The Longest Day. General Zanuck's war games are played off like cops and robbers. With 42 stars and a musical score by Ludwig van Beethoven and Paul Anka to inspire them, Zanuck's troops have a splendid time on D-day outfoxing those funny old Germans, dodging bullets (even the casualties are bloodless), and scaring old ladies. Day is three hours long, and while it is never boring, it is basically an episodic documentary that sometimes has the bad taste to say: war is swell.
Long Day's Journey into Night. The greatest and most personal of Eugene O'Neill's plays has been respectfully translated by Director Sidney Lumet and a capable cast (Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Stockwell) into one of the year's finest films: a fearsome examination of the terrible things people do to each other in the name of love.
Gigot. A nice sentimental comedy in which Jackie Gleason plays a Parisian janitor and looks like an overweight hippopotamus impersonating the poor little match girl.
Barabbas. A religious spectacle that is also something of a religious experience: Paer Lagerkvist's novel about the man who went free when Christ went to the cross has been dramatized with spiritual insight by Christopher Fry, and is played with crude vigor by Anthony Quinn.
Divorce--Italian Style. This wickedly hilarious lesson in how to break up a marriage in divorceless Italy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a Sicilian smoothie who sheds his wife by doing the only Latin-gentlemanly thing: he resorts to bullets instead of court billets.
The Island. A Japanese silent (nobody says a word) that describes with relentless monotony the hard but beautiful life of a Japanese family who struggle to exist on a barren island in Japan's Inland Sea.
Yojimbo. A Japanese movie that is anything but silent, Yojimbo begins as a grisly and noisy parody of Hollywood westerns samurai-style, develops into a masterpiece of film making in the grand manner, and proves that Director Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa is one of the world's greatest masters of satire.
TELEVISION
Wed., Oct. 24
CBS Reports (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* A look at the quieter, steadier, and more hopeful incidents of integration progress in the South.
The Bob Hope Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests for Hope's first program of the season are Bing Crosby, Lucille Ball and Juliet Prowse.
The Eleventh Hour (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Psychiatrist Wendell Corey, the new season's Ben Psyche, has George C. Scott under scrutiny as a Red Army officer who defected to the West and now wants to return to the Soviet Union.
Fri., Oct. 26
Hall of Fame (NBC, 8:30-10 p.m.). The Teahouse of the August Moon with David Wayne, Paul Ford, and John Forsythe of the original Broadway cast. Also Miyoshi Umeki.
Route 66 (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Something called the Society for the Preservation of Gerenuks meets in Chicago, and the result is a kind of ghouls' convention. Among those present: Lon Chancy Jr.
Sun., Oct. 28
Look Up and Live (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). A fragmentary adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.
Politics '62 (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Campaigns in Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Nebraska. Interviewed are: former HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, candidate for U.S. Senator from Connecticut; Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, up for re-election in Illinois; Senator Homer Capehart, running for re-election in Indiana; Robert A. Taft Jr., candidate for Congressman at large in Ohio; Michael Di Salle, running for re-election as Governor of Ohio; former Interior Secretary Fred Seaton, running for Governor in Nebraska.
The Campaign and the Candidates (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). This one is entirely focused on the fight between Dick Nixon and Pat Brown for Governor of California.
Mon., Oct. 29
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Brinksville has dug up a Peace Corps type who is disillusioned with his job in South America.
Tues., Oct. 30
Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A study of U.S. urban renewal programs, concentrating on Boston.
THEATER
The Affair is an affair of justice, treated with a Galsworthy-like concern for the niceties of fair play. Judiciously adapted by Ronald Millar from the novel by C. P. Snow, the play relies on tension rather than passion, and its evocation of an English university milieu is donnish, literate and civilized.
A Man's a Man, by Bertolt Brecht. This Eric Bentley adaptation of a 1926 play by the late great German playwright uncannily prefigures the process of brainwashing. Amid chalky white masks, silent-movie captions and honky-tonk pianos, a sardonic 20th century dirge is sounded for the death of the individual.
With the new season footlight-dragging along, playgoers' choices are largely limited to several holdovers of merit. A Man for All Seasons might have taken its theme from Shakespeare's "Every subject's duty is the King's but every subject's soul is his own." Torn between duty and conscience is Sir Thomas More, played by Emlyn Williams. There is fresh comedy in the conformist cry for nonconformity as raised by A Thousand Clowns. As a nonworking anti-square, Jason Robards Jr. is supported by a prize cast of plodballs. Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary is baited with laughs, and Barbara Bel Geddes hooks every one, as this fun-fest nears the 700-performance mark.
It takes a rare gift for meshing story, song and dance to fashion an outstanding musical comedy. That gift is brilliantly displayed in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Dynamic Robert Morse supplies high-voltage clowning. High-styled low comedy of the vaudeville-cum-burlesque variety sets the house roaring with belly laughs at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Zero Mostel is the pluperfect master of the zany revels.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Chekhov, by Ernest J. Simmons. An absorbing if overdetailed portrait of the mercurial Russian doctor who became, without meaning to, one of the world's great storytellers and playwrights.
The Vizier's Elephant and Devil's Yard, both by Ivo Andric. Two books--the first, three short novels, the second, a single not very long one--by the Yugoslav author of the powerful novel of tyranny in Bosnia, The Bridge on the Drina. His target is still tyranny, some of it ancient and some, as is clearly legible between the lines, quite modern.
Say Nothing, by James Hanley. In a novel written almost entirely in jagged-edged monosyllables, three guilt-ridden people in the north of England turn life into death by endlessly punishing one another.
The Kindly Ones, by Anthony Powell. A collection of British eccentrics, many of them familiar from the author's earlier novels, adjust fumblingly to the stern demands of World War II in this comic opera of a novel.
A Company of Heroes, by Dale Van Every. A readable history of the bloodiest and perhaps least-known struggle in the American Revolution--the long death feud between settlers and Indians on the western frontier.
Images of Truth, by Glenway Wescott. Shrewd portraits of fellow authors (Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Mann and others) by one of the U.S.'s best non-practicing novelists (he wrote The Pilgrim Hawk).
The Climb Up to Hell, by Jack Olsen. A skilled, dramatic retelling of the suicidal climb of four men up the north face of one of the Alps' worst man-killers, the Eiger.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Ship of Fools, Porter (1, last week)
2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (5)
3. A Shade of Difference, Drury (2)
4. The Prize, Wallace (4)
5. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (3)
6. The Thin Red Line, Jones (9)
7. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (6)
8. Act of Anger, Spicer
9. Uhuru, Ruark (10)
10. The Reivers, Faulkner (8)
NONFICTION
1. The Rothschilds, Morton (1)
2. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2)
3. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)
4. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (6)
5. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (5)
6. Silent Spring, Carson (4)
7. Who's in Charge Here?, Gardner (7)
8. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (8)
9. Final Verdict, St. Johns (9)
10. The Guns of August, Tuchman
* All times E.D.T. through Oct. 27--after that, E.S.T.
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