Friday, May. 11, 1962
CINEMA
Jules and Jim. France's Franc,ois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) has created a gay, grotesque little fable about two men in love with a Lorelei (Jeanne Moreau).
The Counterfeit Traitor. A spate of spy stuff, slick and scary, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer playing hugger-mugger in Hitlerland.
Five Finger Exercise. A competent film version of Peter Shaffer's prizewinning play about a family that has everything money can buy--including unhappiness.
State Fair. Hollywood's third cinemadaptation of the 1932 novel by Phil Stong just about corners the market in spring corn. Credits: Pat Boone, Bobby Darin. Tom Ewell. Alice Faye, Pamela Tiffin, Ann-Margret, Wally Cox and an 800-lb. Hampshire hog called Blue Boy on camera and George the rest of the time.
Moon Pilot. Walt Disney has produced a funny farce about a moonstruck astronut who almost wrecks the U.S. missile program.
The Horizontal Lieutenant. A brass-button burlesque starring Jim Hutton and Paula Prentiss.
Bell' Antonio. A thoughtful but not profound discussion of impotence by Italy's Mauro Bolognini.
All Fall Down. Angela Lansbury is painful and fascinating as a mother hen who clucks inanely over a bad egg (Warren Beatty), but the picture is just painful.
Only Two Can Play. Peter Sellers plays a Welsh librarian who finds all sorts of interesting things between covers.
Viridiana. Made in Spain on Franco's money but banned in Spain by Franco's decree, this peculiar and powerful film by Luis Bunuel predicts in parable the next Spanish revolution.
Sweet Bird of Youth. In most Hollywood movies chrome does not pay, but in this case Writer-Director Richard Brooks has redipped and triple-polished a hunk of junk by Tennessee Williams until it glitters like a junkie's eyeball.
Through a Glass Darkly. Perhaps the best, certainly the ripest, film ever made by Sweden's Ingmar Bergman.
Last Year at Marienbad. A Gordian knot of cinema tied by two ingenious Frenchmen, Scenarist Alain Robbe-Grillet and Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour).
The Night. The fashionable ailment of anxiety is skillfully anatomized by Italy's Michelangelo (L'Avventura) Antonioni.
Lover Come Back. Animadversions on advertising, wittily written by Stanley Shapiro and blandly recited by Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
A View from the Bridge. Arthur Miller's attempt to find Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush.
TELEVISION
Wed., May 9
Howard K. Smith--News & Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Notes and opinions on the week's events.
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Brinkley examines the impact of proposed higher postal rates on magazines, discussing the problem with Harper's John Fischer, Saturday Review's Norman Cousins, Playboy's Hugh Hefner.
Sat., May 12
Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb in Titanic, the story of the 1912 sinking of the luxury liner.
Sun., May 13
Look Up and Live (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). Dramatized excerpts from Albert Camus' novel The Plague, concerning man's battle against terror and death.
The Catholic Hour (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). "America and Communism" is the subject of this four-part study. Narrator is Tim O'Connor; readers include Thayer David, who appears currently on Broadway in A Man for All Seasons.
Accent (CBS, 1-1:30 p.m.). Dr. Richard MacLanathan, former curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, discusses the jazz, poetry, literature and painting that represent deviations in Communist dogma behind the Iron Curtain.
Meet the Professor (ABC, 2:30-3 p.m.). Guest is Dr. Patricia O'Connor, professor of languages at Brown University.
Adlai Stevenson Reports (ABC, 3:30-4 p.m.). Stevenson and Barbara Ward, British economist and writer, discuss world economic imbalances.
Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Art Carney, Barbara Cook, Alice Ghostley in Fails and Foibles, a musical revue based on the U.S. love for novelty.
Mon., May 14
The Bing Crosby Show (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Bob Hope, Edie Adams, the Smothers Brothers, Pete Fountain and his jazz group join Bing in a musical caper.
THEATER
On Broadway
A Thousand Clowns, by Herb Gardner, rescues nonconformity from humorless causists and introduces a fresh comic imagination to Broadway. Jason Robards Jr. heads a splendid company of unreconstructed oddballs.
The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. Four desperate people at rope's end find the strength to live beyond despair and accept their torturous lot. Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle award as best play of the year.
A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. A lofty, probing and eloquent examination of the conflict between individual conscience and public duty. Voted best foreign play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle.
Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, makes the relationship between God and man more humorous than awesome; but the theme is tinged with sublimity.
A Shot in the Dark, adapted from a Paris hit, is a sex mystery in which Julie Harris raises laughs and eyebrows.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying follows Robert Morse's beguilefully self-appreciative rush to the corporate summit. This accoladen musical was voted best of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle.
Off Broadway
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mania's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, by Arthur Kopit. A surrealistic foray into the no man's land of Momism. Barbara Harris is the sexiest sprout since Lolita.
Brecht on Brecht. An oasis for parched minds, where the playgoer may sip the aphorisms, songs, scenes and poems of a powerful master of 20th century theater.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Patriotic Gore, by Edmund Wilson. Threading together an apparently haphazard series of essays on the literature of the U.S. Civil War, Wilson achieves an important work of history, more stirring than an account of the bloodiest battles.
The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Harry T. Moore. A novelist and poet fabled for frankness and passion confirms his reputation in a fascinating collection of opinions on everything from lambs ("I loathe lambs") to fellow Englishmen.
Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. A German passenger ship bound from Vera Cruz to Bremerhaven in 1931 becomes a moving and despairing allegory of the human condition.
George, by Emlyn Williams. The celebrated playwright and actor writes with warmth and wryness about the poverty of his Welsh childhood, and the near disasters of his career as a scholarship boy at Oxford.
Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull. A lovingly exhaustive biography of a writer whose talent was a diamond very nearly as big as the Ritz, but whose life was a far from tender nightmare.
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, by John Updike. The skillful young author of Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run captures the exact curve of a handful of small but marvelous human moments.
The Rothschilds, by Frederic Morton. A seven-generation chronicle of family ways and financial wizardry in the world's greatest banking dynasty.
A Long and Happy Life, by Reynolds Price. This wise, skillful first novel about a Carolina country girl's attempts to keep both her fiance and her virtue is marred only by an occasional too-swooping bow toward William Faulkner.
In Parenthesis, by David Jones. A bitter novel in which a painter turns to prose and poetry to attack war.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Ship of Fools, Porter (7, last week)
2. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (2)
3. The Bull from the Sea, Renault (3)
4. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (1)
5. The Fox in the Attic, Hughes (4)
6. Devil Water, Seton (5)
7. Island, Huxley
8. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (6)
9. Captain Newman, M.D., Rosten (9)
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (8)
NONFICTION
1. Calories Don't Count, Taller (1)
2. The Rothschilds, Morton (3)
3. My Life in Court, Nizer (2)
4. Six Crises, Nixon (5)
5. The Guns of August, Tuchman (4)
6. In the Clearing, Frost
7. The New English Bible
8. The Making of the President 1960, White (6)
9. The Last Plantagenets, Costain (8)
10. Scott Fitzgerald Turnbull (9)
*All times E.D.T.
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