As the camera pans around the apartment, the little boy Lukasz—“David” in the script—scampers in with carousel-worthy delight, stage left. He pauses for a moment, looking around to see if anyone has noticed him, and then he climbs up on a deep red Victorian ladies’ chair, dangling his arms over its back, tiny silver key in hand, to reach the Music Box on the table behind it. The camera zooms in on his little, adorable fingers as they twist the key in the lock and open the Music Box. Then, note by note, the music begins to seep out of the Box: a soft melody, slow and perfectly rhythmic, each little plucked bell-shaped droplet of sound falling in neat order on the audience’s ears. It doesn’t matter what the tune is, really. (The stage directions, Bill Landsmann imagines, suggest “an old Jewish melody,” but due to a careless individual in the audio department, the tune turns out to be “Edelweiss.” Bill Landsmann guesses that the director was quite angry about this but kept it in the end, mired in more pressing problems involving Lukasz’s contract.)

The camera turns slowly now, keeping pace with the slowing music. At last it comes around to the boy’s hands again, which he plunges into the Box’s riches (and here, Bill Landsmann thinks, the director must have hesitated—not too much gold, he must have told the props people, because there’s this thing about Jews and gold, you see, so go easy on the gold), a child’s riches of trinkets and tiny toys. The boy’s enchanted face is reflected in the Music Box’s mirror behind the turning ballerina figurine, and he handles, with a delicacy only children victimized in movies have, each of the treasures in turn: a charm bracelet with tiny silver sailboats, a locket with a sepia photograph of a woman inside it, a necklace with a Star of David (as if you had to ask), and, lastly, a magnificent diamond ring. The boy takes the ring in his little fingers, fascinated. He kneels on the seat of the chair he was standing on and pretends to propose to the ballerina figurine, who continues spinning as the music continues. Suddenly the boy is lifted, in his kneeling position, right out of his seat. Luckily, the culprit turns out to be his mother, who sweeps him away in an armload of laughter and kisses. (At this point Bill Landsmann would feel Naomi’s eyes on his profile in the darkened theater, checking for crying or cringing. He would ignore her.)

Of course, the entire point is that this charming apartment is doomed to destruction—that’s what makes it so charming. A few scenes in, the Bad Guys break down the charming door, smash the Royal Copenhagen china, steal the mother’s diamond ring, knock the Music Box to the floor (the music stops abruptly), and take the boy’s mother away with them while the boy watches the whole scene from under a bed. Later it turns out that there are also papers in the Music Box, letters of permission and forged identity cards that his mother had been hoarding in a hidden drawer, and the boy and his father use them to escape. Many years later, at the end of the film, the boy comes back as an Old Man and opens the Music Box once more to find the locket, with the picture of his mother inside it. By the time the credits started rolling, Naomi would be in tears.