Friday, May. 15, 1964
On Broadway
TELEVISION
Wednesday, May 13
THE ELEVENTH HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.)* Rachel Roberts plays a terrified pregnant wife who cannot cope with the news that her husband may soon die. Repeat.
Thursday, May 14
THE NURSES (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A television unit invades a hospital to film a story about doctors and nurses and wreaks havoc with routine. Barbara Harris and Kevin McCarthy guest-star.
Friday, May 15
THE OREGON PRIMARY. CBS gives results from 11:15 p.m. to midnight, ABC continues from 12:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and NBC from 12:45 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Saturday, May 16
TRIPLE CROWN-THE PREAKNESS (CBS, 5:30-6 p.m.). The 88th running of the Preakness, from Baltimore.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m.-conclusion). The Left Hand of God, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gene Tierney. Color.
Sunday, May 17
MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: Oregon Governor Mark O. Hatfield.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Portrait of Pierre Laval. Repeat.
Tuesday, May 19
MOMENT OF FEAR (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Thirteen years after the fact, a conscience-stricken woman confesses the murder of her husband. Nina Foch, Dean Stockwell and Gary Merrill star in the first of selections from past series.
THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests are Singer Harry Belafonte. Tenor Franco Corelli and Pianist Grant Johannesen. Color.
THEATER
On Broadway
HAMLET. Witty, virile, supremely intelligent, Richard Burton's Hamlet is a masterful prince of language, though never quite the fallen prince of tragedy.
HIGH SPIRITS. A house was never haunted by so blithe a spirit as Tammy Grimes, and Bea Lillie is the comic conjurer who brings her back to earth to tempt her husband and torture his second wife.
FUNNY GIRL shines in the refracted light of the most brilliant new star to rise over Broadway in several seasons, Barbra Streisand. She colors every song and caps all her clowning with the indelible impact of a fiercely magnetic stage presence.
ANY WEDNESDAY. Without even the help of her closetful of balloons, Sandy Dennis ascends from playmate to helpmate in two acts.
DYLAN. Alec Guinness probes the special hell in which Dylan Thomas found himself. His performance is moody, moving, taut with rage and sometimes bright with humor.
HELLO DOLLY! Cast as a matchmaker, Carol Channing dangles her gay, carrot-topped self in front of a stuffy moneybags (David Burns) who is slow off the mark. Gower Champion's dancers set a brisk pace for the chase.
NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS. As a fast-talking TV producerdirector, Robert Preston gives a sly, light touch to a play full of caustic mass-media mockery.
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford spice an early married life with dollops of humor and bright good looks.
Off Broadway
DUTCHMAN, by LeRoi Jones. In a New York subway car, a white girl who is a twitchy, neurotic bundle of well-informed cliches and sterile sexual aggressions, lures, taunts, degrades and destroys a Negro in a Brooks Brothers shirt, but not before he tells her, with profane and explicit brutality, how much Negroes hate whites. Though his one-acter repeats the pattern of Albee's The Zoo Story, Jones captures the contemporary mood of violence with raw and nerve-tingling fury.
THE BLOOD KNOT. Two half brothers--joined in kinship, disjunctively opposite in color--prey on each other's weaknesses, but stay together in a communion of spirit that is full of laughter, envy, good intent and deep fears.
THE TROJAN WOMEN, acted in the round and with a classic chorus, is a powerful, tormenting image of humans bearing the unbearable.
RECORDS
Orchestral Music
MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic; Columbia, 2 LPs). Bernstein again shows his affinity for Mahler in this strong, youthful performance of the panoramic five-movement work sometimes called "The Giant." There are none of the songs that Mahler put in some of his other symphonies, but the instruments alone, as he used them, have eloquence to spare. Bernstein handles the long, playful scherzo with easy humor, changes moods in lightning flashes, and tears at the vitals of the dramatic sections. A milestone in the Mahler revival.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: SYMPHONY NO. 2 (Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Halle Orchestra; Everyman). Sir John, maestro of both the Houston Symphony and the Halle of Manchester, gives a glowing performance of the too-little-heard impressionistic symphony called "The London." Here are pomp and pageantry, cockney airs, the chimes of Big Ben, and a luminous lento movement that the composer called "Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon." The music also evokes an era; it was completed in 1914.
HINDEMITH: SYMPHONIC METAMORPHOSES ON THEMES BY CARL MARIA VON WEBER (Wilhelm Furtwaengler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic; Deutsche Grammophon). Choreographer George Balanchine composed his Metamorphoses to this music: beetlelike creatures eventually turn into birds. Furtwaengler, an early champion of Hindemith, calls upon his own powerful magic to translate the themes into various musical modes, from unsettling nervous buzzings to biting jazz. On the other side, Furtwaengler conjures up a more peaceful succession of Metamorphoses, also written in the 1940s, by the 81-year-old Richard Strauss.
MOZART: DIVERTIMENTO NO. 2 (George Szell conducting a chamber group from the Cleveland Orchestra; Epic). Mozart composed this divertimento (for flute, oboe, bassoon, four horns and strings) after two operas and 26 symphonies, but he still had something to say; he was 16. Szell makes the 200-year-old party music sound as bright and young as yesterday, and he insists that the dancing be both festive and mannerly.
PROKOFIEV: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony; RCA Victor). Only a conductor with the sophistication and logic of Leinsdorf can keep rein on the tugging emotional and intellectual strands of Prokofiev's greatest symphony. The first and third movements are deeply felt, but never betrayed by theatrical effects; the second and fourth are lively and lyrical in turn, but edged with sudden ominous outcroppings.
CINEMA
THE ORGANIZER. Playing a sad, scraggly revolutionary who leads an unsuccessful strike of textile workers, Marcello Mastroianni sews up his status as the international cinema's most versatile leading man.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. Houris and hired assassins play it mostly for laughs when Sean Connery arrives in Istanbul as Ian Fleming's Bond bombshell, Secret Agent 007.
THE NIGHT WATCH. Five men plan an underground escape from a Paris prison--a commonplace theme developed with uncommon skill in this taut French thriller.
BECKET. A superior film spectacle based on Jean Anouilh's pungent drama has a prodigally talented cast headed by Richard Burton as England's 12th century religious martyr and Peter OToole as Henry II.
THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT. TeenAgers Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth racket about Manhattan as a pair of metro-gnomes in hilarious pursuit of Peter Sellers, a playboy pianist with a yen for footloose matrons.
THE SERVANT. Hellfire gleams through the tea-party facade of Dirk Bogarde, the conniving "gentleman's gentleman" who serves up Director Joseph Losey's message about class distinction in Britain with a dash of bitters.
YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. In three yeasty folk tales directed by Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren is a whole Italian street scene rolled into one woman. Marcello Mastroianni is head of the block.
THE SILENCE. A tortured lesbian (Ingrid Thulin) and her nymphomaniac sister (Gunnel Lindblom) dominate Ingmar Bergman's bold, beautifully acted drama--though a child and an old man furnish scraps of evidence that the human condition may not be hopeless.
TOM JONES. "Best" Director Tony Richardson's wonderfully wicked assault on Fielding's 18th century classic proves that the wages of sin add up to a boodle of 1963 Oscars--four in all.
BOOKS
Best Reading
A MOVEABLE FEAST, by Ernest Hemingway. Looking back 30 years later at Paris and himself on the threshold of fame, Hemingway re-explored--and perhaps re-invented--his friendships with established writers (Pound, Stein, Ford, Joyce), particularly his ambiguous relation to the already successful young Scott Fitzgerald.
PEDRO MARTINEZ, by Oscar Lewis. Anthropologist Lewis follows his brilliant tape-recorded pastiche, The Children of Sanchez, with the story of an old Mexican peasant whose passion and native eloquence was spent on aborted uprisings and hopeless land-reform politics.
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, by Robert Graves. These skillful tales show again, if further proof is needed, that Robert Graves can write anything well. Most of the stories are set in Spain and feature lively eccentrics whose escapades make astonishing reading.
SELECTED POEMS BY HERMAN MELVILLE, edited by Hennig Cohen. The finest of U.S. novelists was not an outstanding poet, but there are enough good poems in this chronological sampling, such as the final lines of Billy Budd, to make it more than just a literary curiosity.
IN HIS OWN WRITE, by John Lennon. The oldest Beatle ("he's the arty one") explains his startling collection of post-Joycean jabberwocky: "As far as I'm conceived this correction of shorty writty is the most wonderfoul larf I've ever ready." His readers shrudlu too.
THE SPIRE, by William Golding. In this medieval parable a saintly, obsessed canon orders a huge stone spire to be built atop his fragile cathedral, only to realize at last that his monument was not to God's glory but his own.
KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, by Shirley Ann Grau. Though miscegenation is the theme of this deceptively artless novel, it has no pejorative connotations for a large Louisiana clan until the heroine's racist husband makes a violent entry into politics.
EPISODE-REPORT ON THE ACCIDENT INSIDE MY SKULL, by Eric Hodgins. The author of Mr. BIandings Builds His Dream House tells what it was like to rebuild his life after a major "cerebrovascular accident" (in layman's terms, a stroke) left him severely paralyzed four years ago. Hodgins wrote this book with ballpoint pens (he can no longer use a typewriter), but it has Mr. Blandings' old wit and wordcraft.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
Le Carre (1 last week)
2. The Group, McCarthy (2)
3. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (3)
4. The Night in Lisbon, Remarque (8)
5. The Deputy, Hochhuth (4)
6. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (6)
7. The Martyred, Kim (7)
8. Von Ryan's Express, Westheimer (5)
9. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (9)
10. The Night of the Generals, Kirst
NONFICTION
1. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (1)
2. A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, Bishop (2)
3. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (3)
4. The Naked Society, Packard (4)
5. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (5)
6. My Years with General Motors, Sloan (6)
7. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris (7)
8. When the Cheering Stopped, Smith (9)
9. The Great Treasury Raid, Stern (8)
10. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky
* All times E.D.T.
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