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but he is probably best remembered for a picture that earned him a brief vogue during World War II. The film had the members of a New York mob deciding, for God knows what reason, that the Germans posed an even greater threat than the cops. The mob enlisted en masse , went overseas, and apparently won the war—only to gulp back their tears at the film’s end as they crowded about their mortally wounded chief while he took his own sweet time to die in Small’s arms, muttering something unlikely about brotherhood, democracy, and peace.
    Small’s brief moment of fame occurred in an earlier scene in the film which required him to burst into a farmhouse, his Thompson submachine gun at the ready, and capture what appeared to be the entire German high command with the line: “Freeze the mitts, Fritz!” A radio comedian picked it up and for a while it became a popular saying around high schools and colleges. In the mid-sixties some Merry Andrews at an Eastern university decided to hold a Christopher Small Festival, but nothing ever came of it other than a press release.
    Small came through the door that led to a bedroom, shook hands with me, and asked how business was. I told him that it was fine.
    â€œMarcie getting you a drink?” he asked and lowered himself into a green overstuffed chair that matched the divan.
    â€œYes.”
    He turned his head and yelled back at the kitchen: “Make it two, Marcie.”
    There was an answering yell which I assumed to be one of assent. Marcie and Small yelled at each other a lot.
    â€œDoing anything?” he asked and I knew that he was talking about the stunt business.
    â€œNothing,” I said.
    â€œAnd you’re not pushing either.”
    â€œNo, I’m not pushing.”
    â€œYou could get something if you pushed,” he said.
    â€œThere’s not much demand.”
    â€œThe hell there isn’t.”
    â€œLet’s just say that I like what I’m doing.”
    Marcie came in from the kitchen carrying the drinks on a hammered aluminum tray. She served them and then curled up on the other end of the sofa, one foot tucked under her rear in what has always seemed to me a most uncomfortable position.
    â€œYou getting the usual lecture, Eddie?” she asked.
    â€œChris still seems to think that I’m neglecting a promising career.”
    Small stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. He wore tan, wide-wale corduroy slacks, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and brown loafers. He had let his hair go grey and his stomach pushed a little at the front of the knit shirt, but his face was still the same: lean and long with a pointed chin, hollow cheeks, a strong thin nose, and deepset dark eyes that he could make crafty or frightened or cruel, depending upon what was called for by the script.
    â€œWell,” he said, “you have to admit that you invested a hell of a lot of time to get where you were. Now it’s just going to waste. Your old man would be goddamned sore.”
    â€œHe’s dead,” I said.
    â€œHe’s sore wherever he is. I remember when you were just a brat—no more than five or six. He used to tell me then how someday you were going to be top stunt man.”
    â€œSure,” I said, “and for my tenth birthday I got fencing lessons. Just what I always wanted.”
    My father had been a stunt pilot, one of the first of that strange breed who descended on Hollywood in the twenties, willing to attempt anything that the writers could dream up for ten dollars and a place to sleep. He never got over the fact that he had flown with Frank Clarke in 1927 when the dogfight for Hell’s Angels was filmed over San Francisco Bay. It was still the highlight in his life when, heading for yet another flying assignment at age sixty-one, he crashed into the tail end of a seven-car freeway pileup, went through the windshield, and bled to death before they got him to the hospital. He left me