Word: byronic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Along with Henry's adventures in history, Wouk has constructed various subplots involving Henry's family, particularly his son Byron (Jan-Michael Vincent), and Natalie Jastrow (Ali MacGraw), the American Jew Byron woos and marries. Natalie is an impetuous and headstrong woman who works as secretary to her Uncle Aaron (Houseman), a cultivated historian who lives in Bernard Berenson-style splendor outside Siena...
...days before the Germans storm into Poland, Natalie insists on visiting her fiance Leslie Slote (David Dukes), an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Warsaw, and she drags the love-smitten Byron along with her. Through this credibility-straining contrivance, Wouk brings within his action the German blitzkrieg and the bombing of Warsaw. Later, after Natalie marries Byron, she is trapped in Europe with her uncle; as Jews, both are in grave danger of disappearing into Hitler's Holocaust. The persecution of the Jews is one of the dominating concerns of both the series and its author...
...shallow but nonetheless sympathetic Rhoda; Houseman, who has been blessed with a much more amiable character than he usually portrays, is convincing as the civilized survivor of an ancient society who cannot believe that the barbarians have finally broken through the gates; and Vincent brings to the part of Byron a force of vitality and a hard, sometimes menacing passion. The only really bad performance, in fact, is MacGraw's. Although she looks splendid, she flounders in a role for which she is ill suited. Her voice has no inflections, her face has few expressions and her performance...
...contrived. The wedding of Natalie's Polish relatives, for ex ample, looks as if it had been borrowed from Fiddler on the Roof, and the timing, the night before the German invasion, is ludicrous. His dialogue is often wooden. "Why did you insist on marrying me?" Natalie asks Byron. "We could have made love as much as you wanted. But now you've tied me to you on this rope of burning nerves." Furthermore, in all the hours of script there is scarcely a glint of humor. As a collegiate critic once said about an earlier work...
...they lowered the French flag and raised the Nazi one, and a bereft Frenchman looked on," says Wouk. Author-Adapter Herman Wouk "That was dramatic, I thought." On the other hand, Curtis occasionally requested material that had not appeared in the book; for example, in a scene where Newlyweds Byron Henry and Natalie Jastrow encounter some Nazis in a Lisbon restaurant, Curtis wanted to have Byron slug one of the Nazis, instead of simply walking out as he did in the book. Wouk objected that Byron would never do such a thing. Curtis shot it anyway. Says Wouk: "I laughed...