PANDAEMONIUM.<i> By Leslie Epstein</i> .<i> St. Martin’s Press: 398 pp., $24.95</i>

“If this had been a movie and not real life . . .” the novel opens, on the sight of storm clouds over the Bavarian Alps. The obvious irony is that what is to follow is neither film nor life; it’s a novel about the ways in which movie reality and historical reality get mixed, causing public confusion and large-scale disaster.

“Pandaemonium,” which involves the crossing paths of real-life stars, impresarios and mass murderers, is fictional, as made-up, say, as the tragedy of “Antigone,” which his director-character, a Wagnerian maestro-maniac, is driven to mount and remount in every medium. But Epstein’s technique, his retouched and over-dubbed surrealism, is, nonetheless, an instrument well chosen to capture a troubling area of real life: namely, the overlap of show business and politics, where sanity can be pushed to the limit by the fierce competition for stardom and power. The mood is sustained hysteria; the mode is sex, murder, image mongering and what might be called control of the final cut.

The year is 1938, and a silver plane is caught in a spring thunderstorm. We pull back to find Peter Lorre peering out the window, as only he can anxiously peer. Inside, the lordly director, Rudi Von Beckmann; his longtime lady friend and Dietrich-like star, Magdalena Mezaray; and a cast of ex-European movie actors are in panic lest the plane be forced down in Nazi Germany. The great Von B is bound for the Salzburg Festival, where he intends to break off his Hollywood career and return to the theater with a stupendous production of “Antigone.”

He can no longer stand, he says, a medium infested by Jews, yet his cast is anchored by Jewish stars who have worked with him for 40 years, going back to his pioneering epics on Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus walking on the water. Among them is Lorre, a Hungarian Jew born Laszlo Lowenstein, through whose eyes most of the story unfolds, who would go anywhere to squirm out of his fated role as Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective adored the world over, the role that Lorre is signed and sealed to reenact in endless sequels.

In the beginning, as Lorre labors through the fluttering plane, lingering for actors’ credits and dialogue freighted with obvious exposition, I feared I had entered a novel in the style of the all too earnest, ‘30s message movie. But once the plane touches down in Salzburg, and “Antigone” is played against the opening of the Anschluss--when Austria welcomes Herr Hitler and sets its Jews to scrub paving stones--the action wheels with such rapidity through highs and lows of sexual-cinematic-historic-ironic treachery, comedy and depravity that I turned in my disbelief and leaned back to enjoy the ride. Mixing Hitler’s hubris and Von B’s movie mania with deftness and cool, Epstein tells a knowing tale of merciless moguls and tyrants, the “hypnotized” masses who made them what they were and the ghastly history that came from their unconscious collaboration.

Lorre is an endearing, if unwilling, foil and guide for such a trip. Just as we remember him, he is the star whose sneer evokes a fine-tuned inner suffering and whose mocking snivel cannot hide a sincere regard for a Bogart-style ease he could never (except as Mr. Moto) manage. Lorre in “Pandaemonium” (his last great credit) is tormented by plagues that would wither a larger man. He is a magnet for beatings, betrayals and public humiliations, all of which cause him to sweat profusely, give forth a nut-like cyanide smell and reach nervously into his pocket for a pinch of snow-like powder. Cursed by a survivor’s conscience that sends him back into the fray and a self-mocking sense of his own story, Lorre, in moments of danger, tries inwardly to become Mr. Moto, tossing off paradoxical asides (such as “Dead men tell many tales”) while lamenting his lack of Moto-esque jujitsu, among other skills enabling his cinematic alter ego to foil sinister plots and save the world.

As for the plot line, it works like a doomsday machine put together by Rube Goldberg and Franz Kafka, ratcheting in different directions as if about to fall apart. Yet it takes the reader to exactly the finish the writer intends.

It takes many a twist and turn to propel Lorre back and forth on two separate trips to Nazi-occupied Germany, bringing him into the presence of Hitler and out again, terrified but alive, and then into the Nevada desert where a western is being shot in a makeshift combat zone.

Lorre’s movements are keyed to the dark and unpredictable inner passion of Magdalena. In movie terms, she is totally desirable both sexually and financially. Whether she falls into the clutches of Hitler or is held incommunicado on the desert movie location, she must be rescued. And the only man she trusts, the only man who doesn’t have designs on her, is her old friend Peter Lorre.

The action goes into high gear when a shot rings out from a high church tower, interrupting the Salzburg “Antigone.” At the last moment, Von B recognizes the assassin, leaps from the stage screaming in indignation and saves Hitler. He is called to the spooky SS headquarters in Vienna, expecting praise and thanks, but finds himself confronted by Goebbels in a nightmare of a black-tower meeting. The SS has uncovered Von B’s past as a yeshiva bucher who ran away to join a one-family carnival and later made his first film in Yiddish about the martyred Col. Dreyfus. The film buff Goebbels has the actual footage and compels Von B to buy back his freedom in exchange for a one-night stop by Magdalena in Hitler’s suite. But Hitler, like everyone else, wants to keep Magda for an extended run. Goebbels substitutes Lorre for Magdalena at the airport and, in a reversal of “Casablanca,” Von B flies off while his lady love remains in Nazi territory.

Back in L.A., the Warner Bros.-rivaling Granite Bros., descendants of old man Granach, who once ran the touring carnival, force Lorre back into “Motodom” and, blaming Von B for leaving Magdalena in Hitler’s clutches, demote him to a grubby extra in a B western. Lorre then is assigned a quick trip to Poland and Germany with the ancient founder of Granite Bros. studio, old man Granach, to bring back Magdalena in exchange for the Granite Bros. European movie houses. Meanwhile Von B, demented by the Nazis’ exposure of his Jewish origins, his failure to stage “Antigone” and the loss of status, regains directordom by causing a rash of deadly “accidents” on the set. By seducing the son of one of the Granite brothers and playing upon the other’s lust for the newly returned Magdalena, he gets the B western upgraded into a vehicle for her stardom. Having burned down the Granite lot, he moves his shoot to a crater in the middle of the Nevada desert, containing an abandoned mine and an old ghost town called Pandaemonium.

Like many another director, Von B turns the location into his own little world, and there is a parallel here between the efforts of the Granite brothers to control and monitor what he is doing and the debate in America about what Hitler is doing and whether we should join the war to stop him. In either case, there was a drastic failure of imagination. Like Hitler, Von B possesses a genius for arousing his constituency and leading them past all moral considerations in pursuit of what he defines as their destined goal.

He turns the western into a disguised version of “Antigone,” serving both as a warning about Hitler and a grandiose culmination of his own genius. To ward off outside interference, he makes Pandaemonium a miniature Third Reich, with a thirst-maddened crew and cast loyal only to himself, armed to the teeth, imposing punishment and enduring privation in service of their leader’s vision. Only Magdalena, devastated by her experience as Hitler’s concubine, has the will to resist Von B’s direction and, like Hitler, he both uses and degrades her.

In the larger micro-cosm of Hollywood, it falls to none other than Peter Lorre to insist on the evil of the Nazis. But all he has to imply Hitler’s death camps is a photo he smuggled out (in Magdalena’s bra), showing a Judenrein town square in Poland, indirect and unconvincing evidence compared to the reassurances of such public figures as Ambassador Joe Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, William Randolph Hearst and his monster gossip queen, Louella Parsons, who depicts Hitler as a rugged folk hero “breaking eggs to make omelets.”

As the novel shifts between Hollywood and the desert, Epstein’s late father Philip and his uncle Julius Epstein, the screenwriting twins who wrote “Casablanca,” appear as themselves at intervals, serving as a kind of chorus, warning Lorre in wise guy patter as they disengage from the dangerous missions he plunges into. Louella Parsons (ghost-written by Epstein) supplies interludes of more exposition in the form of gossip columns: fevered, elephantine, coy; a little less Lolly would be more than enough for me.

Fortified against the world, Antigone-on-the-Range goes over budget. Granach’s two sons (the Granite brothers) rush to the desert to take command of the set. Instead, Von B takes command of them. Meanwhile, Lorre, who has been brought along to mollify Magdalena, spies on some ambitious filming where, true to those times (or ours), the dialogue is leaden. But the visuals Epstein rolls forth are colossal in conception, surprisingly haunting, even beautiful, all building to an operatic cataclysm, involving a real weapons massacre of an Indian tribe, a stampede, a mine shaft collapse, a heroine dangling by a thread, murder, blackmail, insanity and the arrival of federal marshals in a B-29.

Never fear, important reader. Epstein does not in “Pandaemonium” roast any chestnuts at the expense of the current media-political complex. The dance he leads us through is wild enough as it is, encompassing a world where too many thought Hitler was a movie, while Hitler was in pre-production with the show to end all shows. Epstein makes it no great stretch to imagine the forces that give rise to a would-be Hitler in the Nevada desert, where Von Beckmann is neither the first nor the last impresario to project himself as a god or to measure his grandiosity by the size of the damage he creates. The devastation that remains in the wake of Von B’s unsettling final scene is a miniature version of Hitler’s perverse boast that he would leave behind “thousand-year ruins” outlasting the Parthenon.

Let all who think “image is everything,” who celebrate film as sacrament and worship imaginary super-heroes who can do no wrong, read this book and know where their roads lead to Pandaemonium. As for the rest of us, we have one more book to bring us this day our daily bread--and a last laugh for Peter Lorre, stifled in the throat like a sob.