then rigs the bathroom door to make it appear that Fabienne locked herself in and deliberately took an overdose.Michele, as Stan expects, takes the news badly and blames herself for Fabienne's death. Stan loudly tells the police investigators how worried he now is for her mental health.A few months later, Stan leaves town, telling Michele that he is going to Brussels to play in a chess tournament. Where he really goes is to a Paris suburb, which is part of Fabienne's plan. But there is another complication of which Stan is unaware: Charles comes to see Michele on the night of the tournament and quarrels with Michele over her continued enabling of Stan. Michele orders him out--and at that moment, Stan, who has made enough of a scene at the Paris suburb where he has gone that multiple witnesses would swear that he was in that city, has gotten enough of a moment alone to call Michele and trick her into opening the rigged safe.Michele agrees to open the safe to retrieve what she thinks will be a small present Stan bought, in anticipation of his victory. Stan waits a long time, then in an attack of cold feet, calls out to Michele four times. Then he hears a single gunshot, and hangs up.He then comes back home and finds Michele lying on the floor of the library, apparently dead. He completes the last part of the plan: disconnecting the gun, wiping it of fingerprints, placing it in Michele's hand, and dropping it on the floor--a classic "throwdown." Then he calls the police--but when he turns back to the library, he notices that Michele is no longer lying on the floor. Returning to the library, he is suddenly surrounded by two detectives, Charles Bovard--and a very much alive Michele.What has actually happened is this: Michele quarreled with Charles--but when she told Charles to leave, Charles opened the outer door of the foyer--and then closed it again. He intended to go back into the house and apologize, but before he could reopen the inner door, the telephone rang. Charles waited a decent interval, and then walked in on Michele, who asked him to wait, because she was still on the telephone. She moved to the library, and Charles waited just outside--until Stan shouted Michele's name four times. Charles stepped in, Michele turned toward Charles--and Charles saw the rigged gun. He rushed forward, shoved Michele aside--and the gun fired, harmlessly, putting a round through the doorway into a far wall. Shortly after that, the telephone went dead.Now recalling this, Michele tells Stan that she now understands his totally amoral attitude. The detectives then take Stan away--and Stan wryly observes to himself that "the simple closing of a door has brought me to the guillotine." Michele and Charles remain behind, sadder but wiser.
murder