`Sharpe’s Rifles,” violent enough to make the “NYPD Blue” cops run for cover, is a costume epic with considerable class and outrageous action.
The 24th season of “Masterpiece Theatre” finally kicks into something resembling exciting, substantial entertainment with this raucous, bloody, passionate, clever and altogether wonderful two-part trip to Portugal and Spain in 1809 during the Peninsular War (consult your encyclopedia for further details of the six-year conflict).
Airing at 9 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 21 on PBS-Ch. 11, and based on the novels of Bernard Cornwell, it gives us a sexy, swashbuckling hero in the form of Sgt. Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean) who, having saved the life of the future Duke of Wellington in a heroic display, is immediately elevated to the rank of lieutenant.
This promotion puts him in a lonely spot. He is despised by his fellow officers because he lacks their breeding. He is despised by the soldiers because they think him too big for his commoner’s boots. Snobbishness being less appealing than insults, Sharpe sets his lot with the soldiers, specifically a ragtag, grizzled band of sharpshooters.
They are sent off on a mission behind enemy lines to try to recover a vanished payroll and that’s where they encounter a group of Spanish guerillas, led by a beautiful and brutal woman (Assumpta Serna), on a different kind of mission.
There are battles aplenty, convincing twists and a tryst. It’s a full-bodied story, with characters to match, and vibrantly filmed. Best of all, Sharpe will return in another adventure, “Sharpe’s Eagle,” at 8 p.m. Dec. 19.
– Rudyard Kipling wrote his short story “They” in an attempt to deal with the death of a child. John Korty directs the TV version of the story in an attempt to attract viewers. Different motivations. Different results.
Kipling’s story, slight but filled with magic, allows the reader to easily suspend belief and buy the otherworldly aspects of the tale.
“They” (7 p.m. Sunday, Showtime cable) never does, because it is such an uneasy mix of ghost story and family drama.
Shattered by the death of the oldest of his two daughters, a father (Patrick Bergin) feels guilty for never having expressed his love and he starts seeing and hearing things and wondering is he’s going nuts.
Seeking understanding or explanation, he is led, by a mysterious photo, to visit a blind woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who communes with the spirits of dead children on her estate in the South Carolina countryside. Surrounded by trees hanging heavy with moss and containing an evil owl-spirit, this is where the father hopes to set matters right with his dead daughter.
Redgrave is typically dignified, but Bergin is leaden, giving the film an awkward emotional core: Do we care if he gets to make peace with his daughter?
Though a few tears should be jerked from the more sentimental among you, for me this disappointing film has the ring of some New Age seminar.
– In one of the strangest bits of typecasting in recent memory, Lesley Ann Warren seems to have been pegged as Homicidal Mom.
She was a murder-plotting mom in “Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story” and gets to pull the trigger in “A Mother’s Revenge” (11:30 p.m. Sunday, ABC-Ch. 7, after Bears game). She does this because she has just watched the sicko who raped and beat her little daughter beat the rap in court.
The mother freaks and fires. Naturally, she’s arrested. It’s not a smart thing to commit crimes in a courtroom and-as her family stands by her side-she hires the lawyer (Annette O’Toole) who had successfully defended the rapist to try to get her sprung.
