Wednesday, August 27
YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH (NET, 9-10 p.m.).* "Prescription Drugs: Prices and Perils." Starting with one of the drug industry's most painful and enduring scandals, the sale of thalidomide, this program moves on to discuss contraceptives, fertility drugs, new products and current testing and marketing standards for drugs. Repeat.
Thursday, August 28
THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Bette Davis stars in The Nanny (1965), a thriller-chiller about--you guessed it--a nanny and her ten-year-old charge. Something for everyone: death, suspense, generation-gap intrigue.
Friday, August 29
THE HIGH CHAPARRAL (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A camel? In High Chaparral country? Right. A sweet-talking Irish cavalry trooper, played by Frank Gorshin, sells the four-footed version of the Brooklyn Bridge to Uncle Buck, claiming the animal is expert at cattle herding. Uncle Buck buys both the story and the camel --hoof, line and stinker. Repeat.
Sunday, August 31 MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). This gathering of State Governors for the annual conference held in Colorado Springs features Democrats Buford Ellington (Tenn.), Richard Hughes (N.J.), John McKeithen (La.), and Republicans John Love (Colo.), Nelson Rockefeller (N.Y.) and Richard Ogilvie (111.).
THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). In a program that could be Ralph Nader's favorite, Walter Cronkite leads a probe into methods of designing safer cars and highways, plans to improve driver competence and then moves headlong into the problem of traffic congestion.
SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8-10:45 p.m.). Sizzling action for a hot summer's night: Zulu (1964), the story of eight British officers (including Stanley Baker and Michael Caine), 97 men, one minister (Jack Hawkins) and the minister's daughter (Ulla Jacobsson) v. 4,000 assorted Zulu warriors. Eleven Victoria Crosses were earned in the original battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.
Tuesday, September 2
FIRST TUESDAY (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). This segment of NBC's magazine-format show features a profile of big-game Conservationist Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's son; an attempt to answer the question of Whatever Happened to Carroll Baker; plus looks at skydiving, computer dating and other features.
CINEMA
RUN WILD, RUN FREE. The trouble with most matinee movies is that they often seem made by children rather than for them. Run Wild is a happy exception, a fondly and meticulously rendered parable about an autistic English boy (Mark Lester) and an almost magical white colt.
THE WILD BUNCH. The blood runs thick and often in Sam Peckinpah's raucous, magnificent western about a band of freebooting bandits operating on both sides of the Tex-Mex border around the turn of the century. The action is plentiful, the performances faultless, and the film itself one of the best of the year.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The journey of Apollo 11 has lent a new immediacy to Stanley Kubrick's visionary film of an expedition to Jupiter that assumes staggering metaphysical consequences. Kubrick is among the greatest of American film makers, and 2001 may well stand as his best film.
EASY RIDER. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda cruise around the country on their choppers looking for the meaning of it all. If the self-pity becomes rather too heavy at times, Hopper (who also directed) has captured some telling bits of Americana on film and extracted a performance from Jack Nicholson that is a model of intuition and sensitivity.
TRUE GRIT. John Wayne, at 62, has the time of his long screen life in this cornball western comedy about a stubborn old marshal (Wayne) who joins forces with a headstrong teen-age girl (Kim Darby) to bring some murderers to justice. The Duke's performance proves that his nickname has never been more apt.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A slick package about being lonely and loveless in New York is directed by John Schlesinger in fashion-magazine style, but the acting of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight gives the film a sense of poignancy and reality.
MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Claude Berri (The Two of Us) wrote and directed this wistful comedy about the trials of courtship in a French Jewish family.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Nicol Williamson plays a heartsick member of the English aristocracy yearning for the love of a movie usherette (Anna Karina) in this skillful adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel.
THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Another slight and savage comedy by Philippe de Broca, Devil follows a Gallic seducer (Yves Montand) on his rounds. Montand could well become the new Bogart if he weren't already so good as the old Montand.
BOOKS
Best Reading
COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene. In retrospective notes and criticism, the prolific novelist drives home the same obsessive point: "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."
PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequitur Irish storyteller around--which may on occasion be more welcome than well-made fiction.
SIAM MIAMI, by Morris Renek. The trials of a pretty pop singer who tries to sell herself and save herself at the same time. Astoundingly, she manages both.
THE YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whale's life cycle with a mixture of fact and feeling that invokes Melville's memory.
ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA, by Jane Kramer. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Allen Ginsberg has evolved from a minor poet to a major cult figure--a kind of one-man air ferry between bohemian and Brahmin traditions. Wisely, perhaps, Author Kramer concentrates on the life rather than the works.
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Peter Kropotkin. The absorbing autobiography of a 19th century Russian prince turned anarchist who paid for his ideals in stretches of penury and imprisonment.
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. White is just as diligent as he was when recounting the victories of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But this time his protagonist lacks the flamboyance to fire up White's romantic mind, and as a result a slight pall hangs over much of the book.
H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES, by Lovat Dickson. Wells sold the masses on the future and the Utopia that science would bring, but Dickson shows that inside the complacent optimist a pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.
ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. Newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches demonstrate the individuality that was both Babel's genius and his death warrant.
THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel of her Children of Violence series, the author takes Heroine Martha Quest from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Love Machine, Susann (1 last week)
2. The Godfather, Puzo (3)
3. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (4)
4. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (2)
5. The Pretenders, Davis (5)
6. Ada, Nabokov (6)
7. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (7)
8. The Death Committee, Gordon
9. Except for Me and Thee, West (9)
10. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (10)
NONFICTION
1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)
2. The Making of the President '68, White (3)
3. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (2)
4. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (5)
5. Jennie, Martin (6)
6. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (4)
7. The 900 Days, Salisbury (8)
8. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (10)
9. My Turn at Bat, Williams
10. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (7)
*All times E.D.T.
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