CINEMA
The Best of Enemies. A comedy of military errors, starring David Niven and Alberto Sordi as World War II officers who do practically everything but fight.
A Matter of WHO. Britain's Terry-Thomas plays a dewlapped bloodhound from the World Health Organization who goes bugling after a migratory virus and turns up the trail of a swindler.
War Hunt, set in war-torn Korea, is about a war lover, a man for whom war is not hell but home. How this leads to the corruption of an innocent Korean boy is only one among many strata of meanings explored in this low-budget film made with high intelligence and high art.
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. The young man is Hemingway, as he saw himself in the Nick Adams stories, which are here assembled in a charming, rambling, romantically melancholy tale of a boy attempting to get away from mother and become a man. Paul Newman, in a minor role, adds several impressive new wrinkles to Hollywood's standard portrait of a cauliflower ear.
Strangers in the City is a brilliantly abrasive social shocker about a Puerto Rican family living in the rat-infested lower depths of Manhattan's Spanish Harlem. Rick Carrier's script, cast, and camera work have a harsh-grained honesty.
Bird Man of Alcatraz. One of the strangest cases in U.S. penal history is that of Robert F. Stroud, who spent 43 years in solitary confinement. As the convict murderer who became a bird expert behind bars, Burt Lancaster gives the finest performance of his career.
Ride the High Country and Lonely Are the Brave are off-the-beaten-trail westerns about men--Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Country, Kirk Douglas in Brave--who attempt to forget the gall of the world in following the call of the wild.
Boccaccio '70. Eros in Italy, interpreted by three top Italian directors (Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti) and three top-heavy international stars (Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Romy Schneider).
The Notorious Landlady is Kim Novak, and her tenant, Jack Lemmon, does not ask for anything more until Scotland Yard prods him into a situation in which he makes some horribly funny discoveries.
Lolita. Any resemblance between this film and the novel is accidental and inconsequential. The partners in this esthetic crime include Author-Scripter Nabokov, Director Stanley Kubrick, and Co-Leads James Mason and Sue Lyon. The genius of Peter Sellers saves some scenes, and might have saved the movie if he had been cast as Humbert Humbert.
TELEVISION
Wed., Aug. 15 Howard K. Smith: News and Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).*A critical look at the U.S. architectural landscape: "Is America Ugly?" Focus on America (ABC, 8-8:30 p.m.).
Los Angeles between dusk and dawn, the portrait of a city through the night.
Thurs., Aug. 16
Accent (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Poet John Ciardi will host a visit to three San Francisco boites -the hungry i, the Roaring Twenties, The Drinking Gourd.
The Lively Ones (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Vic Damone and Guests Andre Previn, the Limeliters, Dorothy Loudon and others.
Americans: A Portrait in Verses (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A special on American poets with readings from the works of T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters by Peggy Wood and Kim Hunter, among others. James Whitmore will narrate.
Fri., Aug. 17
The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show (ABC, 11-11:30 a.m.). Ernie chats with Attorney General Robert Kennedy about his family life, hobbies and sports activities.
Sun., Aug. 19
Issues and Answers (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.). The issues are nuclear testing, the Berlin situation and other diplomatic dilemmas; the answers are offered by Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A report on the 1938 Munich pact with Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, who, as First Secretary of the British embassy in Berlin during the period, was an eyewitness to that particular prelude to war.
The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Sullivan, who has just about exhausted all the known talent in his sphere, turns to some unknowns with the first of a series of shows introducing young performers who have never appeared on TV before.
Mon., Aug. 20 Where Do We Go from Here? (CBS,
10:30-11 p.m.). The first of a five-day series exploring the U.S.'s major economic problems. David Schoenbrun will host, Professor John R. Coleman of Carnegie Tech will narrate, and leading experts will be interviewed.
THEATER
There is no pleasanter time to go Broadway show-shopping than the summer. The productions are seasoned, the fare is varied, and tickets to most attractions are enticingly easy to get. Top dramatic playbilling goes to The Night of the Iguana and A Man for All Seasons. Iguana is Tennessee Williams' gentlest play since The Glass Menagerie, and the wisest play he has ever written. Seasons is a play of wit and probity about a man of wit and probity, Sir Thomas More. On the comedy front, A Thousand Clowns lives up to its title, and rings merry changes on the slightly tired subject of nonconformity. In its second season, Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary remains a wisecrackling funfest.
A clutch of musicals caters to the best and worst of tastes. The astringent wit of Abe Burrows fuses How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the impish energies of Robert Morse provide the explosive for an evening of great delight. Multi-aptituded Zero Mostel brings his masterly clowning to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, an uproarious burlesquerie, lewdly adapted from some plays of Plautus. And there is still plenty of verve and joy left in the grande dame of Broadway musicals, My Fair Lady.
In the off-Broadway showstakes, Brecht on Brecht is the intellectual class of the field, an ingeniously sifted sampling of the poems, aphorisms and dramatic excerpts of a master of 20th century theater. Mixing surrealism and college humor, young (25) Arthur Kopit has mounted a splendidly zany attack on Mom behind the jawbreaking title, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hun? You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Having recently crossed the 500 mark in performances, Jean Genet's audacious, exotic, unsentimental and eloquent dramatization of the color question, The Blacks, is still being enacted with undiminished zest and style.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye.
Revelations of a young writer's agonizing struggle to discipline his talent, as told to a kindly confidant.
The Inheritors, by William Golding. In a fascinating display of imagination the author of Lord of the Flies delves into prehistory to tell how a pathetic band of apelike Neanderthals is exterminated by a terrifying new breed--man himself.
Rocking the Boat, by Gore Vidal. A onetime boy novelist, now become playwright and part-time politician, shies a few rocks at an assortment of U.S. ideas and institutions.
Letting Go, by Philip Roth. An overlong but powerful novel shows off a sharp eye for irony and a fine ear for dialogue but fails to make the goings-on of the youthful characters seem significant.
Death of a Highbrow, by Frank Swinnerton. In this excellent novel by an author who has never had the recognition he deserves, an eminent man of letters relives a literary feud with a dead rival and decides the man was not so much his enemy as his friend.
The Reivers, by William Faulkner. The Southern writer's final work is an outlandish comedy filled with bittersweet reminiscences from his earlier novels.
Saint Francis, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Never has Francis suffered so poignantly, or been treated so compassionately.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Ship of Fools, Porter (1, last week)
2. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (2)
3. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (3)
4. The Reivers, Faulkner (4)
5. Uhuru, Ruark (7)
6. Another Country, Baldwin (6)
7. The Prize, Wallace (5)
8. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (8)
9. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (10) 10. Letting Go, Roth
NONFICTION
1. The Rothschilds, Morton (1)
2. My Life in Court, Nizer (2)
3. One Man's Freedom, Williams (7)
4. Men and Decisions, Strauss (9)
5. The Guns of August, Tuchman (4)
6. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (6)
7. In the Clearing, Frost (3)
8. Veeck--as in Wreck, Veeck
9. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (10) 10. Conversations with Stalin, Djilas (5)
-All times E.D.T.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.