Lee Remick is Alicia Browning, a New York City casting agent who learns of the death of her son Mark (Robert Bowman) in Germany. In Germany, she discovers what Mark had - that Alicia is a child of "leibensbaum" - German for "fountain of life, Himmler's program for the breeding of pure Aryans - and that Dr Grigor Bamberg (Richard Munch) has arranged for Mark to father a child Maria to continue the blood line. What will happen to the child? Remick's natural Aryan looks and somewhat mechanical manner makes her perfectly cast as a leibensbaum child, and Alicia's outrage at her identity being a shame and having her grandchild at risk gives Remick plenty of anger to play. The scene where her mother Erika Muller (Edith Schneider) tells Alicia of how she was impregnated by the SS Officer Carl von Lubich who disappeared at the end of the war works more because of Schneider's playing than Remick's stiff reaction, though Remick has a good scene where she becomes hysterical at the realisation of her arbitrary rejection of children at a casting session, hugging the children around her and crying for forgiveness. The teleplay by Michael Zagor and Del Coleman, suggested by a book by Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry, has elements of Ira Levin's The Boys of Brazil, but on a lesser scale. The irony of the Steinhem house where Alicia was born and raised until she was 5 now used as an institution for handicapped children is mentioned more than once , but Erika's model recreation exists to be smashed. Director Joseph Sargent presents such a fascinatingly gothic tale that we can overlook aspects like McGoohan's German accent and old man makeup, Alicia's nightmares of Steinhem, and even the jump cuts of Remick crying when she learns her real father was a war criminal. Sargent cuts from Mark's dead perfect face to head shots at Alicia's casting agency, uses an effective music score by Brad Fiedel, and continues the telephone conversation dialogue from one scene over the visuals of another.
