This Great Escape
The Case of Michael Paryla
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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 is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died.
In This 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 journal, This 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Montréal-born author Andrew Steinmetz documents the life of his distant relative Michael Paryla, an actor whose claim to fame was a brief, uncredited appearance in the World War II classic The Great Escape. Building on exhaustive research, Steinmetz traces Paryla’s childhood in Hitler’s Europe, his postwar journey to Canada, and the acting career that preceded his untimely death. This poetic and moving chronicle—a finalist for the 2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction—explores the unexpected, fascinating ways that history and art can converge in a person’s biography.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To most audiences of John Sturges's classic war movie The Great Escape, Michael Paryla was an unnamed actor whose appearance on screen lasted just 57 seconds. To Andrew Steinmetz, Paryla was the lost cousin he never met, a relative he could only know from secondhand reports and brief flickering film images. In this touching biography, Steinmetz interviews Paryla's relatives, friends, and colleagues and explores old records to reconstruct the events that took the Vienna-born actor from a childhood spent as a displaced person to a seven-year sojourn in Canada, and finally to an all-too-brief acting career in Germany, where he died from a lethal mix of alcohol and sleeping pills. Paryla was never a household name and may not seem worthy of the attention, but the founding editor of Esplanade Books succeeds in making the case that anyone's biography can provide insight about the context in which he or she existed. Paryla's too-short life was defined by Europe during World War II and after, and through his life, those periods are themselves defined.
