New Play in Manhattan

Jacobowsky and the Colonel (adapted by S. N. Behrman from a play by Franz Werfel; produced by the Theater Guild in association with Jack H. Skirball) uses one of the grimmest moments of the war--the fall of France--for half-satiric, half-fantastic comedy. Its comic thesis is that flight from the Nazis makes strange carfellows. A swaggering, snooty Polish colonel with "a perfect 15th-Century mind" (well played by Louis Calhern) and a rueful, humorous, clever Jewish refugee (delightfully played by Oscar Karlweis) both have to bolt from Paris on the run. The colonel cannot find a car; Jacobowsky finds one but cannot drive. Grandly tossing out Jacobowsky's luggage, the colonel condescends to take the wheel, and off they go--smack toward the Nazis in order to fetch the colonel's pretty mistress (Annabella--see p. 62). From then on, while the colonel remains majestically helpless, Jacobowsky gets the party out of tight squeezes, ferrets out food, locates gasoline. As the colonel's lady becomes more & more admiring of Jacobowsky, the colonel becomes more & more jealous, issues a challenge, creates an opera-bouffe atmosphere that makes the trip as much a flight from reality as from the Nazis.

But at St. Jean-de-Luz trouble awaits the trio--and the play. Nazis make up the reception committee, and it requires a lot of trite, melodramatic hokum to get past the receiving line. After that, the colonel "reforms" and practically falls in love with Jacobowsky; and the two escape--across a sea of soupy sentiment--to England.

So much third-act gunfire and goo not only mar an otherwise enjoyable play; they also keep it from meaning anything. Jacobowsky should have grasped how gaiety in the face of annihilation can create, as it seldom did here, its own kind of pathos and heroism.

. . .

In June 1940 famed Continental Actor Karlweis pretty much played Jacobowsky in real life. Karlweis was in Paris without a passport when the Nazis smashed toward it. He started south in his tiny Citroen. When "that old rat" Petain took over, Karlweis plunged desperately on. Says he: "I was a very lucky man." Someone who had admired him in a movie helped him get a transit visa to Spain. From there another admirer helped get him to Portugal. Three months later he was in Manhattan.

Almost immediately he landed a comic refugee bit part in something called Cue for Passion. Knowing hardly a word of English, Karlweis learned his lines "like a parrot," got wonderful notices. He got them again as the Prince in the enormously successful revival of Johann Strauss's Rosalinda (Die Fledermaus). By then his English was fine. Chuckles he slyly: "As the French say, 'The pillow is the best teacher.' "

A jaunty, bow-tied, kuess-die-hand Viennese who has charm off stage as well as on, and knows it, Karlweis was bred to old-world culture. His father, a friend of Johann Strauss's, was a well known playwright; his sister married the late great novelist Jakob Wassermann (The World's Illusion). World War I, in which Karlweis was cited four times for bravery, picked him up a law student, set him down an actor. By the mid-'20s he was playing in Vienna, Munich and Berlin opposite a flowering Elisabeth Bergner, a budding Marlene Dietrich.

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