Cinema: Feb. 16, 1962

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The best puppet picture ever made: a feature-length version of Shakespeare’s play put together by Czechoslovakia’s Jiri Trnka, the Walt Disney of the Communist bloc.

A View from the Bridge. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s play, the film postures ineffectually as Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush, but as a modern drama of moral incest, it has considerable merit, thanks largely to Raf Vallone’s muscular performance as the troubled stevedore.

One, Two, Three. Director Billy Wilder employs contemporary Berlin as location for a Coca-Colonial comedy of bad manners that relentlessly maintains the pace that refreshes.

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 failed hero with All-American charm.

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

The Five-Day Lover. France’s Philippe de Broca has directed a gay-grim comedy of intersecting triangles in which the participants suddenly discover that the dance of life is also the dance of death.

A Majority of One. Rosalind Russell as a matron from Brooklyn and Alec Guinness as a Japanese millionaire keep straight faces long enough to stuff this soggily pleasant knish with sentiment.

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.

La Belle Américaine. A running gag about U.S. automobiles that sometimes stalls but usually crowds the speed limit; written, directed and acted by Robert (La Plume de Ma Tante) Dhéry, a French comedian who is rapidly emerging as a sort of tatty Tati.

TELEVISION

Wed., Feb. 14

Howard K. Smith—News and Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Analysis of the week’s top news stories.

A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy (CBS, NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A network pool program. The President pops in for a moment.

Thurs., Feb. 15

Special for Women (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). Today’s program concerns itself with the inner conflicts of “The Indiscriminate Woman,” who knows too many men too well.

Fri., Feb. 16

The Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Guests include George London, Isaac Stern, Mahalia Jackson.

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The week’s top news event.

Sat., Feb. 17

Accent (CBS, 1:30-2 p.m.). The program begins a new feature: dramatizations of history, aimed at U.S. youth. The first tells of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys.

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Gary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers in Monkey Business (20th Century-Fox, 1952).

Sun., Feb. 18

Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). “Air Show”—civilian and military aerobatics.

Directions ’62 (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). Third in a series on the origins of church music.

Issues and Answers (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.). House Speaker John McCormack.

To Breathe Free (NBC, 4-4:30 p.m.). A documentary on the ministry of American Baptist missionaries and Chinese Baptists in Hong Kong.

Update (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). Robert Abernethy’s news program for teenagers.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The life and works of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Jack Benny Program (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Benny impersonates Jack Paar, interviewing the real Rock Hudson, aided by the real Hugh Downs.

Mon., Feb. 19

Expedition (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.). Seeking out ancient customs and rituals, the program visits the South Pacific island of Pentecost, where young men climb a 90-ft. tower and dive to the solid ground.

THEATER

The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. In a play of nocturnal mood and meaning, Williams assembles a defrocked minister, a Nantucket spinster, a sensual spitfire and a nonagenarian poet on a Mexican hotel veranda, where their defeated dreams converge in an elegiac pattern of destiny.

Ross, by Terence Rattigan, speculates tantalizingly on the nature of T. E. Lawrence. Actor John Mills performs with a purity of anguish that irradiates the hero without resolving his mystery.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, is a prismatic play that throws its varicolored light on the theme of public duty v. private conscience. As Sir Thomas More, British Actor Paul Scofield gives a performance that is an incarnation.

Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, explores the relationship of God and man in a compelling, if not exalted, drama. Fredric March and Douglas Campbell brilliantly light up Chayefsky’s firmament.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is as enjoyable as its title is long. Rising from window washer to chairman of the board, Robert Morse is a comic marvel of apple-cheeked guile and flaming self-adoration.

The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. In a junk-filled London room, two odd brothers and a tramp illuminate the perennial questions of man’s isolation from, his need for, and his quirky rejection of, his fellow man.

Who’ll Save the Plowboy?, by Frank D. Gilroy, slices close to the center of three lives that war, marriage and illusions have haphazardly drawn together.

Brecht on Brecht is an exciting peek at poems, letters, scenes and songs in the treasure trove of a 20th century master of theater. A splendid company of six perched on stools gives magic to this revue-styled evening.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman. A detailed and dramatic account of the fateful first month of World War I; a set piece every actor in it had rehearsed for years and managed to turn into a shambles nevertheless.

The Quarry, by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. A sick old detective trapped in a sanitarium run by an arch sadist—each of them the other’s quarry—provides the author of The Visit with a new set of grotesque mouthpieces for his macabre view of life.

Writers on the Left, by Daniel Aaron. A cool look at the long-gone days of the ’30s, when the Communists were able to attract or bully some of the best writers in the U.S.

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 turns into a young lady, thereby giving her keeper and Vercors much opportunity for ironical analysis of what little girls are made of.

The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Vols. 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.

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

Best Sellers

FICTION

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

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

3. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (4)

4. Daughter of Silence, West (3)

5. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (6)

6. Chairman of the Bored, Streeter (7)

7. Little Me, Dennis (5)

8. Captain Newman, M.D., Rosten

9. The Ivy Tree, Stewart (8)

10. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (10)

NONFICTION

1. My Life in Court, Nizer (1)

2. Calories Don’t Count, Taller (2)

3. The Making of the President 1960, White (3)

4. Living Free, Adamson (4)

5. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (7)

6. The Coming Fury, Catton (8)

7. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (5)

8. The New English Bible (9)

9. My Saber Is Bent, Paar (6)

10. Citizen Hearst, Swanberg (10)

* All times E.S.T.