Friday, May. 24, 1963
CINEMA
Black Fox. Producer-Director Louis Clyde Stoumen has woven in illustrations from Goethe's Reynard the Fox to strike an allegory between the sly Reynard and the scheming Adolf Hitler, and the result is a fresh and trenchant look at Naziism.
The Idiot and Sanjuro. These two films by Japan's Akira Kurosawa are not in a class with his Rashomon or Yojimbo. But Kurosawa's genius can make a miss almost as good as a masterpiece.
Two Daughters. In this gentle and witty two-part film, the camera of India's Satyajit Ray speaks a universal language. The Postmaster tells of the touching relationship between a backwoods postmaster and a ten-year-old girl who is his servant; The Conclusion is a comedy about a reluctant bride, ardent groom and spoiled mother. With minor changes of script, Two Daughters could have been made in rural Louisiana.
The Third Lover. In this chilling story about a self-centered young man whose envy drives him to ruin the happiness of a couple who befriend him, Claude Chabrol, who launched the French New Wave, proves that with honest camera work and well-motivated plot, films may be excitingly nouvelle without being murkily vague.
Landru. Another Chabrol picture, this one with a screenplay by Francoise Sagan, whose cynical scenario is based on the French Bluebeard who murdered ten women during World War I in France. Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan are among Landru's victims.
To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck's Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch is good, but the kids (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna) almost steal the show in this pleasant screen version of the Pulitzer-prizewinning novel.
Lazarillo. Based on a 1554 Spanish novel, Lazarillo is a sort of 16th century Huckleberry Finn that details the misadventures of its young hero as he pits wits and wiles against a world of unscrupulous adults.
Mondo Cane. The bite of this documentary of depravity is even worse than its bark: the thesis that the world has gone to the dogs.
TELEVISION
Wednesday, May 22
CBS Reports (7:308 p.m.).* Russian Physicist Igor Evgenievich Tamm, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1958, talks with Marvin Kalb in Moscow.
Perry Como's Music Hall (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests: Jimmy Durante and Jane Powell.
Friday, May 24
Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The top news story of the week.
Saturday, May 25
Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). An educational smorgasbord for children, including puppets explaining math and astronomy, a re-creation of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, a small segment of the life and times of the average porpoise, and Actor Eli Wallach reading The Pied Piper of Hamlin.
Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Rodeo in Las Vegas.
Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11:45 p.m.). The Egyptian, with Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Gene Tierney, Michael Wilding and Peter Ustinov.
Sunday, May 26
The Catholic Hour (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Fourth of four segments in a history of the Catholic Church and its Ecumenical Councils.
Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: Ole Miss Student James Meredith.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A survey of U.S. programs aimed at rocketing three men to the moon. Repeat.
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). This one is about a quarter horse who nearly goes to the glue factory but ends up winning prizes. Repeat.
The Emmy Awards (NBC, 10-11:30 p.m.). The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences presents its annual awards in ceremonies televised from Hollywood, New York and Washington.
The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Metropolitan Opera Soprano Elaine Malbin, Tenor Sandor Kenya, Baritone William Warfield.
Monday, May/27
Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). The Enemy Below, with Robert Mitchum on the surface and Curt Jurgens skippering a Nazi submarine at depth.
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Brinkley views with alarm the deterioration of the national shrines at Gettysburg, Pa.
Tuesday, May 28
The Jack Benny Program (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Jack reminisces about his gilded youth in Waukegan. Repeat.
THEATER
On Broadway
She Loves Me is head over heels in love with love. The musical's springtime sweethearts are Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey, son of Raymond. Carol Haney's dance spoofs and the Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bock score keep this romantic fairy tale spinning gaily.
Rattle of a Simple Man, by Charles Dyer, locks a London floozy and a virginal Manchester clerk in a bedroom and then busily prevents them from going to bed. Stalemated between farce and pathos, the play does not go anywhere either; but Tammy Grimes is a beguiling imp and Edward Woodward a touchingly vulnerable bumpkin.
Strange Interlude, by Eugene O'Neill, puts its characters on a kind of verbal couch for 4 1/2 hours, but the amateur psychoanalyzing currently seems both comic and a trifle freudulent. Star Geraldine Page rings as true as 14 carats.
Enter Laughing, by Joseph Stein. There is an improvisational air to this play that lends freshness to a stalely familiar genre, the Jewish family comedy. As a youngster with a yen to act, Alan Arkin is rib-splittingly funny.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle award as the best play of the year, Virginia Woolf detonates a shattering three-act marital explosion that, for savage wit and skill, is unparalleled in the recent annals of the U.S. stage. As the embattled couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen enact their roles with magnificent ferocity.
Beyond the Fringe. Recipient of a rarely accorded Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Beyond the Fringe is the finest revue in years. Four antic and articulate young Englishmen rip the comic stuffing out of nuclear defense, Shakespearean theatrics, and glibly patronizing men of God.
Off Broadway
To the Water Tower. The Second City troupe is unequaled among U.S. revue groups for its acting skill, imaginative verve, and satiric intrepidity.
Six Characters in Search of an Author is quite possibly the best-thought-out and most excitingly executed revival of the Pirandello classic ever seen in the U.S.
RECORDS
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 (Philadelphia Orchestra; Columbia) was rehabilitated in 1961 after 25 years of official scorn in Russia; Shostakovich meekly labeled his next symphony "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." Now, in its first American recording, the Fourth is worth hearing mainly to find out what all the fuss was about. Whatever its polemic content may be, it sounds clumsily Mahlerian and full of papier-mache grandeur.
Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Hilde Roessl-Majdan; Philharmonia Orchestra; Angel) is the highest expression of Mahler's fascination with "the life force," and in this bountiful recording, it seems fit music for Resurrection Day itself. Schwarzkopf sings beautifully. Two LPs, sung in German.
Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov (Boris Christoff; Angel) features the best of the half a dozen great Borises in a superb recording. Christoff sings three roles in his amazingly rich basso, and the Sofia National Opera chorus is matchless in the music. Three LPs, sung in Russian.
Dello Joio: Fantasy and Variations (Lorin Hollander, pianist; Boston Symphony Orchestra; RCA Victor) is here given an appropriately spirited performance by the young pianist who played its world premiere last year. It is music for a virtuoso pianist and a game orchestra. So is the cheerful Ravel Concerto in G on the other side.
Beethoven: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (Jascha Heifetz; RCA Victor) is a five-LP package that includes all ten of Beethoven's sonatas, masterfully played by Violinist Heifetz and Pianists Emanuel Bay and Brooks Smith. What with a fat book of program notes, it is big enough to be a doorstop; what with Heifetz playing as he does, it is almost a way of life.
Barber: Knoxville, Summer of 1915 (Eleanor Steber; Columbia) is a rondo for voice and orchestra, with Soprano Steber singing James Agee's affecting text, which Barber has set to music. On the other side (and, unfortunately, better recorded) is Berlioz' Les Nuits d'Ete, also sung by Steber.
Songs at Sunset (Virgil Fox; Capitol) features a great virtuoso and a great instrument (the 10,000-pipe organ at Manhattan's Riverside Church) pitted against the banalities of such music as Ich Liebe Dich and The Lost Chord.
Handel: Four Favorite Organ Concertos (E. Power Biggs; Columbia) features another great virtuoso and a great instrument (designed by Handel, it is now in St. James's Church, Packington, England). The best of the four concertos is the grand and glorious No. 16 in F Major, which Biggs plays with immense symphonic richness and excitement.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Dare Call It Treason, by Richard M. Watt. The mutiny of almost 100 French divisions during the bloodiest fighting of World War I was long hushed up, but now it has been skillfully told by a salesman turned history buff.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C. G. Jung. In this posthumous autobiography, the late great Swiss psychologist traces his life in dreams, offering some startling insights into a mind that at the end was in flight from its century, from science and particularly from Freud.
Forge of Democracy, by Neil MacNeil. How the House of Representatives evolved from a rowdy "Bear Garden," where many a man carried a pistol, to a reasonably responsible voice of government.
Our Mother's House, by Julian Gloag. A little masterpiece of the macabre in which seven London youngsters bury their mother in the garden, clout Dad with a poker, and evolve the forms of a religion based on the dead.
The Tin Drum, by Giinter Grass. A grotesque dwarfs-eye view of the Third Reich and its aftermath told by the most powerfully imaginative novelist to emerge in postwar Germany.
Speculations About Jakob, by Uwe Johnson. Writing in a fragmented style, another gifted young German uses a whodunit plot to explore the small tensions and concerns of his divided world.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction, Salinger (3, last week) 2. The Glass-Blowers, Du Maurier (2) 3. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (1) 4. Grandmother and the Priests, Caldwell (4) 5. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (5) 6. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (10) 7. The Moonflower Vine, Carleton (8) 8. The Tin Drum, Grass (7) 9. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (6) 10. The Centaur, Updike
NONFICTION 1 . The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper (1) 2. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2) 3. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (6) 4. The Ordeal of Power, Hughes (3) 5. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (4) 6. Forever Free, Adamson ( 10) 7. The Great Hunger, Woodham-Smith (7) 8. The Feminine Mystique, Friedan 9. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, Lewis 10. This Kind of War, Fehrenbach (9)
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.