Penguin Press, 688 pages, $29.99
After six days on the S.S. Bremen in 1939, the little Berliner fleeing the Third Reich disembarked in New York. Igor Michael Peschowsky was seven, “a self-contained, unsmiling child,” and bald as an egg – the unexpected result of a whooping-cough vaccine. At the time, said his brother, they had never seen the inside of a synagogue and were about as un-Jewish as it’s possible for Jews to be.
In terms of distinguishing characteristics (no hair, no brows, no lashes) and identity (not Russian like Dad, not fully German like Mom, and not yet American), Igor was undefined. He would spend the next seven decades defining, refining, and periodically reinventing himself, along the way reinventing American comedy and Broadway theatre and taking Hollywood films to psychological places previously unplumbed. Igor Peschowsky? You know him better by his American name, Mike Nichols, improv wizard of Nichols and May, stage director of “The Odd Couple” and
Watching The Firm, I realized that law firms have replaced Army platoons as Hollywood s favorite microcosm. The new law thrillers have the same ingredients as those dependable old World War II action films: various ethnic and personality types who fight with each other when they re not fighting the enemy. The law movies have one considerable advantage: the female characters participate fully in all the action, instead of just staying home and writing letters to the front.
In The Firm, a labyrinthine 153-minute film by Sydney Pollack, Tom Cruise plays Mitch McDeere, a poor boy who is ashamed of his humble origins now that he has graduated from Harvard Law fifth in his class. He gets offers from the top law firms in New York and Chicago, but finally settles on a smaller firm headquartered in Memphis. His decision is salary-driven; he sees money as security, although later in the film he is unable to say how rich he d have to be to feel really secure.