Cinema: Dec. 7, 1962

Two for the Seesaw. Love comes to Gittel Moscowitz in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson’s play about what happens when a blue-eyed Babbitt from Omaha meets a blackstocking in Greenwich Village.

The Long Absence. The old reliable Enoch Arden story, told with skill and significant variations by France’s Henri Colpi.

Mutiny on the Bounty. MGM’s $18.5 million reconstruction of The Bounty goes bounding along at a great rate for two hours, but all at once the story springs a leak and sinks beneath contempt. Marlon Brando is a sight too cute as Fletcher Christian, but even in disaster Trevor Howard makes a superlative curmudgeon of Captain Bligh.

Gypsy. Rosalind Russell is loud and funny in this stripping good show, from the Broadway musical abstracted from Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography.

Billy Budd. Herman Melville’s didactic tale has been transformed by Peter Ustinov—who directed the picture, helped write the script, and plays one of the leading roles—into a vividly affecting film.

Long Day’s Journey into Night. Eugene O’Neill’s play, one of the greatest of the century, is brought to the screen without significant changes and with a better than competent cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell.

Divorce—Italian Style. Marcello Mastroianni is lethally hilarious as a Sicilian smoothie who gets rid of his wife in the only way the law in Italy seems to allow: femicide.

TELEVISION

Wed., Dec. 5 Naked City (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).* Denise Darcel and Claude Dauphin co-star in a story that involves the French community in New York.

Thurs., Dec. 6 Hall of Fame (NBC, 9:30-11 p.m.).

Christopher Plummer and Hope Lange are Cyrano de Bergerac and Roxane in Edmond Rostand’s classic play.

Fri., Dec. 7 Sing Along with Mitch (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Soloists: Leslie Uggams, Louise O’Brien, Mary Lou Ryhal, Bill Ventura.

The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Judy Garland, Singer Robert Goulet, Comedian Woody Allen.

Sat., Dec. 8 Football (CBS, 1:30 p.m. to end). Washington Redskins v. Baltimore Colts.

N.C.A.A. Football (CBS, 4:15 p.m. to end). Syracuse at U.C.L.A.

Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Roller-skating championships.

Sun., Dec. 9 Washington Report (CBS, 12:30-1 p.m.). Interviews from the capital about the week’s leading news.

Issues and Answers (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). Senator Stuart Symington discusses Cuba.

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

Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.).

Tonight’s guest: Pennsylvania’s Governor-elect William Scranton.

The Wizard of Oz (CBS, 6-8 p.m.). For the fifth straight year, as the holiday season approaches, CBS whips up the old twister and brings back the M-G-M movie with Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger and Billie Burke.

The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Guests: Ralph Votapek, recent winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, plus Baritone Mario Sereni, Dorothy Kirsten and Julie London.

Howard K. Smith—News and Comment (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). The controversial commentator is still at it.

Mon., Dec. 10 David Brinkley’s Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Brinkley attends a reunion in Chicago of the U.S. flyers who bombed Hiroshima, and he also goes to Hiroshima for memorial services held on anniversary day last summer.

Tues., Dec. 11 Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). First of two programs about the Minuteman missile.

Bell & Howell Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Tonight’s subject is politics on the precinct level.

THEATER

On Broadway

Little Me presents Broadway with a one-man comic-population explosion—seven Sid Caesars. Great Caesar plays all the men in the farcical musical-comedy saga of Belle Poitrine, the all-American showgirl originally lampooned in Patrick Dennis’ novel. For rampagingly frivolous fun, this is it.

Beyond the Fringe. Four monstrously clever and wildly amusing young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge gleefully smash the icons of any and all Establishments, from Shakespeare to nuclear defense. The head pixy, Dr. Jonathan Miller, is a rubber-faced, rubber-jointed comic wonder.

Tchin-Tchin. Opposites, who are also rejects, attract each other in this sad, amusing, pathetic fable about an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman who try to be adult about their mutually adulterous spouses. Margaret Leighton, who acts with the purity of light, and Anthony Quinn, who acts as common as dirt, give the two roles rare distinction.

Mr. President is still the worst musical on Broadway, despite the fact that Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray are thrashing about on stage as valiantly as goldfish in a dry bowl.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, examines the sterility of a marriage, and of modern U.S. life, with cold fury. The playgoer may doubt whether he has been shown the human heart, but he will know that he has seen human entrails. As the warring couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen give performances of indelible brilliance.

The Affair has been expertly adapted from C. P. Snow’s novel, and revolves around the issue of justice toward an ideological enemy. A predominantly British cast evokes the donnish flavor of a university common room turned courtroom.

Off Broadway

A Man’s a Man, by Bertolt Brecht. As early as 1926, the late great German playwright had an uncanny prevision of the process of brainwashing. In this stylishly performed Eric Bentley adaptation, John Heffernan is the brainwashee, and Olympia Dukakis is splendidly sensual and coarse as an army camp follower.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O’Hara. Back in his Gibbsville, Pa., stamping grounds again, and once more at the top of his short-story form, the old master lays bare the mores and morals of the nice and not-so-nice.

The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, Vols. II & III of Henry James’s life, by Leon Edel. The most massive biography ever devoted to an American author is also one of the most gracefully written.

The Anatomy of Britain, by Anthony Sampson. A precise and skilled journalist takes his native land apart from Mayfair to Muddling-Through, and is far from reassured by what he finds.

Tale for the Mirror, by Hortense Calisher. One of the rare mistresses of the short story in a three-star excursion to Exurbia-on-Hudson.

The Community of Scholars and Drawing the Line, by Paul Goodman. An uneven but provocative display of literary fireworks by a critic who finds U.S. colleges and cold war thinking otiose.

Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. Life with a great impressionist painter, and a charmingly quirky parent, fondly recollected by his gifted son.

A Dancer in Darkness, by David Stacton. John Webster’s grim 17th century drama The Duchess of Malfi retold with silkily evocative overtones.

The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. This first complete collection reveals the thoughtful side of a man whose plays often seemed dedicated to the unimportance of being earnest.

Best Sellers FICTION 1. A Shade of Difference, Drury (1, last week)

2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2)

3. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (3)

4. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (4)

5. Ship of Fools, Porter (5)

6. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (6)

7. The Thin Red Line, Jones (7)

8. The Prize, Wallace (8)

9. The Passion Flower Hotel, Erskine (9)

10. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (10)

NONFICTION

1. Silent Spring, Carson (2)

2. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

3. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (3)

4. The Rothschilds, Morton (4)

5. My Life in Court, Nizer (5)

6. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (7)

7. Final Verdict, St. Johns (9)

8. Letters from the Earth, Twain (8)

9. The Pyramid Climbers, Packard

10. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (6)

*All times E.S.T.