TWO-WAY STRETCH(1960) has prison inmate Peter Sellers contriving to secure food, drink and minimal inconvenience for himself and his cellmates under their nitwit warden, then realizing that being locked up is the perfect alibi for participating in Wilfred Hyde-White’s diamond robbery—but unfortunately, a new hardcase guard may screw up both schemes. Fun (though annoyingly my off-air DVD cut off in the middle), reminiscent of countless army comedies such as The Phil Silver Show or Hogan’s Heroes in showing fun and games in a regimented environment “Silence when you talk to me!”
THE SCAR by Ukrainian authors Sergey and Marina Dyachenko is a very tedious read that starts off with a good concept (a wandering demigod inficts both the eponymous mark and a curse of cowardice on an arrogant duelist) but burying it under several lengthy info-dumps and lots of whiny soul-searching. It’s what I imagine Russian literature would read like if it were a bad fantasy novel.
THE MONUMENTS MEN: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, chronicles the work of the the military Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section created to minimize the destruction to Europe’s cultural heritage during the invasion of Fortress Europa and then to track down the various stockpiles of Nazi loot. The authors do a good job showing how a mixed team of museum curators, career military, architects and historians managed (at least some of the time) to minimize the damage to buildings and art museums (or at least to gather evidence Americans weren’t the ones destorying it); of the work of Europeans such as French curator Rose Valland to keep Germany from absconding with too much stuff; the race to find the various stockpiles after Hitler issued the Nero Order to destroy it all; and the efforts of various participants in the Nazi thefts to rehabilitate their past in the post-war years (Austria rewrote the saving of one Nazi art repository to give credit to a non-existent Austrian resistance). I dislike the authors’ habit of inventing conversations to move things along (though they don’t attempt to pass them off as factual recordings, as some do) but overall, quite good.
My big birthday present from TYG was a local production of IOLANTHE, in which the half-fae shepherd Strephon’s efforts to marry a Ward in Chancery run afoul of the skeptical Chancellor (“Perhaps if the thunderstorm could present an affidavit?”), rival lovers and the complication that the female romantic lead has assumed Strephon’s immortal faerie mother is obviously The Other Woman (after all, she’s much too young to be his mother!). The best from the local Savoyards I’ve seen yet, very entertaining and taking several shots at a proposed anti-gay marriage amendment here in NC (without overdoing it). “From now on, if I see you kissing a young girl, I shall know it is just one of your relatives!”
SHARPE’S GOLD is a decidedly odd entry in the TV series, dispensing with the book to tell a story (written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale) about a band of Spanish guerillas practicing Aztec sacrificial rites, and Sharpe having to rescue the episode’s Pretty Girl from their evil clutches. I can understand part of the reworking (the book introduced, IIRC, Sharpe’s wife Teresa, who’s already dead by this point in the TV series), but I wonder if part of it isn’t also that Sharpe’s ruthlessness (blowing up a British fortress as part of his mission for Wellington) was more than the BBC wanted to put on screen (certainly they could have worked around Teresa if they’d wanted to). “I know exactly what you’ve heard about me.”
