Q:Build a movie plot around this: What is Michele's step-daughter's name? Fabienne Wolf
A:
In the winter of 1945, on a train bound for Paris, a small boy kicks monotonously at the outside compartment door of a crowded compartment--and then opens the door and jumps from the train. His mother howls in anguish, an unnamed passenger pulls the brake cord, the conductor comes and escorts the distraught mother to an empty compartment in the next car--and everyone else in the compartment wonders why one fellow passenger, a woman, sat mute and motionless throughout the entire shocking episode. And then someone notices the concentration-camp tattoo on her right forearm. The fact of the matter is that Dr. Michele Wolf (Ingrid Thulin) has seen--and experienced--such horrors that a little thing like a little boy jumping off a moving train to his death looks like the spilling of milk in comparison. And not a man or woman on board could possibly dispute that--especially not a Gentile.Michele arrives in Paris, books a room under an assumed name, and then calls the number of her old home. Her husband, Stanislaus Pilgrin (Maximillian Schell) picks up the phone and says hello, but Michele does not answer. And on the other end of the wire, Stan's companion, Fabienne Wolf (Samantha Eggar), Michele's stepdaughter from a previous marriage, urges Stan to hang up.Michele goes up to her room and recalls the years that brought her to this pass. She met Stan before the outbreak of war in Europe. He was much younger than she (thus making her what is today called a "cougar") and made his living, such as it was, as a professional chess player. Michele, as she would later admit, "bought" him--and Stan always resented having to take money from Michele, just as he resented having to live from prize to prize off his playing.Dr. Charles Bovard (Herbert Lom), a plastic surgeon at the hospital where Michele is on staff as a radiation oncologist, disapproved of the match, recognizing exactly the sort of man Stan was and is: a gigolo. He soon had reason to worry about far more momentous things: the Nazis overran the Maginot Line and...