The Night. Marriage without love and life without meaning are examined with talent, intelligence and despair by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), whose text might be taken from St. Paul: "For as in Adam all die. . ."

Victim. An entertaining but tendentious thriller that illustrates a shocking statistic: in nine out of ten cases of blackmail in Britain, the victim is a homosexual. Not for the kiddies.

Sail a Crooked Ship. The last movie made by the late Ernie Kovacs is a sort of shaggy seadog story in which Comedian Kovacs plays "a unsussessful crinimal" with a big cigar and a tiny brain.

Lover Corne Back. Stanley Shapiro, one of Hollywood's more competent make-'em-laugh-till-they-gag men, has served up a grand old turkey of a plot--the mistaken-identity bit--and has stuffed it with giggles. Dessert: a couple of cream puffs called Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

Light in the Piazza. Question: Should a wealthy American mother (Olivia de Havilland) permit her beautiful daughter (Yvette Mimieux) to marry a charming young Italian (George Hamilton) who does not realize that the daughter is mentally retarded? Answer: Florence in Metrocolor is worth seeing anyway.

Tender Is the Night. F. Scott Fitzgerald's graceful, transparently self-descriptive story of a gifted young psychiatrist (Jason Robards Jr.) who gives up his career to get married makes a melancholy and affecting movie.

A View from the Bridge. Adapted from Arthur Miller's play, the film postures as Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush, but as a moden drama of moral incest, it has merit, thanks to Raf Vallone's muscular performance as the troubled stevedore.

One. Two. Three. Director Billy Wilder's Coca-Colonial comedy of bad manners is set in Berlin and relentlessly maintains the pace that refreshes.

A Midsummer Night's Dream. The best puppet picture ever made: a feature-length version of Shakespeare's play put together by Czechoslovakia's Jiri Trnka.

Murder, She Said. Margaret Rutherford, the British comedienne, comes on strong as a lady gumshoe in this adaptation of an Agatha Christie chiller.

The Innocents. This psychiatric chiller, based on The Turn of the Screw, owes as much to Sigmund Freud as it does to Henry James, but the photography is wonderfully spooky and the heroine (Deborah Kerr) exquisitely kooky.

TELEVISION

Wed., Feb. 28

Howard K. Smith--News and Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Interpretive report on the week's news.

Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Documentary-drama about teenage junkies.

The Bob Newhart Show (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). The young master comedian does a monologue in which he is a professor at a school for political convention delegates. His guests are The Limeliters (TIME, June 16).

David Brinkley Journal (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Doughty Dave discusses Cuban refugees in Miami.

Fri., March 2

Telephone Hour (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). An Irving Berlin program, with Ginger Rogers, John Raitt, Janet Blair, Mindy Carson, Johnny Desmond.

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). Walter Cronkite and the week's top news story.

Sat., March 3

Accent (CBS, 1:30-2 p.m.). First of two segments about life in Elizabethan England.

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, and Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Sun., March 4

The Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). A documentary of daily life at the U.S. Air Force Academy, with particular attention to the physical fitness program.

Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Final events in the International Ski Federation's quadrennial world games, from Chamonix, France.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Second of two parts about modern psychiatry (filmed at Menninger Clinic).

Show of the Week (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). Pocket biography of George M. Cohan.

Mon., March 5

Expedition (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.). Russian alpinists scaling seven peaks above 20,000 ft. in the Pamir Mountains of Soviet Central Asia.

THEATER

On Broadway

The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. In what may be his wisest play, the author gathers four of life's castaways on a Mexican veranda and probes their violated hearts.

Ross, by Terence Rattigan, presents an absorbing theory of T. E. Lawrence as a man both raised and racked by his own will. John Mills plays the hero with anguish and skill.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, throws its varicolored light on the theme of public duty v. private conscience. As Sir Thomas More, British Actor Paul Scofield is faultless.

Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, treats the relationship of God and man with more humor than awe, but the superb acting of Fredric March and Douglas Campbell supplies the necessary power and the glory.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is the secret that Actor Bobby Morse shares with the season's most appreciative audiences, as he clambers deceitfully and nimbly up the corporate slag heap.

Among Broadway's long-run tenants, Mary. Mary incites full houses to laugh along with Playwright Jean Kerr; Camelot's Round Table is becoming as durable as King Arthur's--and there is always the grande dame of Manhattan's musicals. My Fair Lady.

Off Broadway

Brecht on Brecht is an exciting peek at poems, letters, scenes and songs in the treasure trove of a 20th century master of theater. A splendid company of six perched on stools gives magic to this revue-styled evening.

Books

Best Reading

The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes. A trenchant novel about Europe's sickness between two World Wars, contrasting a victorious England in need of no new God with a defeated Germany in search of the sinister old warrior-deities.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. Set inside a mental hospital, this brilliant first novel is a roaring protest against middlebrow society's rules.

The Death of Ahasuerus, by Par Lagerkvist. The Wandering Jew as a symbol of salvation by unfaith--by a Nobel Prize-winning novelist who once described himself as "a believer without a belief."

The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman. The fateful first month of World War I as a drama in which every actor had rehearsed his part for years and yet turned into a shambles.

The Quarry, by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. A sick old detective trapped in a sanitarium run by an archsadist--each of them the other's quarry--provides the author with a new set of grotesque mouthpieces for his macabre view of life.

Writers on the Left, by Daniel Aaron. Some of the best writers in the U.S. fell for or got bullied into Communism during the Depression '30s; a look at who they were, what they said and wrote, how they fellow-traveled through ideology to disillusionment.

The End of the Battle, by Evelyn Waugh. Part 3 of a trilogy about Britain in Waughtime, how an upper-class way of living and dying turned grey when the Russians became Britain's allies.

Sylva, by Vercors. A fox turns into a young lady, thereby giving her keeper and Vercors much opportunity for ironical analysis of what little girls are made of.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (1, last week) 2. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (2) 3. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (5) 4. Captain Newman, M.D., Rosten (6) 5. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (3) 6. Daughter of Science, West (4) 7. Chairman of the Bored, Streeter (7) 8. The Ivy Tree, Stewart (9) 9. Little Me, Dennis (8) 10. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (10)

NONFICTION

1. My Life in Court, Nizer (1) 2. Calories Don't Count, Taller (2) 3. The Making of the President 1960, White (3) 4. The Guns of August, Tuchman (10) 5. My Saber Is Bent, Paar (6) 6. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (4) 7. The Last of the Plantagenets, Costain (9) 8. CIA: The Inside Story, Tully 9. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (8) 10. Living Free, Adamson (7)

*All times E.S.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.