The Year's Ten Best

From its year-long guide to what's going in books, theater, cinema, records and television, TIME takes a backward look at 1962's ten best in each field.

CINEMA

David and Lisa. The most deeply moving U.S. movie of 1962: a dramatized case history, made by cinema beginners for less than $200,000, that sensitively describes the problems of a schizophrenic girl (Janet Margolin) and an obsessive-compulsive boy (Keir Dullea).

Divorce--Italian Style. Director Pietro Germi and Actor Marcello Mastroianni, in the year's most hilarious comedy of bad manners, slyly rattle one of the mustier skeletons in their country's closet--the antiquated Italian divorce law.

Last Year at Marienbad. The French New Wave, which has saltily subsided, nevertheless flung up the intellectual sensation of the year, a tour de force of cubistic cinema in which Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) dismantles reality and reassembles it in a monstrous maze whose exit is its entrance.

Lawrence of Arabia. The only spectacle released in 1962 that is truly spectacular: a film biography of the peculiar guerrilla genius who led the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I.

Yojimbo. Japan's Akira Kurosawa, the greatest living master of cinema, bloodily castigates modern man; but he disguises the satire as a great big noisy eastern western, and he manages to make the carnage seem horrendously comic.

Through a Glass Darkly. A wise and warm and frightening picture in which Ingmar Bergman tells the story of a young woman (Harriet Andersson) who looks through a crack in the wall that limits reason from unreason and on the other side sees God--an enormous spider.

Billy Budd. The allegorical classic by Melville has been made into a somber drama in which good and evil meet with a clash of symbols and then founder in the green indifference of the sea.

Long Day's Journey into Night. Director Sidney Lumet and an imposing cast (Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Stockwell) have transformed a great play by Eugene O'Neill into a good film: a study of spiritual wretchedness.

Lonely Are the Brave. Man as God made him and a world God never made meet in mortal battle in this simple, painful story of a cowboy (Kirk Douglas) who tangles with 20th century civilization.

A Taste of Honey. The hit play by Shelagh Delaney, Britain's angry young ma'am, has been made into the year's best British movie: a grim-gay, witty-gritty tale about a mill-town miss (Rita Tushingham) who grows up the hard way.

TELEVISION 1 Series

Naked City (ABC), in its fourth season, is as good as ever, a skillfully written, cool and objective anthology of stories about New York, filmed in the streets.

I'm Dickens . . . He's Fenster (ABC) is the best new TV comedy in several years, about a couple of construction carpenters with sawed-off brains and a certain finesse at slapstick.

The Jetsons (ABC), an animated cartoon series by Hanna and Barbera, is about a family that lives in the distant future and survives on show business's most solid fuel: corn.

The Lively Ones (NBC) was a rare find among summer replacement series, a polished, inventive musical variety show with Vic Damone as host to such marvelous guests as Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.

Festival of Performing Arts. Producers David Susskind and James Fleming put together a syndicated series that brought to television such performing masters as Violinist Isaac Stern, Cellist Pablo Casals, Actor Paul Scofield and his wife, Joy Parker, reading poetry, Margaret Leighton reading Dorothy Parker, et al.

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (CBS) continued to be one of TV's most noteworthy contributions, particularly the program from Japan.

Public Affairs

David Brinkley's Journal (NBC) kept on baking little loaves of irony with considerable skill, particularly when Brinks had a look at the shifty Interstate Highways Program.

Germany: Fathers and Sons (NBC) was an absorbing program that examined the "barrier of silence" that exists between Germany's wartime and postwar generations.

60 Hours to the Moon (ABC), featuring John Glenn, was an excellently documented summary of U.S. plans for space exploration.

D-Day (NBC), a David Wolper documentary on the Du Pont Show of the Week, made Hollywood war movies look like so much stagecraft.

THEATER

Dramas

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.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, probes the persistent dilemma of private conscience v. public duty and shows how Sir Thomas More, a sage, wit and Christian martyr, resolved it.

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 marvelous.

Mary, Mary, by Jean Kerr, is a Broadway thoroughbred with over 750 performances behind it, and still not winded, frazzled or fading.

The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter, are strange, funny, terrifying one-acters that enigmatically glimpse the contortions, evasions, and inarticulateness of human beings groping for contact with one another.

Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, by Arthur Kopit, mobilizes college humor and surrealistic props to launch a bizarre offensive against poor Mom. As a girl with a yen for Mama's boy, Barbara Harris ranges from clowning grotesquerie to candied simpering to erotic voracity, with unflawed skill.

Musicals

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is to the Broadway musical comedy scene what Switzerland is to watchmaking. The mainspring in this jewel of precision is beguileful Robert Morse.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum mates the delightful buffoons of vaudeville with the delectable houris of burlesque. The pluperfect master of the hilarious revels is Zero Mostel.

Little Me is called Little Caesar by the showbusy set. Miming the seven suitors of Belle Poitrine, the Ail-American Showgirl, Sid Caesar is the most brilliantly versatile playboy of the Western world.

Beyond the Fringe. No musical, but the funniest revue in years, this lunatic entertainment offers four young English antiEstablishmentarians aiming blowgun darts of parody with poisonously amusing accuracy at Shakespeare, Harold Macmillan, and positive-thinking clergymen.

RECORDS Classical

Victoria de los Angeles and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Duets (Gerald Moore, pianist; Angel). Purcell, Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky are among the composers visited in this beautiful introduction to a part of the vocal repertory now rarely heard in the concert hall.

Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Martha Lipton, mezzo-soprano; the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting; Columbia, two LPs). A radiant reading by Bernstein of Mahler's mammoth, six-movement "musical poem."

Verdi: Aida (Leontyne Price, Rita Gorr, Jon Vickers, Robert Merrill, Giorgio Tozzi; Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus, Georg Solti conducting; RCA Victor, three LPs). Soprano Price's tigerish passion and luminous voice discover a moving Aida--and cleave through the massed choral and orchestral sound unfalteringly.

Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (the Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell conducting). A magically good performance, combining grace with precision, heart with head.

Jazz & Popular

Hearty and Hellish! (the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem; Columbia). The Irish revolutionaries who now campaign on the nightclub circuit bring their characteristic gusto to the folk favorites of the pubs--love songs, drinking songs, and a few broad digs at Mother England.

Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, Vols. I and II (Ray Charles; ABC-Paramount). The year's hottest and most recorded jazz singer. Here, with choruses, strings, terrible arrangements and strident bands, he survives everything and seems the better for it.

Mingus: Oh Yeah (Atlantic). Musical anarchy and social commentary mixed into a fascinating trouble-pudding by fretful Charlie.

Andre Previn and J. J. Johnson: Kurt Weill (Columbia). Previn's triple sec piano and Johnson's sudsy trombone breathe new life into Weill's old tunes.

Oscar Pettiford: Last Recordings (Jazz-land). Mementos of Bassist Pettiford's inventive mind and agile technique, cut shortly before his death.

Joan Baez in Concert (Vanguard). Containing light selections like Copper Kettle and protest songs like What Have They Done to the Rain, this third Baez album is the one to have if you're only having one.

BOOKS

Fiction

Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. Human folly afloat and ashore.

The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes. A trenchant parable of Europe's sickness between the two world wars.

The Reivers, by William Faulkner. His last and most lovable work.

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. Always provocative, often perverse, the greatest verbal prestidigitator of his time successfully juggles a dead poet, a live scholar and an imaginary land.

Death of a Highbrow, by Frank Swinnerton. A veteran novelist, now too little appreciated, probes the rivalry of two men of letters.

Letting Go, by Philip Roth. A bright new star of U.S. letters tries the big novel and nearly brings it off.

The Death of the Adversary, by Hans Keilson. The author, a German Jew, explores the strange relationship between a hunted man and his persecutor.

Labyrinths and Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges. The half-commonplace, half-fantastic world of the greatest living writer in Spanish, finally rendered in English.

Morte d'Urban, by J. F. Powers. A burlesque with love, on the foibles and faith of a modern priest consigned by his order to today's money-raising lunch-and-lecture circuit.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. The Virginia Werewolf of U.S. fiction in top form.

Nonfiction

The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, by Leon Edel. Volumes II and III in the continuing, magnificent life of Henry James.

Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. Great impressions of a great impressionist, by his son.

Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull. A fond recollection by a man who knew Fitzgerald.

Patriotic Gore, by Edmund Wilson. A vast, masterful exploration of Civil War writing and what it meant.

A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, by Randall Jarrell. Criticism in a rare admixture of infectious enthusiasm and inci sive judgment.

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. The first days of World War I, with historical figures seen as well-rehearsed players in an inevitable tragedy.

The Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead. A fitting, fetching sequel to his earlier pageant of life along Africa's greatest river.

The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. The anguished chronicle of a young writer's discovery that his talent was not enough to do justice to a high vision of the world.

The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. The thoughtful side of a man whose life often seemed dedicated to the unimportance of being earnest.

II Duce, by Christopher Hibbert. The rise and fall of a famous Fascist whose life inspires pity as well as hatred.

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