The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico

9. Europe, 1958 &mdash 75

Confidential [FBI] source advised on 1-14-59 that [name blacked out] received correspondence from Paul Jarrico from 226 Rue de Rivoli, Paris, France, and an individual in Los Angeles advised that he has learned from [name blacked out] that subjects are residing in Paris and that Paul Jarrico is attempting to find employment in the movie industry and, if successful, will take up residence in Paris for an indefinite period. Information concerning subjects’ travel previously furnished to State, CIA, and abovementioned Legal Attachés [Paris, Rome, London]. —J. Edgar Hoover, 1959 Within five days of Jarrico’s arrival in Paris, he and Michael Wilson met with Dino De Laurentiis to make a deal to adapt Ugo Pirro’s novel Jovanka e le altre (Jovanka and the Others), a story about World War II Yugoslavian partisans. De Laurentiis agreed to pay them $45,000. Two weeks later, Jarrico and Sylvia moved into a fiveroom apartment in the first arrondissement, at 226 Rue de Rivoli. It was situated on the Right Bank, halfway between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. It was rented to them at a very low price by a doctor who maintained a love nest in a room closed off from the rest of the apartment. The Jarricos began their Paris lives with liquid assets of $9,623. Jarrico later claimed that it was not difficult being a writer in exile, given that most of his work was on English-language movies, mainly financed by American companies and intended for an international 9 Europe, 1958–75 market. But his earliest letters from Paris indicate that he was experiencing great difficulties and that his life had changed dramatically. On Christmas Day, 1958, Jarrico wrote to Clinton and Virginia Jencks, It’s really very strange, being here. In the sense that the Wilsons are here, it’s home. In the sense that Mike was able to line up a good assignment for me, it’s business as well as pleasure. In the sense that we’d spent six years trying to get another passport, it’s a satisfying but rather anti-climactic victory. . . . But the fact is, after all, that we’re aliens. It’s not only the language, with which we struggle. It’s the sense of not being able to affect our society. And without kidding ourselves about how much we’ve been able to do so at home, and without minimizing how much we still have to learn about being effective, we do miss the day to day feeling of belonging where we are, and the longer term feeling that we’re changing something for the better. They did not, he concluded, plan to stay in Europe for any great length of time, because they were “not meant to be expatriates.”1 Jarrico never mastered French well enough to function comfortably in France or to feel integrated into French society. The Jarricos would spend most of their leisure time with English-speaking couples , the Wilsons, Dassins, Berrys, and Golds. Wilson brought him virtually all of his projects, and he and Wilson spent a huge amount of time together. Their Jovanka script progressed slowly. They faced two difficulties : the novel was too unstructured and episodic to serve as the basis for an intelligible script, and they did not know enough about Yugoslavian history. The novel is set in German-occupied Yugoslavia in spring 1942. Five Slovenian women who have slept with a German army sergeant have their heads shaved by Yugoslav partisans and are then driven from the town by the Germans. They quickly learn that survival requires cooperation with one another and a kill-or-be-killed mentality. When they join forces with the partisans who shamed them, they have to learn “guerrilla discipline,” which includes a ban on love affairs. But romances do blossom. That theme, Jarrico and Wilson wrote De Laurentiis, was the key to the drama: “In the most brutal circumstances, in the midst of the most violent carnage, the human animal is still capable of love, human life 178 EMIGRATION is still precious. Love transcends national, political and even military boundaries. But love is a function of life, not of death, of liberty, not of fascism. For women especially, the bearers of life, the fight for freedom is a fight for the right to love freely, to love whomever they choose to love, for...