VARIAN': MILD-MANNERED REPORTER, REAL-LIFE HERO.

Byline: - David Kronke

Perhaps a story almost as astonishing as the one told in ``Varian's War'' would be one explaining why this saga isn't much, much better-known. Varian Fry, an intellectual and journalist for whom the expression ``mild-mannered'' could have been invented, roused himself and colleagues to rescue about 2,500 Jewish artists and thinkers from Nazi tyranny between 1939 and 1941. Among those he helped to escape Nazi-occupied territories were Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel.

As a journalist for Foreign Affairs magazine, Fry (played by William Hurt) was appalled by what he saw of the Nazis' reign of terror during a visit to Berlin in 1938. When he tried to rally friends and the U.S. State Department into aiding his quixotic, hastily prepared plot for rescuing poets, satirists, authors and artists - ``Their work makes them a target of the Fascists,'' he reasoned - he was initially met with a bewildering indifference. No one had seen what he had; few were yet willing to accept the gravity of the situation in Europe or that it merited U.S. intervention. One colleague here even sniffs to Fry with a willful villainy, ``We already have all the Jews we need.''

Nonetheless, Fry forms the Emergency Rescue Committee, scrapes together some funds and a list of influential names to seek out and assist, and lands in Marseilles. There, the U.S. Consulate is decisively of no help, but an attache there named Harry Bingham (Ted Whittall) is already a step ahead of him, concealing some of the people on Fry's list. Bingham also hooks him up with another American, Miriam Davenport (Julia Ormond), who helps Fry see that what he hopes to accomplish cannot be done so legally, and in turn introduces him to others sympathetic to his cause, including a refugee named Albert Hirschman (Matt Craven) and an ace forger (Alan Arkin).

In a sense, ``Varian's War'' - written and directed by Lionel Chetwynd, who began working on the project when producer Michael Deakin found a brief mention of Fry in a tattered magazine at an airport - is an intellectual action thriller, in which the hero uses his conscience rather than any brawn he clearly doesn't possess. It's fascinating and largely well-acted, with a variety of performers (Ormond, Craven, Arkin and Lynn Redgrave, who plays the wife of Werfel, who was also the former wife of Gustav Mahler) doing credible work with accents not their own.

The one drag on the proceedings is Hurt's turn as Fry. Hurt has always been a mannered performer, but in the past decade or so, his acting tics have tended to supersede his characterizations. Many of his key expressions look like nothing so much as a wince or grimace, and he responds to others by arching his head back from his shoulders like a very curious bird or someone with a perpetual crick in his neck.

Certainly, Hurt underscores Fry's vulnerability when going up against Germans and Vichy French, but his acting is distracting in a story that otherwise would be utterly absorbing. Chetwynd has done history a service by bringing this fascinating man's saga to a wider audience, much as Steven Spielberg did with a similar hero, Oskar Schindler.

``VARIAN'S WAR''

What: Docudrama about an American journalist who struggled to help the Jews during World War II.

The stars: William Hurt, Julia Ormond, Matt Craven, Maury Chaykin, Alan Arkin, Lynn Redgrave.

Where: Showtime.

When: 8 tonight; also May 11 and 15.

Our rating: Three stars

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Julia Ormond and William Hurt portray Americans trying to rescue Jewish artists and thinkers from Nazi persecution in Showtime's ``Varian's War.''