Cinema: Mar. 1, 1963

To Kill a Mockingbird. Like the Pulitzer Prize novel by Harper Lee, this picture is two things in one: a black-and-white meller and a tomboy ode to the Great American Childhood. Gregory Peck is appealing as the father figure, and the children (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna) are three little darbs.

Son of Flubber. In The Absent Minded Professor, Neddie the Nut (Fred MacMurray) invented “flubber”—lab gab for flying rubber—and then put flubber in a flivver and flew. In this picture he turns flubber slubber into flubbergas and starts blowing flubbles. Infantile? Absolutely. But fun.

Term of Trial. Sir Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret, cast as the Mr. and Mrs. Chips of a mill-town slum, memorialize an appalling marriage with charm and admirable finesse.

Love and Larceny. Vittorio Gassman, cast as a con man, is wacky and wicked in an Italian comedy that is ditto.

A Child Is Waiting. What is it like to be a mental defective? What is being done to help such people? This film makes a calm inspection of this major disaster area (there are 5,700,000 defectives in the U.S.) and makes some surprising recommendations. Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland and Bruce Ritchey play the principal parts with distinction.

Days of Wine and Roses. Jack Lemmon is the life of the party but he wakes up to a long mourning after in this savage story of alcoholism.

The Bad Sleep Well. Japan’s Akira Kurosawa examines with ferocious irony and some exaggeration the motives and the operations of Big Business in Japan.

Night Is My Future. Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman has long since fallen out of love with love, but in 1947, when he made this burningly romantic little picture, he could still tell a simple tale of man and maid, and tell it with all his art.

Who’s Got the Action? Lana Turner, that’s who. She plays a bride who makes book for her horseplaying husband, Dean Martin, in this modest attempt to improve an unpromising breed: the formula farce.

Eclipse. In this picture, Director Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura) perfects his subtle and expressive language of film, but unfortunately he employs it to say the same hopeless things he always says about the human condition.

David and Lisa. In his first movie, made for less than $200,000, Director Frank Perry tells a heartrending, heart-warming tale of two psychotic adolescents (Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin) who find love at the bottom of the snake pit.

Lawrence of Arabia. Blood, sand and stars (Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, José Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy), with the help of a top director (David Lean) and a $10 million budget, make this the best superspectacle since Ben-Hur.

The Lovers of Teruel. One of those ballet movies, but this time it’s for surreal, and Ludmila Tcherina, though she wobbles on her toes, gives the picture body.

Freud. Director John Huston has turned out an intense, intelligent cinemonograph on the early struggles of the papa of psychiatry, portrayed without much psychological insight by Montgomery Clift.

Electra. Greek tragedy is a nectar that does not travel well, but Director Michael Cacoyannis has managed to transform the tragedy by Euripides into a beautiful and sometimes touching film.

Jumbo. Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye measure comic talents in this ponderous pachyderm of a picture—a $5,000,-000 screen version of the 1935 Broadway musical. Jimmy wins by a nose.

Two for the Seesaw. Shirley MacLaine is pretty funny in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson’s Broadway comedy. Robert Mitchum is not.

TELEVISION

Wednesday, February 27

Discovery ’63 (ABC, 4:30-4:55 p.m.).* The first of three shows on the American Indian—this one is about “The Forest Indians”; succeeding daily shows will examine “The Plains Indians” and “The Desert Indians.”

CBS Reports (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A “Self-Portrait” of Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.

Thursday, February 28

Alcoa Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). The first of what may be spun off as a separate series on C. S. Forester’s British naval hero Horatio Hornblower, filmed in England.

Friday, March 1

Who Goes There?—A Primer on Communism (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Robert Abernethy hosts an examination of Communist ideology and methods.

Saturday, March 2

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Trevor Howard trying to save the African elephant in The Roots of Heaven, with Errol Flynn, Orson Welles and Eddie Albert.

Sunday, March 3

The NBC Opera Company (NBC. 2-3 p.m.). The world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s surrealist opera Labyrinth.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). First half of a two-part report on Franco Spain, including an interview with Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

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

The Sunday Night Movie (ABC, 8-10 p.m.). Hayley Mills in Tiger Bay with Father John, and Horst Buchholz.

Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Robert Merrill, Richard Tucker and Anneliese Rothenberger are guests.

A Country Called Europe (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). An NBC News special on the Common Market.

Monday, March 4

The Lucy Show (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Lucille Ball’s eleven-year-old daughter Lucie Arnaz will make her debut as the girl friend of her mother’s TV daughter.

David Brinkley’s Journal (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The caste system in India.

Tuesday, March 5

The Untouchables (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Even non-Ness fans may get a chill out of “Man in the Cooler,” with J. D. Cannon and Salome Jens, directed by Ida Lupino.

THEATER

On Broadway

Photo Finish, by the triply talented Peter Ustinov (writer, director, and star), cleverly places an 80-year-old man beside his onstage 60-, 40-, and 20-year-old selves with amusing and ironic results. Ustinov’s consummate mugging shores up he weak spots.

Natural Affection, by William Inge, has the impact of a tabloid shocker edited by Freud. As dramatic art the play fades out with the curtain’s fall, but Kim Stanley’s acting, Tony Richardson’s direction, and John Lewis’ hot-and-cool jazz score make it boil with sensual excitement.

The Hollow Crown provides a right royal evening of dramatic readings by and about English royalty. Max Adrian is commanding and Dorothy Tutin lovely to look at. Engagement ends March 9.

The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, has all the style and elegance that one could possibly ask for in the restaging of this classic comedy. John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Geraldine McEwan are a school for splendor. Engagement ends March 16.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams, asks playgoers to contemplate the state of their souls at the moment of impending death. In this resonantly religious allegory, Hermione Baddeley is magnificent.

Little Me wears its high-polish frivolities with a sophisticated air. The chief funmaster of this musical is Sid Caesar, who clowns his way through seven roles with imperial abandon.

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.

Beyond the Fringe chips away at petrified people with satiric finesse. Four young and infectiously funny Englishmen perform the iconoclastic surgery.

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 effulgent.

Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, is pulverizingly funny about a piffling subject—belated fatherhood. As the pater dolorosus, Paul Ford is unimaginably droll.

Oliver!, twisted by Lionel Bart into a vulgarized travesty of Dickens, is a jolly bad musical show. Let the buyer beware, unless he prefers his classics edited by vandals.

Off Broadway

The Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal, are both clever, two-character one-acters; the first concerns nonconformists who make strange bedfellows, the second a pair of office-worker mediocrities whose lives dim out like light bulbs. Each is performed with personable flair by the skilled husband-and-wife team of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter. Britain’s most provocative dramatist puts his characters in an enigmatic rat’s maze where they twist, turn and stumble, seeking each other and the truth with both amusing and terrifying results.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Serpent and the Rope, by Raja Rao. The odyssey of a high caste Hindu from childhood in Mother India to a hectic marriage in France makes an illuminating—if sometimes bewildering—novel.

Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus. Plotlessly presenting Hollywood as a series of tangentially connected lives, the author is surprisingly successful because he avoids both easy sentimentality and satiric rage.

The Price of Glory, by Alistair Home. The battle of Verdun, one of the great military and emotional turning points of World War I, is examined with prose precision and historical understanding.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. In the guise of a nasty little shocker about London teen-age terrorists in a hopped-up world this side of 1984, the author tells a morality tale about man’s need for moral choice.

Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti. Taking all human history as his province, the author brilliantly shows how man’s urge to power finds fulfillment in a crowd and how menacing this is to civilization.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction, by J. D. Salinger. Further doings in the steadily proliferating saga of the Glass family.

Crossroads of Power, by Sir Lewis Namier. In this collection of essays on 18th century England, the late great British historian makes clear how little ideology mattered in the tolerant days of George III.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One day seems like a lifetime in this grim novel about conditions in one of Stalin’s slave labor camps.

The Centaur, by John Updike. A Greek myth in imaginative modern dress, with a woebegone high school teacher cast in the role of the tragic centaur Chiron.

Best Sellers

FICTION

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

2. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (3)

3. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (1)

4. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction, Salinger (4)

5. A Shade of Difference, Drury (6)

6. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (9)

7. $100 Misunderstanding, Gover (5)

8. The Cape Cod Lighter, O’Hara (8)

9. Genius, Dennis (7)

10. Ships of Fools, Porter (10)

NONFICTION

1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

2. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (2)

3. Final Verdict, St. Johns (6)

4. The Points of My Compass, White (5)

5. Silent Spring, Carson (3)

6. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (4)

7. My Life in Court, Nizer (7)

8. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin

9. The Fall of the Dynasties, Taylor

10. Renoir, My Father, Renoir (9)

* All times E.S.T.