Great escapes meet greater escapism: how the life of a displaced Jewish actor illuminates the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

“What the hell kind of great escape is this? No one escapes!”
—L.B. Mayer, on the 1963 film

He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film isThe Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died.

InThis Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz tenderly reconstructs the life of a man seen by millions yet recognized by no one, whose history—from childhood flight from Nazism to suspicious death twenty years later—intersects bitterly, ironically, and often movingly with the plot of Sturges’s great war film. Splicing together documentary materials with correspondence, diary entries, and Steinmetz’s own travel journalThis Great Escape does more than reconstruct the making of a cinema classic: it is a poignant and moving testament to the complexity of human experience, a portrait of a family for whom acting was a matter of survival, and proof that our most anonymous, uncredited, and undocumented moments can brush against the zeitgeist of world history.

This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla

The Case

Appell (5)
Escape Construction (6)
Screenplay (7)
Michi’s Diary (10)
Unnecessary Travel Lengthens the War (15)
The Seagull (30)
Letters to Eva (57)
Cousins und Kunst (71)
The Great Escape for Those Who Missed it (89)
DeutschBahn Ice 164 (136)
Stateless Person of Undetermined Nationality: A Review of The Evidence (141)
The War on Michael: Dear John Leyton - Extra Hater (144)
‘Shot in The Never Get Bored’ (154)
Hangin’ in Hamburg (162)
The Author is Dead (190)
The Actor’s Entrance (194)
DeutschBahn Ice 164 (208)
Stop Pause Play (210)
Waldfriedhof Cemetery (220)
Dear Michael (227)

Simple Song (267)
Casting (275)

Notes