CINEMA
A Child Is Waiting. There are 5,700,000 "mental defectives" in the U.S., and his picture forces U.S. moviegoers to look them and their problems in the face. The theme is not pleasant but the script (Abby Mann), the direction (John Cassavetes) and the principal performances (Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Bruce Ritchey) are honest and moving.
Days of Wine and Roses. Drunks are bores, but Jack Lemmon, wry on the rocks, is one of the most entertaining fellows who ever said cheers when they meant booze, and this is the best picture about alcoholism since The Lost Weekend 1945).
The Bad Sleep Well. A thriller of considerable social significance in which Japan's Akira Kurosawa examines with ferocious irony and some exaggeration the motives and the operations of Big Business in Japan.
Night Is My Future. Sweden's Ingmar Bergman has long since fallen out of love with love, but in 1947, when he made this burningly romantic little picture, he could still tell a simple tale of man and maid, and tell it with all his art.
Who's Got the Action? Lana Turner, that's who. She plays a bride who makes book for her horseplaying husband, Dean Martin, in this modest attempt to improve an unpromising breed: the formula farce.
Eclipse. In this picture, Director Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura) perfects his subtle and expressive language of film, but unfortunately he employs it to say the same hopeless things he always says about the human condition.
David and Lisa. In his first movie, made for less than $200,000, Director Frank Perry tells a heartrending, heartwarming tale of two psychotic adolescents (Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin) who find love at the bottom of the snake pit.
Lawrence of Arabia. Blood, sand and stars (Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy), with the help of a top director (David Lean) and a $10 million budget make this the best superspectacle since Ben-Hur.
The Lovers of Teruel. One of those ballet movies, but this time it's for surreal, and Ludmila Tcherina, though she wobbles on her toes, gives the picture body.
Freud. Director John Huston has turned out an intense, intelligent cine-monograph on the early struggles of the papa of psychiatry, portrayed without much psychological insight by Montgomery Clift.
Electra. Greek tragedy is a nectar that does not travel well, but Director Michael Cacoyannis has managed to transform the tragedy by Euripides into a beautiful and sometimes touching film.
Jumbo. Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye measure comic talents in this ponderous pachyderm of a picture--a $5,000,000 screen version of the 1935 Broadway musical. Jimmy wins by a nose.
Two for the Seesaw. Shirley MacLaine is pretty funny in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson's Broadway comedy. Robert Mitchum is not.
Long Day's Journey into Night. Eugene O'Neill's play, one of the greatest of the century, is brought to the screen without significant changes and with a better than competent cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell.
No Exit. A competent cinemadaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's celebrated attempt to demonstrate the existentialist tenet that hell is other people.
Gay Purree. A full-length, somewhat overanimated cattoon about a pretty French pussy named Mewsette who falls in with a sinister allee cat but is rescued by a hair-trigger mouser.
The Reluctant Saint. Maximilian Schell attains new histrionic heights in the amusing, amazing story of San Giuseppe of Cupertino (1603-63), a saint who could literally fly.
The Long Absence. A man who does not know who he is and a woman who thinks he is her husband suffer their strange dilemma in a strange but affecting French film, thoughtfully directed by Henri Colpi.
TELEVISION
Wednesday, February 13
A Dickens Chronicle (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* A dramatization of the life and works of Charles Dickens, with Clive Revill, Douglas Campbell, Robert Stephens and Rosemary Harris.
Going My Way (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Keir Dullea (David of David and Lisa) and Susan Kohner are guests on the weekly soaper, with regulars Father Gene Kelly and Father Leo G. Carroll.
Thursday, February 14
Playwright at Work (WNDT, 9-9:30 p.m.). Off-Broadway Playwright Jack Richardson (The Prodigal, Gallows Humor), whose first on-Broadway work, Lorenzo, opens tonight, discusses the role of the philosopher in the theater.
The Nurses (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Joan Hackett, sometimes girl friend of Ken Preston on The Defenders, joins Regulars Shirl Conway and Zina Bethune in an episode about a pregnant, unwed nurse.
Heifetz Master Class (WNDT, 10:30-11 p.m.). Violinist Jascha Heifetz and Student Erick Friedman explore Bach's Sonata for Violin in G Minor and Concerto for Two Violins.
Friday, February 15
The Big Preview (WOR-TV, 7:30-9 p.m.). Burly Anthony Quinn and early Sophia Loren in Attila.
Exploring the Universe (WNDT, 8-8:30 p.m.). Dave Garroway, guests and astronomy.
The New York Junior League Mardi Gras Ball (CBS, 11:15 a.m.-12 noon). From the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor; Mayor Wagner will present the Queen of the Ball.
Saturday, February 16
Cities, People and Architecture (NBC, 2:30-3 p.m.). Dean Charles R. Colbert of Columbia's School of Architecture will moderate a discussion on "What Is a Structure?"
Repertoire Workshop (CBS, 3-3:30 p.m.). A dramatization of Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart.
Wide World of Sport (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). N.Y.A.C. indoor track meet from Madison Square Garden.
The Defenders (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Fritz Weaver is guest defendant this week, and the charge is espionage.
The National Hockey League (WPIX-TV, 9-11 p.m.). The New York Rangers v, the Toronto Maple Leafs in Toronto.
Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11:19 p.m.). The Long, Hot Summer, with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles and Anthony Franciosa--loosely based on a Faulkner novel.
Sunday, February 17
Lamp unto My Feet (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). Mahalia Jackson in a program of spirituals.
Camera Three (CBS, 11-11:30 a.m.). "The Problem That Has No Name," a discussion of woman's feelings of unfulfillment, with Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique.
Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). Highlights of 1962's nine Grand Prix races: Zandvoort, Monaco, Spa, Rouen, Aintree, Nuerburgring, Monza, East London and Watkins Glen.
Update (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). Robert Abernethy's teen-age news program looks at Africa and oceanography.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite reports on U.S. foreign aid in "We Fed Our Enemies," with guests General Lucius Clay and Admiral Lewis Strauss.
A Look at Monaco (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Princess Grace (nee Kelly) does for Monaco what Jackie Kennedy did for the White House, with the aid of His Serene Highness Rainier III.
Open End (WNEW-TV, 9-11 p.m.). Susskind and guest experts dip into the problems of alcoholism.
The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Sally Anne Howes, Blanche Thebom, Aldo Monaco, Edward Villella and Arthur Fiedler are guests.
Monday, February 18
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). A look at British gambling.
Ben Casey (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). James Donald portrays a surgeon who is urged to operate on his hated exwife.
Tuesday, February 19
Festival of the Performing Arts (WNEW-TV, 9-10 p.m.). British Actor Robert Morley reads from his own works.
The Most Powerful Woman of the Century (WPIX-TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A special documentary on the life of Eva Peron.
THEATER
New Shows on Broadway
Natural Affection, by William Inge, is a sensual melodrama acted and directed with hypnotic and devastating force. The characters may not be the sort one would invite to dinner, but they involve the playgoer inexorably in their tawdry fates.
The Hollow Crown is an expertly fashioned, gracefully rendered, persistently evocative evening of dramatic readings, chronicling a cavalcade of English monarchs from King Arthur to Queen Victoria. To the democratic land of king-size everythings, The Hollow Crown brings a rare and resplendent novelty, king-size kings.
An Evening with Maurice Chevalier. Close to 75, Chevalier has not stopped Father Time, but he certainly makes him blink. He is one of the last of the pure entertainers, aiming only to please, and he sings of his enduring love affair with life.
The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is an iridescently enchanting, contagiously amusing evening in an 18th century drawing room. John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson top a superlative cast and bring to the Broadway stage the unfamiliar glory of literate English spoken with wit, clarity and precision.
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams. A rich old clownish woman rages desperately against the good-night of death, until a Christ figure comforts her tormented soul. Hermione Baddeley plays the dying woman with blinding, blistering brilliance.
Little Me wears its high-polish frivolities with a sophisticated air. The chief funmaster of this musical is Sid Caesar, who clowns his way through seven roles with imperial abandon.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, is a jolting, mesmeric, wittily savage theatrical experience. In this brilliantly devised night of marital horrors, Arthur Hill plays cobra to Uta Hagen's mongoose.
Beyond the Fringe chips away at petrified people with satiric finesse. Four young and infectiously funny Englishmen perform the iconoclastic surgery.
Tchin-Tchin sees the world through a whisky glass, as a couple of wistful rejects drink the lees of abandonment by their mutually unfaithful spouses. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn are amusing, affecting and effulgent.
Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, is pulverizingly funny about a piffling subject--belated fatherhood. As the pater dolorosus, Paul Ford is unimaginably droll.
Oliver!, twisted by Lionel Bart into a vulgarized travesty of Dickens, is a jolly bad musical show. Let the buyer beware, unless he prefers his classics edited by vandals.
Off Broadway
The Establishment. Britain's Angry Young Men seem to have ceded the spitball concession to a younger lot of Mocking Young Men. It's mock mock mock all night long in this revue, as a bouncy, agreeable quintet jive like carbon-copycats from Beyond the Fringe.
Desire Under the Elms, by Eugene O'Neill. The arena stage is not a very intense setting for this lacerating drama of greed, incest and infanticide on a New England farm, but an able company headed by Colleen Dewhurst pours the molten lava of passion over it.
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection are two one-acters by Britain's Harold Pinter, a playwriting terrorist who can conjure up menace with the easy authority of a Hitchcock and pose Pirandellphic conundrums about the nature of truth and reality.
A Man's a Man. Is it right to brainwash a man if it makes him happy? Is the individual an anachronism in the 20th century? These are some of the questions posed with inventive theatricality in this 1926 play by Bertolt Brecht.
The Blacks, by Jean Genet. Unsentimental in attitude, ritualistic in form, poetic in language, this unconventional play is a remarkable work of art on the color question.
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, by Arthur Kopit, mobilizes undergraduate humor and surrealistic props to launch a hilariously bizarre offensive against poor Mom.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Crossroads of Power, by Sir Lewis Namier. The late great British historian, who loved tradition and loathed ideology, expounds his philosophy of history in these fond essays on 18th century English politics and people written over the course of a lifetime.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. An ex-political prisoner, who spent eight years in Siberia, has soared to fame in Russia by writing a roughhewn novel about life in one of Stalin's concentration camps.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--An Introduction, by J. D. Salinger. More installments in the life of the solemn little Glass menagerie may delight younger readers but may prove a bit wearing for older ones.
The Centaur, by John Updike. An imaginative retelling of the Greek myth in modern dress turns the tragic centaur Chiron into a long-suffering high school science teacher.
The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela. The greatest novel ever written about the Mexican Revolution shows how idealism degenerates into savagery under the pressure of war.
March to Calumny, by Albert Biderman. Examining the behavior of captured G.I.s in Korea, a sociologist corrects the widespread impression that they were more easily brainwashed than other troops.
Diary of an Early American Boy, by Eric Sloane. The journal of a 15-year-old boy in the early 1800s is an absorbing how-to-do-it book about a time when charity (and everything else) still began at home.
The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem, by Myrick Land. Feuding authors have a way with rude remarks about one another that even fishwives would envy and, according to this book, nearly all the noted writers from Dickens and Thackeray to Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were feuding.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2, last week)
2. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (1)
3. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (4)
4. A Shade of Difference, Drury (3)
5. $100 Misunderstanding, Grover (7)
6. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart
7. Genius, Dennis (6)
8. The Cape Cod Lighter, O'Hara (5)
9. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (8)
10. The Prize, Wallace (9)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)
2. Silent Spring, Carson (2)
3. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (10)
4. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (6)
5. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)
6. Final Verdict, St. Johns (5)
7. The Points of My Compass, White (4)
8. The Pyramid Climbers, Packard (8)
9. Renoir, My Father, Renoir (9)
10. Letters from the Earth, Twain (7)
* All times E.S.T.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.