Return from the Ashes movie storyline. 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 occupied Paris. Soon they subjected all the hospitals to new employment regulations, which affected Michele directly, because she is Jewish. Stan offered to marry Michele in order to give her an identity apart from being a Jewess–but on the day of her wedding, a Nazi patrol arrested Michele and took her away.
Now in 1945, Michele introduces herself first, not to Stan, but to Charles Bovard. She confesses to him some of the horrors she endured–including prostituting herself to the camp guards in exchange for rations in excess of starvation rations. Charles can and does understand her having to do what she needs to do in order to survive–but he is not sure about her plan to re-enter Stan’s life. Nevertheless, he performs a reconstructive procedure to make Michele look as near to her old (pre-Holocaust) self as the consummately skilled Charles can manage–and then Michele allows Fabienne to see her at the hotel, this although Fabienne fails to recognize Michele for who she is.
Return from the Ashes is a 1965 British thriller film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Ingrid Thulin, Maximilian Schell, Samantha Eggar and Herbert Lom. It is based on a novel by French crime writer Hubert Monteilhet, adapted for film by prolific screenwriter Julius J. Epstein. The novel would also serve as the source material for the 2014 German film Phoenix, directed by Christian Petzold, though the latter film makes multiple changes to the book’s elements and concerns itself solely with the plot to reclaim an inheritance.
Return from the Ashes (1965)
Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Maximilian Schell, Samantha Eggar, Ingrid Thulin, Herbert Lom, Talitha Pol, Vladek Sheybal, Jacques Cey, Jacques B. Brunius, Jean Marc, Andre Charisse, Danièle Noël, Doreen Moore
Screenplay by: Julius J. Epstein
Production Design by: Michael Stringer
Cinematography by: Christopher Challis
Film Editing by: Russell Lloyd
Costume Design by: Margaret Furse
Music by: John Dankworth
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: November 19, 1965
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