Mercury Pictures Presents

Twentieth Century Fox plagiarizes Tell ‘em in Tokyo and creates a new film entitled Little Tokyo USA. This new feature is an extended apology for mass internment camps and suggestions that the Japanese community is riddled with spies plotting against America. Artie is morally uncomfortable with the role his films played in cultivating this anti-Japanese sentiment.

The War Department informs Artie that he will have to find a replacement for Anna because they want her for the Chemical Warfare Corps. Artie and Maria discuss the fact that they do not know what has become of Ada and Giuseppe. They both struggle to accept the absence of answers.

Maria doesn’t go home but instead goes back down to the studios to begin work in secret on a new film. In response to their professional and moral frustrations, Maria and Eddie work on a script called The False Front. Eddie’s experience at the screening is the starting point. The film deals with the difficulties and paradoxes faced by “enemy aliens” in Hollywood.

Maria visits Vincent and shows him her father’s letters. Vincent asks Maria to help him join the Signal Corps so that he can assist in the invasion of Italy and perhaps be present for the liberation of San Lorenzo. Maria discourages him, saying that as an “enemy alien,” he would never be allowed to enlist.

Anna and Vincent watch propaganda reels together on Sundays in search of images of Kurt, which they have yet to find. Vincent feels in some way as if he is repaying his debt to Concetta, whom he left in limbo with no knowledge of her son’s fate, and Anna feels as if she is experiencing being a mother once more since Vincent’s age is similar to Kurt’s.

Anna asks Vincent why he helps her, and Vincent responds with another question: What would she do if she found herself sitting opposite the person responsible for Kurt’s loss? Anna responds that she would kill him slowly and that she would start by putting her cigarette out in his palm. Vincent closes his hand around Anna’s cigarette and squeezes it until he faints from the pain. The two embrace, and Vincent begs for forgiveness in Calabrian as Anna comforts him with lullabies in German. The next week, Vincent shows Anna the album of torn passport photos. She sees Vincent’s torn photo and learns his real name.

The narrative shifts to Maria’s secretary, Vedette. She sees Maria and Nino bent over the photo album and assumes they are practicing lines from a film. She is somewhat disappointed in Maria, as she always admired and emulated her career. She learns that Harold Chandler and Gerald Flann died in action. Vedette weeps for the men, whom she remembers as charming but who only ever played bit parts. She imagines them congratulating each other on having finally made “top billing” (298).

Distracted, Vedette knocks into the miniature model of the studio. She impulsively places the miniature figure of herself behind Maria’s desk.

Artie “discovers” Eddie’s script because Maria pays all of the secretaries to huddle together in the ladies’ room and read it. Vedette asks Maria to put in a good word for her with Artie if he promotes Maria to executive producer.

Anna Weber leaves Mercury and Los Angeles to join the military.

At the bar, Vedette and Maria run into Betty Ludlow, Artie’s former mistress whom he abandoned when he realized she was married. Betty is on her ninth husband. She discovered that for each enlisted soldier she marries, she is entitled to a $50 monthly check from the army.

The narrative flashes forward and reveals that Betty got married a total of 18 times and went to prison for fraud when two of her husbands got into a bar brawl with each other in 1944. When she got out in 1947, she found one of the men, Chaz Mendes, her 10th husband, who, it emerges, she picked up around the time she met Maria and Vedette outside the prison. The two had a long and happy life together.

Artie watches the chase scene from False Front as it romps through the studios. He is initially skeptical, but Maria points out that it will go into direct competition with a big A-list project, Guns of Midday, that Ned is pushing forward, in which Eddie Lu is cast as a villain. This wins Artie over.

Artie learns that the board of directors is questioning his leadership and competence after they learned about the False Front project. He calls Maria and Eddie and tells them to abandon the film.

That evening, after he reads an article that describes the Manzanar Concentration Camp for Japanese immigrants in the Owens Valley, Eddie tells Maria that he plans to leave California the next day.

Maria tries to convince Eddie to at least finish shooting Guns of Midday. If he breaks his contract, he gets blacklisted in Hollywood. Eddie counters that he never found a satisfying ending for The False Front—that all versions of the script end with the actor trapped on the set of Tell ‘Em in Tokyo. He says that if he walks away in this manner, then the story finally has a satisfying close.

Eddie asks Maria if she has a suitcase, and she gives him her father’s old suitcase, which her mother once filled with cemetery earth before she gave it to Maria.

Maria accompanies Eddie as far as she is allowed. When he asks if she will be alright, she reflects that if she were to say “no,” he would stay on at the expense of his happiness. She responds with “yes.”

She remembers that her father accompanied her mother and herself to the train station and abruptly stopped when he reached the invisible borders of the confino. Giuseppe seemed elated to see them walk on and let out “a glorious whoop” as if his wife and daughter walked “on water itself” (318). As Maria watches Eddie walk away carrying the same suitcase, she reflects that she never felt closer to her father.

At Union Station, Eddie reflects on how similar the scenes of farewell and reunion are to those depicted so many times in the movies and at the studios. He buys first-class tickets to ride east on the Central Pacific.

Vincent watches Victory in the East, which arrives too late to show Anna. Rudi Bloch invites Vincent to work as a cameraman and shoot a reenactment in a reproduction of Berlin that a studio in Utah built.

At the Dugway Proving Ground, Anna finds herself in an international group of architects, chemists, and set designers. The progressive Jewish German architect Erich Sonnnenthal presides over the group. They learn from Colonel Macalister that their orders are to build a perfect, detailed replica of Kreuzberg, the Berlin neighborhood in which Anna grew up, so that the army can have a practice run before they firebomb the city. The raid plans target densely populated, residential, and historically predominantly socialist areas since the leading members of the Nazi Party live in villas that are too spaced out to be effectively targeted.

When the team completes the design and War Department representatives approve it, a chain gang comes in from the Utah State Penitentiary to build it in the baking heat. Anna reflects that the Americans replicate the labor practices of Nazi Germany.

Anna works with Louis Harrington, a 17-year-old African American prisoner, as her assistant.

The narrative shifts to Louis’s backstory, which explains how he came to be in prison. Louis’s father is a master woodworker, and he expects Louis to carry on the family trade. Propaganda stories convince Louis to lie about his age and sign up for the army. He is disappointed when they assign him to the Steward’s Branch, where he trains in cooking and cleaning.

During a stopover in Utah before shipping out to the Pacific, Louis and his friend Charles stop at a diner for breakfast. A German prisoner of war serves behind the counter. The man behind the grill tells them he will not serve their “kind” (referring to their skin color). Louis asks why the diner will serve a Nazi but not a member of the US Navy. He refuses to leave, and the owner pulls out his rifle. A woman sees the gun and screams. The sudden noise causes the owner to accidentally shoot the German prisoner of war in the head. The judge sentences Louis to 50 years for manslaughter.

As the War Department ships in household furnishings, including children’s toys, for the houses, Anna feels increasingly uncomfortable. Louis finds a strange message carved into one of the floorboards delivered to the village from Soviet Russia. Anna concludes that it came from a labor camp. She sleeps in the reconstruction houses.

Vincent arrives at the village with a Mercury camera crew to film the first bombing. Vincent and Anna drink together along with the other architects as they wait for the test. They discuss the possibility of going back to Europe. Sonnenthal feels that, as architects, they have the responsibility to rebuild the actual city they are now helping to destroy in effigy. Vincent remarks that he doesn’t merely think of going back to Europe; he feels like he never fully left it (339).

The firebombing test begins, and the violent excitement it arouses in her shocks Anna. She is surprised by her lack of empathy for the civilian victims whose lives she simulated inside the tenements. As Vincent films, she wonders if he recalls the conflagration he and Giuseppe caused at the excavation site in San Lorenzo.

After the fire, Anna walks through the charred remains of the village. When she returns to her barracks, she finds an envelope with a letter from Vincent on her pillow. Sonnenthal tells her that they plan to rebuild the village for another test.

They continue to rebuild Kreuzberg and bomb it into oblivion for two years. Anna increasingly despairs as she grows certain that the bombs will kill Kurt. Vincent’s letter remains unopened.

After the bombs fall on the real Berlin in 1944, the project is finally called to a close, and leadership tells them that the next day will be the last simulation. Anna enters the village at nightfall and shuts herself in one of the houses. As the bombers approach, she opens Vincent’s letter and finds a close-up shot of Kurt from a film.

The narrative shifts to Louis, who finished his sentence at the age of 67. He developed quite a reputation as a miniaturist since, after returning from Dugway with the miniature furniture he made with Anna, one of the wardens who sold his work to dealers and collectors invited him to go into business.

He visits Berlin’s Bergmann Dollhouse Museum, where some of his work is exhibited. He takes the engraved floorboard with him and travels to the address carved there. The message is from Hans to the lady of the house, Frau Schulman. Hans never returned from the war, and Frau Schulman never remarried. The message simply says, “I miss you, darling. Yours, Hans” (348).

Louis leaves feeling embarrassed but starts wondering if he might stay in Germany. The Germans treat him respectfully, and he finds it darkly amusing that everyone calls him “the American” and “that only in a foreign country is he considered a full citizen of his own” (348). As he turns to leave, Frau Schulman calls him back and invites him inside.