The Quare Fellow. Brendan Behan, like most Irishmen, laughs hardest when he hurts worst, and in this movie version of his first successful play he laughs at the way men are made to live, and condemned to die, in an average Irish prison.
To Kill a Mockingbird. The Pulitzer Prize novel by Harper Lee, which was always just a mite too cute for words, has been made into a cinemelodrama of remarkable charm--some of it supplied by the hero (Gregory Peck), most of it by three gumptious young 'uns (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna).
The Trial. Orson Welles presents Kafka in chiaroscuro, an adaptation filled with wondrous Wellesian camera work, spectacularly haunting sets, and a troupe of actors who try to outdo themselves and--in some instances--end up by being undone.
Term of Trial. Sir Laurence Olivier matches skills with Simone Signoret; as a miserable married couple they make a sad little mess and a good little movie of their lives.
Love and Larceny. Vittorio Gassman is a gasser in a grab bag of disguises, ends up as a con man conned con amore.
A Child Is Waiting. What is it like to be a mental defective? This film calmly inspects this major disaster area (there are 5,700,000 defectives in the U.S.), and makes some surprising recommendations. Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland and Bruce Ritchey play the leads with distinction.
Days of Wine and Roses. An old-fashioned but effective diatribe against Demon Rum, in which Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick serve impressively as the object lessons.
David and Lisa. Love is a light to the sick as well as the sane, and in this painful and beautiful film it lights the lives of two psychotic children and gives them hope that somehow they may be healed.
Lawrence of Arabia. The best superspectacle since Ben-Hur.
Night Is My Future. In 1947, when he made this burningly romantic little picture, Ingmar Bergman was already telling one of his simple tales of lovers, and he told it with all his art.
TELEVISION
Thursday, March 21
Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).-Salome Jens and Patrick O'Neal in an adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's novel, The Dark Labyrinth.
Friday, March 22
The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests include Senator Goldwater.
Saturday, March 23
Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). A.A.U. swimming and diving championships, from New Haven, Conn.
National Invitation Tournament (NBC, 6-7:30 p.m.). College basketball from Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.
Sunday, March 24
The Death of a Virus (CBS, 4-5 p.m.).
A CBS public service special about measles, stressing that a serious case of measles can leave children retarded, deaf and blind--and that a safe and effective vaccine is available. The measles season begins with the spring.
Update (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). Robert Abernethy's news program for teenagers.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The Soviet Union's Lomonosov, the best-equipped and largest oceanographic vessel in the world, pipes aboard the cameras of CBS for a permitted look around. Also, the program shows the work of patrol planes keeping watch on Russian trawlers in the North Atlantic.
Marilyn Monroe (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.).
A short TV biography narrated by Mike Wallace.
Monday, March 25
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Class D baseball in the U.S., the life and bus rides of a ball club, as exemplified by the Salem Rebels.
Tuesday, March 26 The Tall American--Gary Cooper
(NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). One of NBC's Project 20 portraits, using news films, home movies, and feature film sequences. Project 20 usually hits a high standard.
Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Huntley goes to Scotland to visit the No. 1 Huntley, head of the Huntley clan--and presumably Glenlivet up.
THEATER
On Broadway
Photo Finish, by Peter Ustinov. Looking like a cross between a grumpy polar bear and tipsy Greek philosopher, Ustinov plays an 80-year-old confronting his onstage 60-, 40-, and 20-year-old selves. His comic mugging and artful directing help the play to skate with deceptive ease over the thin ice of his own script.
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams, raises the specter of death before a coarse, clownish and gallant old woman, magnificently played by Hermione Baddeley, and conjures up the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil before a Christ figure whom Paul Roebling makes as real as this strange allegory will permit.
Little Me welds song, dance and gag with high-precision skill in this musicomi-cal saga of Belle Poitrine. Sid Caesar, clown supreme, stokes the evening with steady laughter.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, is the play that gets on more people's tongues and under more people's skins than any other current Broadway offering. Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen are shatteringly good as a sterile couple who savage each other in a nightlong bout of wit, alcohol and cruelty.
Beyond the Fringe is an explosion of literate joy. A demolition crew of four antic, articulate young Englishmen blow up any number of civilization's idols.
Off Broadway
The Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal. The Tiger claws through many a cliche in the glib lexicon of a duo of self-proclaimed nonconformists. In one symbolic day, The Typists rattles the keys of mortality in the deaf ears of a pair of office workers. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson dominate these one-acters with verve and virtuosity.
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection
are superior theatergoing gifts from Britain's greatly gifted Harold Pinter. These one-acters intertwine menace, hilarity, and the lunatic ambiguities of language itself in modern parables that make meaning mysterious, and mystery meaningful.
BOOKS
Best Reading
That Summer in Paris, by Morley Callaghan. The Canadian novelist reminisces about some old pals, notably Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in the Montparnasse of the 1920s, when every Tom, Scott and Ezra thought he was a writer of genius.
V., by Thomas Pynchon. A likable, mad and unfathomable first novel about a beatnik's search for the meaning of V. --which could stand for Venezuela or Vesuvius or almost anything else in the dream country of the hero's past.
The Ordeal of Change, by Eric Hoffer.
President Eisenhower's favorite philosopher argues in these essays that history is a constant -- and constantly fruitful -- tussle between the intellectuals and the masses.
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. In an exchange of letters that crackled back and forth for nearly 25 years, the two novelists speak with wit, wisdom and dedication about the practice of their careers.
The Second Stone, by Leslie Fiedler. In this boisterous first novel of love in Rome, the author-critic puts into fictional form one of his pet literary theories: the eternal antagonism between the artist as true rebel and the artist as public entertainer.
Voltaire and the Calas Case, by Edna Nixon. Voltaire's memory is well served in this account of how the great skeptic roused Europe against France's execution of an innocent Huguenot.
The Party, by Rudolph von Abele. At a grand and lurid party, a decent German soldier -- symbolizing humanitarians everywhere -- is thoroughly corrupted by an immensely attractive and utterly unscrupulous Nazi warlord.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour -- An Introduction, Salinger (2, last week)
2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (1)
3. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (3)
4. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (4)
5. $100 Misunderstanding, Gover (6)
6. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (5)
7. A Shade of Difference, Drury (7)
8. The Moonflower Vine, Carleton
9. Triumph, Wylie (8)
10. The Cape Cod Lighter, O'Hara (9)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)
2. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (2)
3. Final Verdict, St. Johns (3)
4. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (4)
5. The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper (5)
6. The Points of My Compass, White (6)
7. The Fall of the Dynasties, Taylor (9)
8. Silent Spring, Carson (7)
9. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin
10. My Life in Court, Nizer (10)
*All times E.S.T.
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