Squadron Leader Forrester wakes to the sound of ice tinkling against a glass borne by perhaps the smoothest, sleekest face he has ever seen. Ungesturing at the glass, wholly mesmerized by the genteel sycophancy of the face in which a bit of shame mingles with pride, he tries to blurt, but his throat will not oblige. So he drinks, eyes still on the eager, submissive-looking neat face, with the whisper of someone educated at the best of girls' schools. Miss Win Min Than, as she introduces herself, will see to him, feed and rear him, get him to church and back to form. She knows all the jargon, the hearty british devil-may-care, and will lead him out of the funk in which he rots. His Mosquito has crashed in the desert; Blore, his Cambridge-educated navigator has perished, trekking into the far desert in search of something unutterable. Or did he shoot himself? Forrester is not sure. Did he, Forrester, shoot himself as well, and can this be the skimpy afterlife that equips exquisite handmaidens with strange, inadequate-sounding names? Even if only comforting him with glasses of tinkling water, Win Min Than will touch him magically, he just knows it. Along comes Brenda de Banzie, hearty theist, who vows to see him honorably linked to God. Squadron Leader Forrester is Gregory Peck. As stories go, it has epic reach, especially in its opening scenes. The flying is good, the just deserts in the desert better. In what seems no time, at least in the spiritual avalanche that in The Purple Plain passes for interiorized "recognition," as Aristotle put it, Squadron Leader Forrester goes in search of a ruby, or perhaps Win Min Than equips him with it. Yes she does. The love affair begins to boil, but only as warm catalysis over cold rocks. This is Burma after all, and the time that of the famed Burma Road. All liaisons are bound to be temporary, and Win Min Than, that honed, almost simpering epitome of Burmese beauty—slender, winsome, keenly spiritual—knows it. Yet she risks her all, as if life's profoundest experience has leaped upon her, never to come again. An air raid ensues. Things revert to so-called normal, and the tenderly adjusted octave of wartime infatuation slumps into diurnal uproar.
     H.E. Bates, a.k.a. Flying Officer X, whose wartime stories I almost eagerly mopped up, does well in this regard, letting us intuit the lovers' unanimity as our own, as Forrester cottons on to what's exotic and she espouses his virile version of the mundane. She wafts away from our minds only to haunt our imaginations, having given facial image to all the Asian heroines that Green and Malraux tried to bring to life. Win Min Than the svelte, sari-clad wisp animates the movie and (retrospectively) the book by summoning up into herself the fragility of Asian woman merged with her own perhaps unique ethereal regality. Merely to see her look, at and through and beyond him, is to grasp something all penetrating in at least Bates's concept: the East looking at the West and not quite liking it, yet, in that sympathetic aversion, finding a source of love.
     So where has this bedside angel gone? Was she found, introduced, and wasted all in one go? I doubt it, but I have found no other movies of hers, reinforcing my notion that she was indeed magical, and the mirage she conjured up in the Squadron Leader's hospital room was her only rosebud. That correctly accented whisper of British English is a rare thing in this age of mumble and slur. How come she spoke so well? Who, if not the equally phonetic Nimet, host of The New York Times radio station, WQXR, groomed her for the part and got her thinking she was more imperial in her concise grandeur than mr. Peck's phoney Air Force? Brenda de Banzie understands best when, after the air raid, she explains that Asiatics don't brood inwardly, they let their emotions out. Perhaps Win Min Than felt that flood and slid away with it.

Ripley

How cleverly she combines the ogled pleasure of scanties with an apocalyptic vision of monsters, flaunting her no-nonsense briefs in the recesses of her own interstellar Air Force One. But that was years ago, when we held hands and shrieked as the saber-toothed, newborn monster baby burrowed out of John Hirt's virgin chest. Nowadays, in a movie she herself produced, she is a mere clone of Ripley, two hundred years old, freed by Caesarean from her alien baby who will grow into a queen, a breeder, not through egg-laying but delivering vaginally a monster baby, huge and goofy, with trembling, twinkling upper lip and savage jaws. This is the chap whose tongue, long as three oxen's, uncoils from within his chops to encircle her in glutinous caress, sensing the real dysgenic Mama. Lanky Rip has come so far, you wonder at her teratological imaginings. Is she difficult to live with now? Do baby aliens lurk like feral dolphins in her thorax? Why does she say hand for glove and fuck for fork? Does she remain superb at basketball? Does her blood, cast off like sputum from a Beckett sniter, still work as an oxyacetylene torch? Can she leap enormous distances and shove knives through her palm with minimal pain? Perhaps she will grow up sideways, so to speak, actually learning to read Machiavelli or Hobbes, apply to Yale for a fellowship in drama (thus coming full circle), and in a phrase she applies to Winona Ryder, her former assassin, "save the Earth." Said with a certain monstrous jocularity. Will that slender tummy once more bear alien fruit, then be sliced open like the bellies of those twelve other not so maiden ladies? Will she be number nine this time? She seems to have a penchant for tongues, saving one specimen for Ryder, so perhaps in one sense she will can it: Ox-Tongue (pseudo) for Baby Boomers. Lick it and feel the monster surge within!
     The monster-queen she spawned felt much pain while giving birth. Will this human characteristic continue, or be edited out as merely masochistic? I cannot resist speculating about Ripley and Ryder, arriving in a Betty with old-style lettering (to show how long they've been away) looking out at the big blue wet ball of our domain and getting gushy. What next? They wonder and Rip utters her most pregnant line: "I'm a stranger here myself." Wholly ambiguous. Does she mean she's never been here or just doesn't remember, it's so long ago? The germ of yet another gruesome plot takes root, needle teeth and all. Isn't it time for another Howard Hanson symphony?

Eric von Stroheim

Uncorrected teeth clamped on the butt of a cigarette, the madcap juvenile grin a mere vehicle to the tenor of a sideways leer, the military-cum-yatching cap rakish and too small, his entire torso sheathed in a white tunic up tight to the chin, epaulets ornate and the ribbons of the twin medals Hohenzollern wide—it is the standard photograph of him, the impudent, domineering bad lot. He loved the role of Hun, but only twice won parts worthy of his talent: the camp commandant in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion and the butler in Sunset Boulevard, in which he fawns on the very Gloria Swanson who got him fired from Queen Kelly. Obligated to his caricature, he made his movies far too long, seeing most of them cut, and his Walking Down Broadway (1932), wholly reshot, ended up as the disaster Hello Sister, as banal as its predecessor was raunchy.
     Marooned on Ellis Island, waiting for his papers to clear, he concocted a resplendent biography: son of a count, his mother a baroness and lady-in-waiting to the late Empress Elizabeth. Hence his pleonastic von. Actually he was the son of Benno Stroheim, a Viennese hatmaker, and he had never served in the imperial army, with or without honor, discharged as tiny, useless and frail.
     Well, he doesn't look frail, but quite bionic, within his various rigid uniforms seeming the prisoner of several punitive trusses, forcing his puny body this way or that, so much so that he always appears a man put together from a contortionist's kit, in which high-handedness figures as Procrustean hubris. "Two steps backward," he barks at Anne Baxter, the soubrette in Five Graves to Cairo, flicking his plume-tipped swagger stick at her face. It was this kind of arrogance he became notorious for, a finer Nazi than history provides. Showing off many have been his stock in trade; he hammed it up because his true gift went nowhere at all save the cutting-room floor. Billy Wilder's crack ("you were ten years ahead of your time") brought only the answer "Twenty." It was more like fifty. He remains the buffo, eccentric Hun to frighten children with, a fast but unenduring talker who got producers to underwrite him for all kinds of fantastic projects. One wonders how and why. Stroheim's expressionistic gift resides only in a few roles that zany shaven head in the ultra-Nazi cap, patting his war wound and with a collector's polish savoring aristocratic surnames in La Grande Illusion. I think he knew how potent he was when he allowed a little humility to seep through the gaps in his prosthetic armor.

The most recent of Paul West's eighteen novels are The Dry Danube, about Hitler as painter, and O.K., about Doc Holliday. His new non-fiction book is The Secret Lives of Words. His Gunpowder Plot novel, A Fifth of November, will appear next year. The government of France recently made him Chevalier of Arts and Letters.

 Paul

 West