Mercury Pictures Presents

Eddie is uncomfortable with his lucrative role in Tell ‘Em Tokyo because it is little more than a crude collection of “stereotypes and paranoid fantasies” (255). When he complains to Maria, she implies that he lacks gratitude. He feels belittled. Their relationship sours until filming wraps up.

They attend a costume party to celebrate the studio’s 20th birthday. Eddie dresses as the phantom of the opera, and Maria dresses as the bride of Frankenstein. Eddie’s rapid rise in American society since Pearl Harbor bewilders him. At the party in his monstrous phantom mask, he muses that it is the first time in a while that he has been able to walk down the street without people turning around to look at him.

Eddie listens to two seasoned film extras, Harold Chandler and Gerald Flann, discuss all of the historical wars in which they died on-screen as they prepare to enlist in the Navy the next day. Maria and Eddie drink and dance together and collapse happily into bed at the Montclair. Air-raid sirens and panic on the streets awaken them the next day. The “air raid” is a false alarm, a figment of the over-excited imagination of the local community.