Actors: The Man You Hate to Love

Achtung! The Parisian windows flew open—there below "they" had returned. The street teemed with Wehrmacht uniforms, trucks and gunning motorcycles. Over in the Place de la Concorde the scene was even more incredible: U.S. Sherman tanks were grinding over the cobblestones, shooting it out with panzer units. On the He de la Cite, sandbags were piled up before cafes and Molotov cocktails exploded all around the Palais de Justice.

Off and on for the past four months, Parisians have found themselves jolted right back into a bad dream as a Hollywood production unit has ground out the on-the-spot scenes for Is Paris Burning? The end is in sight, if Parisian nerves can stand up till then. This week, in perhaps the most chilling re-enactment of all, the Fiihrer himself confronts his Paris commandant, General Dietrich von Choltitz, and orders him—once he can no longer defend the City of Light —to leave it "nothing but a blackened field of ruins." The actor who plays Hitler, Billy Frick, is so exact a look-alike that he is afraid to leave the set except mustacheless and in mufti. The porcine, Prussian-looking fellow cast as General von Choltitz worries less, for during the past year he has got as many off-screen hisses as autograph requests. His name is Gert Frobe, but no one remembers him as anything but that malevolent archvillain in his most famed film. Gold finger.

Empathic Powers. Is Paris Burning? boasts a luminous roster: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas (as George Patton) and Glenn Ford (Omar Bradley). But it is significant that the actor that Paramount and Seven Arts signed up first for their $6,000,000 epic is blubbery (230 Ibs.) Gert Frobe. And it was not just on the strength of his Goldfinger portrayal. Though his international following dates only from that role, the 52-year-old Frobe has some 80 film credits, five acting awards, and an infinite range—from the frightening psychopath in It Happened in Broad Daylight to the goatish dupe in Banana Peel to, most recently, the slapstick Kraut in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Raised in what is now the East German city of Zwickau (his mother still lives there, but they are allowed to exchange visits), Frobe was a violin prodigy and opera-set designer before he turned actor. During World War II, the man now cast as a German general never rose past the rank of corporal. He is convinced, however, that his empathic powers are limitless, for no role has eluded him yet. "I cannot stand on my hands," he says, "but I feel certain that if I were acting a part which required me to stand on my hands, I could do it." His Paris Burning producers, he recalls, wanted him "to speak French or English for the Von Choltitz part, but I could not; it would change things." Probe's intuition has proved bang-on; his spitting out of the traditional Junker officer's accent is breathtakingly authentic.