Cinema: Feb. 2, 1962

Tender Is the Night. Director Henry King and Scenarist Ivan Moffat have made a slickly commercial, bleakly melancholy movie out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story of a man emasculated by a fatal desire to please. Jason Robards Jr. plays the moral eunuch with All-American charm.

Murder, She Says. Margaret Rutherford, a British comedienne whose appearance suggests an overstuffed electric chair, comes on strong as a lady gumshoe in this adaptation of an Agatha Christie chiller, 4:50 from Paddington.

A View from the Bridge. Playwright Arthur Miller’s attempt to find Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush makes about as much sense as building a brownstone Parthenon, but Director Sidney Lumet has filmed the play with pace and intelligence, and Actor Raf Vallone, as the stevedore hero, has the brute force of a cargo hook.

A Majority of One. A pleasant geriatric romance between a middle-aged Japanese textile tycoon (Alec Guinness) and a nice Jewish widow (Rosalind Russell) from New York City, with Lower-East-Side dishes of Jewish humor.

The Second Time Around. Debbie Reynolds plumes herself with horsefeathers in a comedy western that, saving her presence, would have been just one more prairie dog.

The Innocents. This psychiatric chiller, based on The Turn of the Screw, owes as much to Sigmund Freud as it does to Henry James, but the photography is wonderfully spooky and the heroine (Deborah Kerr) exquisitely kooky.

Throne of Blood. A grand, barbaric Japanization of Macbeth.

El Cid. The year’s best superspectacle, based on the legend of the Spanish Lancelot.

TELEVISION

Wed., Jan. 31

The Bob Newhart Show (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.).* Skits and monologues from a master comedian.

Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Drama-documentary about the work of missing-persons bureaus.

Fri., Feb. 2

International Showtime (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Circus Krone of Wilhelms-haven, Germany.

Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Soprano Joan Sutherland plus Janet Blair, Polly Bergen, et al.

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). Walter Cronkite cronking out the top news story of the week.

Sun., Feb. 4

Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). A look at the best underwater spear fishermen and their web-footed friends, plus a talk with Jacques (The Silent World) Cousteau.

Directions ’62 (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). Guest Earl Wrightson is featured in a program about the origins of church music.

Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). National ski-jumping championships at Fox River Grove, Ill.

Update (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). Robert Abernethy’s news program for teenagers, shifted to a new time and day because of its popularity.

Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: American Motors President George Romney, who is a likely Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan.

Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A synopsis of Puerto Rico’s self-regeneration program, Operation Bootstrap.

FCC TV Hearings (NBC, 6:30-7 p.m.). Summary of Newton Minow’s nibbles at the networks’ top executives and their retorts, as developed during the previous week’s testimony.

Stan Freberg Presents Chinese New Year’s Eve (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Satire Occidentally pegged on the Oriental New Year.

Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Arthur Kennedy in a play about Han van Meegeren, the Dutch painter who forged a Vermeer and fobbed it off on Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring.

Mon., Feb. 5

Ben Casey (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). The greatest neurosurgeon since Lizzie Borden is faced with a hot one: just as his colleague Dr. Philip Walton is about to perform a history-making brain operation, Ben detects that Walton himself needs brain repair.

Tues., Feb. 6

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Japan (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The program includes material taped in the Imperial Court Theater, also ancient Japanese music played on traditional Japanese instruments.

THEATER

On Broadway

The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams, makes a tethered lizard a symbol of the condition of man, while above it, on a Mexican veranda, Bette Davis, Patrick O’Neal and Margaret Leighton tug with poetic fury at fetters of mind, body and spirit.

Ross, by Terence Rattigan, shadows the elusive psyche of T. E. Lawrence. As the hero, Actor John Mills makes a stagy script shine.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. Rarely has the problem of duty v. conscience been posed with more precision of language and lucidity of thought. In Actor Paul Scofield, the hero Sir Thomas More is reincarnated.

Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, takes a large theme, the relationship of God and Man, and treats it with more humor than awe. Fredric March and Douglas Campbell are full of fire and brimstone.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a secret that Actor Robert Morse exuberantly shares with the audience in his great, grinning rush to the top of the corporate heap.

The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, infuses two brothers and a verminous bum with ripples of humor, glints of malice, and a passionate regard and disregard for one another’s common humanity.

Off Broadway

Who’ll Save the Plowboy?, by Frank D. Gilroy, is a gritty and gripping emotional inquest into a dead marriage, the dead delusions and illusions of a World War II hero, and the pitiful pal he rescued.

Brecht on Brecht is a splendid sampling of the esthetic skill and unique personality of a powerful 20th century playwright. Six compelling actors animate his poems, letters, songs, aphorisms and plays with selfless intensity.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The End of the Battle, by Evelyn Waugh. The crisply written but melancholy-minded third volume of a trilogy about Britain in Waughtime— an obsolete, upper-class way of life and death that began to turn grey for Author Waugh and his hero when the Russians became Britain’s allies.

Sylva, by Vercors. A fox becomes a girl, offering French Novelist Vercors endless opportunities for instructive irony; perhaps the author’s best notion is that the girl’s protector must consult Freud to give her some much-needed inhibitions.

The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Volumes I & II), edited by Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke. These first installments of a proposed 20-volume work read in parts like an excellent epistolary novel, and show Hamilton to have been a man quite different from the cold autocrat of popular fancy.

The Burning Brand and The House on the Hill, both by Cesare Pavese. Respectively, a haunting, pathetic private journal and an astringent novel of World War II by a gifted Italian writer, who committed suicide in 1950 for reasons made clear in the diary.

But Not in Shame, by John Toland. An able historian shows the U.S. staggering through the first six months of World War II.

Assembly, by John O’Hara. More than most short-story collections, this is a mixed bag; O’Hara is very good when he depends on his unmatched skill at seeing and hearing, and very bad when he ventures into abnormal psychology.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (1, last week)

2. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (2)

3. Daughter of Silence, West (5)

4. Chairman of the Bored, Streeter (3)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (4)

6. Little Me, Dennis (6)

7. Spirit Lake, Kantor (8)

8. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (7)

9. The Ivy Tree, Stewart

10. The Incredible Journey, Burnford (10)

NONFICTION

1. My Life in Court, Nizer (1)

2. The Making of the President 1960, White (2)

3. My Saber Is Bent, Paar (3)

4. Living Free, Adamson (4)

5. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (5)

6. Calories Don’t Count, Taller

7. The New English Bible (10)

8. The Coming Fury, Catton (7)

9. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (6)

10. I Should Have Kissed Her More, King (8)

* All times E.S.T.