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By Doug Oswald

A French soldier and spy is sent on a mission to discover the location of a secret German U-Boat base in “Assignment in Brittany,” released on DVD as part of the Warner Archive Collection. Jean-Pierre Aumont plays Captain Pierre Metard, a member of the Free French army serving in Great Britain. He has an uncanny resemblance to a French farmer and soldier, Corporal Bertrand Corlay, a man with Nazi ties who ends up in a British hospital. The British devise a scheme where Pierre impersonates Bertrand and returns home to search out the U-Boat base. He spends weeks studying and memorizing everything known about Bertrand before being flown to and dropped by parachute in to Brittany and makes his way on foot to Bertrand’s family farm.

He runs in to two British soldiers who escaped from a...

On Sunday's (April 29) upcoming episode of "Mad Men" -- titled "At the Codfish Ball" -- Don Draper (Jon Hamm) takes a break from his usual wardrobe of sharp suits to lounge in his pajamas and catch up on some light reading. Meanwhile, new wife Megan Draper (Jessica Paré) is opting to stick close to the TV.

So what does Don read in his spare time? In the picture, he's holding a copy of Bernard Malamud's 1966 novel, "The Fixer." The book -- about "a man who finds himself a stranger in his community and a victim of irrational prejudice as a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria engulfs a town after the murder of a boy" -- won that year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction and The National Book Award.

From the Wikipedia book synopsis: "[The main character] finally finds it in his heart to forgive his former wife, who left him just before the novel began.

 

MacInnes' best-selling Cold War adventure The Venetian Affair was brought to the screen in 1967 starring Robert Vaughn and Elke Sommer.

Scottish novelist Helen MacInnes was known as the Queen of the Cold War thrillers. Prior to her death in 1985, MacInnes had built a loyal international following. However, in recent years, her work has faded into relative obscurity. Now Titan Books has secured the rights to MacInnes' work and will be reissuing these novels. Some of her books had been made into major films such as The Venetian Affair and The Salzburg Connection. Click here for more...

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Day 2 in Venice, and as the press accreditation desk wasn’t opening till the afternoon, that left the morning free for a visit to the Libreria Solaris, the only place in Venice for film books and DVDs (and I mean ‘only’ in both senses of the word). Having grabbed a fistful of movies – including the Italian releases of both HerculesHercules Unchained, which I fervently hope are taken from better prints than the budget discs available in the States – I moseyed on back to the hotel and then over to the Lido, pondering awhile the relationship between Venice and the movies.

MoonrakerVenice has often been likened to a living film set, a most appropriate comparison considering the city was literally conjured into reality from nothing. And yet, paradoxically, it’s the very unreality of the place, the sheer improbability of it, that leaves...