Straw Hat

CINEMA

Good children's films are even rarer than good adult films, but suddenly there are two: Misty, a properly sentimental tale about two Virginia youngsters who long to own a wild pony; and The Parent Trap, a movie whose plot should make it thoroughly emetic--it concerns cute identical twins who try to kid their divorced parents into remarrying--but which is consistently delightful, thanks to its button-nosed star, Hayley Mills. Also recommended:

Secrets of Women. In Ingmar Bergman's first comedy, as in the later films, A Lesson in Love and Smiles of a Summer Night, the Scandinavian warlock gaily examines matrimony and finds it ridiculous.

The Guns of Navarone. Director Carl Foreman leaves out no gunpowder cliche in a World War II dash-and-basher, but tells his absurd tale with great skill; and Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn pull off their caper in rousing style.

Eve Wants to Sleep (in Polish). The solemn may see political protest in this wacky knockabout in a Polish nighttown, but most viewers will view it as the goofiest farce since the Keystone Kops.

TELEVISION

Although widely despised as the rerun season, summer is in some ways the best time for television, since networks rebroadcast the best of their regular season shows, and viewers do not have to stare their way through 600 hours of pap for every halfway worthwhile 30 minutes. This saves the viewers from having to watch TV in the winter any more. Some of the better reruns:

Thurs., July 20

CBS Reports (CBS, 10-11 p.m.)* The Trials of Charles de Gaulle, first shown May 25, is a deftly reported delineation of the Algerian situation and De Gaulle's return to power.

Sat., July 22

The Nation's Future (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). This debate first heard last Feb. 25, treats the question: "Should congressional investigations of loyalty be curbed?"

Sun., July 23

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). Patton and the Third Army follows the pistol-totin' general through North Africa to Sicily to Normandy and the headlong sprint to Germany. Mostly film clips, excellently edited.

The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Sullivan's trip to Portugal, first shown in March 1959, covers the country from the university city of Coimbra to the fish wharves of Nazare. Much of the talent is Portuguese, plus such inexact descendants of Vasco da Gama as Maurice Chevalier.

Candid Camera (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). This is one of the best of Allen Funt's peep shows, in which a motorcycle cop takes viewers along to hear some of the stupefyingly creative excuses that come from his heavy-footed victims.

Tues., July 25

Purex Special for Women (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The Cold Woman, first shown last October, mixes straightforward psychiatric interviews with dramatic scenes to explore the question of sexual frigidity.

THEATER

Straw Hat

North Conway, N.H., Eastern Slope Playhouse: Colette's Gigi.

Provincetown, Mass. Playhouse on the Wharf: Three Words in No Time, a play by Belgium's sulphurously philosophical Playwright Michel de Ghelderode.

West Springfield, Mass., Storrowton Music Fair: Destry Rides Again, and again, and again--this time with Jimmy Dean and Belgium's unphilosophical Monique van Vooren.

Stratford, Conn., American Shakespeare Festival: As You Like It and Macbeth.

East Hampton, N.Y., John Drew Theater: A troupe from Manhattan's Phoenix Theater moves in for a three-week engagement beginning with Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning.

New York City, Central Park: The New York Shakespeare Festival's Much Ado About Nothing.

Haddonfield, N.J., Camden County Music Fair: Friml's The Vagabond King.

Philadelphia, Playhouse in the Park: Invitation to a March, with Eileen Heckart and Valerie Bettis.

Ardentown, Del., Robin Hood Theater: William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers.

Danville, Ky., Pioneer Playhouse: The fourth in a series of ten new plays by new playwrights: The Sparta Fox, by Hollywood's Andrews Carroll Bidwell.

Indianapolis, Avondale Playhouse: Monique, a chiller based on the same novel as the film Diabolique, with Linda (Forever Amber) Darnell.

Bloomfield, Ind., Shawnee Summer Theater: The Corn Is Green comes to Greene County.

Highland Park, Ill., Chicago Tenthouse Theater: Margaret O'Brien, Hugh Marlowe and James MacArthur tenting out Under the Yum-Yum Tree.

Dallas, State Fair Music Hall: Brigadoon, with Ron Husmann and Dorothy Collins.

San Diego, Old Globe Theater: Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, in rotation, with Morris Carnovsky as Malvolio and Shylock.

Stratford, Ont., Stratford Festival: Coriolanus, Henry VIII and Love's Labour's Lost alternating with The Pirates of Penzance.

BOOKS

Best Reading

For summer catching-up with the season to date:

A spate of animal books is available for grownups as well as children, including Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell, and A Zoo in My Luggage, by Gerald Durrell; and those who are really taking summer seriously can dust off their copies of Winnie Ille Pu.

It is also a good season for history: The French Revolution, by Georges Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier, The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas, and Russia and the West, by George Kennan, are all excellent. My Father, Lloyd George is a fine study of Britain's World War I Prime Minister by his son, but generally autobiography was better served than biography. Frank O'Connor's An Only Child tells of his childhood in Cork slums, and is written as gracefully as any book this year. In Nobody Knows My Name, Negro Author James Baldwin tellingly describes the end of his self-imposed European exile and his return to the U.S., and discusses some prevailing delusions--both black and white--on the color question.

Humor has not fared well. Two usually reliable sources, James Thurber and Peter De Vries, both turned out disappointing books. The new P. G. Wodehouse, The Ice in the Bedroom, will delight his claque. The reader who wants real wit may prefer G. B. Shaw's Letters to a Young Actress, in which the crotchety master tried without success to turn out a real-life Galatea from unpromising material.

The best novel comes from a reliable master of suspense and self-searching, Graham Greene. His brilliant book, A Burnt-Out Case, is one of an ever increasing number of fine novels focusing on Africa. Others: The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey, At Fever Patch, by David Caute, and Shadows in the Grass, in which Isak Dinesen looks back on her pioneer life in the Kenya bush. Two fine first novels come, as usual, from the South: The Movie-Goer, by Walker Percy, and The Morning and the Evening, by Joan Williams. Robert McLaughlin provides an absorbing study of a troubled Middle Eastern country, The Walls of Heaven.

Best Sellers

( SQRT previously included in TIME'S choice of Best Reading)

FICTION

1. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (1)*

SQRT 2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (2)

3. Mila 18, Uris (3)

4. The Edge of Sadness, O'Connor (6)

5. Tropic of Cancer, Miller

6. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (5)

7. The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck

8. A Shooting Star, Stegner

SQRT 9. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (4)

10. A Journey to Matecumbe, Taylor

NONFICTION

SQRT 1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1)

2. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (2)

SQRT 3. The New English Bible (4)

SQRT 4. Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell (3)

SQRT 5. Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennan (5)

6. My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, Parks (8)

7. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Hauser (7)

8. Japanese Inn, Statler

9. The Making of the President 1960, White

SQRT 10. Fate Is the Hunter, Gann (9)

*All times are E.D.T. *Position on last week's list.

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