The Bridge (in German). The tragedy of seven teen-age German boys thrown into the front lines as human sandbags two days before the end of World War II
Mein Kampf. A searing documentary of the rise and fall of Hitler's Germany that catalogues in gruesome detail man's organized inhumanity to man. Culled from newspapers, Nazi propaganda pictures Wehrmacht battle films, and secret-police footage.
La Dolce Vita (in Italian). The road to hell in this case is Rome's Via Veneto, and it is paved with the good intentions of a gossip reporter, who slides into corruption during three screen hours divided equally between boredom and skillfully done scenes of moral decay.
Days of Thrills and Laughter. Comedy and heroics, silent and violent, with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, et al.
Shadows. Actor-Turned-Director John Cassavetes' crude, sometimes trite, but powerful improvisation of interracial love among Manhattan's young havenots.
TELEVISION
Wed.. May 17
Perry Conio's Music Hall (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Guests--those with their eyes open--are Don Ameche, Frances Langford, Brenda Lee. Color.
The United States Steel Hour (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Leonardi Code," a backstage melodrama about murder and mind reading, with Sally Ann Howes and Barry Morse.
Thurs., May 18
Ernie Kovacs Special (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A series of improvisations, including sketches on TV and movie stars, written, produced and directed by Kovacs. The star: Kovacs.
Fri., May 19
Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). One of the week's major news stories, told by network reporters with Walter Cronkite as anchor man.
Sat., May 20
ABC's Wide World of Sports (4:307 p.m.). The world series of British soccer: the final cup match between the Tottenham Hotspurs and Leicester City.
Triple Crown Race (CBS, 5:30-6 p.m.). The Preakness.
The Nation's Future (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). "Is A Durable Peace with the Soviets Possible?" Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins says yes; Leo Cherne, executive director of the Research Institute of America, says no.
Sun., May 21 Major League Baseball (NBC, 2:00 to conclusion). White Sox v. Red Sox. In color, and only in non-major-league areas.
Eichmann on Trial (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.).
Correspondents are Yale Newman and Marvin Levin.
Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.).
"The Fall of China," narrated by Walter Cronkite. Repeat.
Walt Disney Presents (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Wonders of the water worlds, caught by Disney's photographers.
Winston Churchill--The Valiant Years
(ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Yalta. Richard Burton reads Churchill's words, and Gary Merrill narrates.
THEATER |
On Broadway
Carnival! The vintage movie Lili, with a touch of Liliom, makes a musical that is often, but not always, worthy of its exclamation mark. Anna Maria Alberghetti is the waif, and Pierre Olaf a superb clown.
Becket. Arthur Kennedy as the archbishop and Sir Laurence Olivier now playing a formidable Henry II.
A Far Country. The early years of Freud are presented in an imperfect but successful marriage of document and drama. Steven Hill and Kim Stanley come up both excellent.
Big Fish, Little Fish. A has-been editor is surrounded by never-weres in this honest but sometimes labored comedy about the sour smell of false success.
Mary, Mary. Playwright Jean Kerr jabs deftly, but gently, at a great many contemporary targets, including female humorists too witty for their own good. With Barbara Bel Geddes.
The Devil's Advocate. An effective, high-purposed but flawed adaptation of the Morris L. West novel; Leo Genn is the emotionless monsignor who in his investigation of an unorthodox candidate for sainthood (Edward Mulhare) is enmeshed in humanity.
Irma La Douce. Elizabeth Seal is the piquant British star of this slight, jaunty French comedy about a warmhearted prostitute.
All the Way Home. This adaptation of James Agee's Pulitzer Prize novel about his Tennessee boyhood is sometimes less than a play, but always vividly playable.
Also recommended: Rhinoceros, Game-lot, A Taste of Honey, Advise and Consent.
Off Broadway
The Blacks. A white man's savage and provocative attempt, by French Playwright Jean Genet, to depict Negroes' ideas of whites, and white men's views of these ideas.
Other back-alley art worth the trip: Under Milk Wood, a fresh retelling of life in the village Dylan Thomas waggishly named Llareggub; The American Dream, Edward Al bee's dissection of modern man; In the Jungle of Cities, Bertolt Brecht's intriguing early effort: Hedda Gabler, an excellent production of the Ibsen classic; The Connection, a relentlessly realistic study of narcotics and nihilists; and the durable Brecht-Weill-Blitzstein classic, The Threepenny Opera.
BOOKS
Best Reading The Age of Reason, by Harold Nicolson. Catherine the Great, Jonathan Swift, John Wesley and a score of other 18th century movers and shapers are laved more in the warm glow of idiosyncrasy than in the cold light of 100% accuracy. The author writes in the witty and amusing fashion of a male Nancy Mitford. The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey. A deeply felt and deeply disturbing first novel about an oddly matched pair of students, McNair (white) and Musaka (black), who are known at Oxford as the "brothers" until the color line and an African journey turn them into Cain and Abel.
Phaedra and Figaro, translated respectively by Robert Lowell and Jacques Barzun. The fiery Racine tragedy and the bubbling Beaumarchais comedy are both superbly restored to the attention of the modern reader.
Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, by John Cheever. Mapped by an author who claims that it is hell, this is the physically and morally split-level world of wry self-questioning success and tepidly rebellious domesticity.
Lanterns and Lances, by James Thurber. Tongue twisters, riddles, puns, palindromes, and the war between the sexes acrobatically presented by that old master of reverse English: Semaj Rebruth.
Snake Man, by Alan Wykes. More remarkable than any of the rare snakes he has captured is C.J.P. lonides, a legendary eccentric who displays all the instincts of the aristocrat and no trace of the gentleman.
The Proverb and Other Stories, by Marcel Ayme. In the hands of this artful French writer, pictures become edible, people lapse into "temporary death," fathers take their sons' exams, and art itself becomes the science of the impossible.
The Odyssey. Robert Fitzgerald translates into the crisp, demotic argot of today the tale of wily Odysseus.
The French Revolution, by Georges Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier. A spirited tabloid of the Terror culled from some 50,000 eyewitness accounts.
Best Sellers ( SQRT previously included in TIME'S choice of Best Reading)
FICTION 1. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (1)*
SQRT 2. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (2)
SQRT 3. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (5)
SQRT 4. A Burnt-Out Case, Greene (3)
SQRT 5. Midcentury, Dos Passes (7)
SQRT 6. Winnie Hie Pu, Milne (9)
7. Hawaii, Michener (4)
8. China Court, Godden
9. Advise and Consent, Drury (6)
10. The Chateau, Maxwell (10)
NONFICTION
SQRT 1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1)
SQRT 2. Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell (2)
SQRT 3 The New English Bible (3)
4. My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, Parks (4)
5. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (9)
6. Fate Is the Hunter, Gann (5)
7. The City in History, Mumford I
SQRT 8. Skyline, Fowler (10)
9. The Frog Pond, Maclver
10. Who Killed Society? Amory (8)
* All times E.D.T. *Position on last week's list.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.