Nobody Intervened

PAPRIKA -- Erich von Stroheim -- Macaulay ($2.50).

His naked arm slid around her waist and drew her against his bare, grease-smeared torso. With his other hand he seized her by the hair, pulled her head back and kissed her roughly on the mouth.

Thus Author Erich von Stroheim describes the preliminary grappling that leads to Paprika's fifth seduction. Before she is grudgingly made an honest woman she goes through eight such man-handlings. Modestly blurbed by Publisher Macaulay as a story that "uncovers with the blunt scalpel of realism the sadism inherent in the sexual plexus of a woman's being," Paprika takes the cake on several counts.

Author von Stroheim, onetime cinemactor ("The Man You Love To Hate") and Hollywood director (Foolish Wives, 1922; Greed, 1925; The Merry Widow, 1025), is described by his publisher as a "thickset, fanatical Prussian . . . possessed of a pair of spaniel brown eyes and a personality so winning that he seems able to move either mountains or human hearts with equal ease." He has again & again felt his passion for uncompromising cinema realism thwarted by cautious superiors. As a safety valve with which to blow off the pent-up, perilous stuff, he wrote Paprika. In it he "has given his passion for realism a free rein. Nobody has intervened.'' Many a reader will be grinningly grateful.

Lick-lip melodrama from the word go. Paprika unrolls a rapid narrative of gypsy love, fistfights, Budapest night life, drunken officers, and a plethora of bedroom scenes. Paprika was the platinum-blonde bastard of a Hungarian nobleman and a gypsy queen. She grew up in the same wagon with Rogi, a young fiddler who loved her well. Paprika loved him too. but she was a wayward girl, and took delight in making him suffer. Unable to take it any longer, Rogi went off to Budapest, where he made a sensation as a musician and became the kept man of a noble lady. Paprika finally went after him, surviving many a love bout by the way. Just as she was about to declare her love to Rogi her insatiable vanity got the better of her. and she married a dashing officer. On her bridal night Rogi cut her husband's throat and carried her off. They were pursued; escape was hopeless; shots cracked. . . . Realism triumphed over Hollywood.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.