Free The Irregulars by Jennet Conant Page A

chartering the future of the world when peace came, and his ideas had been widely circulated in newsreels. His Republican opponents, however, regarded him as a dangerous radical and immediately dismissed the proposed film as political propaganda. It did not escape their notice that the project was to be privately financed by Charles Marsh, the Texas newspaper publisher and staunch Democrat, whose real purpose they suspected was not making a movie so much as sending a message to voters. The conservative Washington Times-Herald opined that while Pascal might be able to “sugar coat his story and the Wallace ideologies,” it would be better if the filmmakers confined their politics to the conventional rostrums, warning that many on Capital Hill still saw red at the mention of Major Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , which was regarded as “a libel on the staid United States Senate.”
    Dahl was delighted with all the attention, as well as the promise of additional film work. The whole deal had been put together with enormous haste, as Pascal had been in Washington only briefly on assignment for the Office of War Information (OWI) and had to return to London in a fortnight. He had flown back with the playwright Maxwell Anderson, whose war drama The Eve of St. Mark he was to direct on the London stage. The British production was being sponsored by the OWI and featured an English cast, with the exception of a few key American roles, which Pascal, with patriotic flourish, announced he would be filling with performers from U.S. Army units stationed in England. Pascal had a number of other projects on his schedule, including a long-delayed film of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose , one of two pictures he owed under his United Artists contract. Before leaving Washington, he had also arranged with Halifax for Dahl to be permitted to work on a script of The Snow Goose , which he hoped to film in England, Canada, and the United States.
    If possible, Marsh was even more excited about the project than Dahl. He was very taken with Pascal, who was born in Transylvania—he claimed to be three-eighths Hungarian, one-eighth Basque, and one-half Italian—and had an equal capacity for liquor and tall tales and told mesmerizing stories about everything from the monks of Assisi to George Bernard Shaw and Toscanini. Remarque, who was from Westphalia, Germany, was also a wonderful raconteur and told a story of being stationed in France during World War I. It was the custom of the Prussian officer in charge to hold a drinking contest each evening, with the major taking only a sip from his glass while the others were required to drain the contents. This went on all night, and every time someone fell under the table, they were wrapped up in one of the rugs and stood in the corner until everyone in the room save one was bound up in a rug. When it was down to the major and himself, the then-seventeen-year-old Remarque had dared the officer to match him glass for glass. The major finally succumbed, and Remarque had to struggle to roll him up in a rug and prop him in the corner. He told them that afterward he just sat at the table for an hour and a half before unbundling everyone.
    Marsh was suitably impressed and judged Remarque to be the real thing. He was so enthusiastic about their project that in addition to putting up all the money and offering his Virginia farm as a possible location for filming, he started bombarding Dahl with suggestions. Marsh proposed bringing in his refugee friend Erich Leinsdorf, an Austrian composer and conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, to write the score. Leinsdorf had escaped Nazi Germany, and Marsh thought the perfect advance publicity for the movie would be that this ensemble of “Europeans who hate Hitler” had combined their talents to produce the movie of “The Common Man in War and Peace.”
    Dahl was now a very busy writer and on his way to becoming a very well-known, well-connected man about