Word: authored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...book, Author Remarque swapped the communiqué quiet of the Western Front for the incessant noise of the Eastern Front in World War II, and Director Douglas Sirk has turned a true camera eye on the bleak grey vista of the once-proud German army in shattered retreat, its beaten soldiers yearning only for a hunk of bread and a hole in which to hide from the Russian artillery. But somebody forgot that there was a war on: the hero (John Gavin), a dutiful Wehrmacht private, gets a three-week furlough back to Germany, and from there on, the movie...
...package of food as a proposition and gets so vexed that two full days pass before she surrenders her virginity. Then he marries her. But the regime that he and his countrymen have created will not leave him alone. His old professor (played with austere dignity by Author Remarque, in his film debut) lives in terror of the SS; a Jewish friend hides out miserably in a bombed-out cathedral; a Gestapo officer hands him a cigar box containing the ashes of his bride's father. Worst of all, the Allied air forces refuse to let bygones be bygones...
...this, wonders the private, what he really wanted? Piously, he asks the old professor: "Isn't there a place where taking orders stops and personal responsibility begins, where duty turns into crime and can no longer be excused by blaming the leaders?" Author-Actor Remarque replies vaguely: "Each man has to decide for himself." The private goes back to his outfit-for no other reason than that he is afraid he will be shot if he tries to desert. He gets shot anyway by a Russian guerrilla whom he has just saved from execution. His death only begs...
...Author Davey's first novel, A Capitol Offense (TIME, Aug. 6, 1956), a middle-aged Ambrose righted wrongs in Washington, D.C.; the present book, set in 1937, shows the philosopher as a younger man, paddling after evildoers in Oxford and London. Ambrose has just done a job of espionage in civil-war-torn Spain to accommodate a friend in the Foreign Office, and he wants a few weeks of peace before the fall term starts at Oxford. But he needs money (he has worked out a scheme to pauperize the Grimaldis' gambling hell at Monte Carlo...
...Ilona, the slinky Hungarian blonde, really has nothing to do with the plot, or to warn the reader about the sneaky German archaeologist who thinks he has found a piece of a Dead Sea Scroll. But the book is less a whodunit than a witty who-said-it-in Author Davey's phrase, a shakerful of "the martini of human kindness." Very dry, too, without unnecessary olives...