Cinema: Apr. 19, 1963

Love Is a Ball. This Riviera-based frappé is an object lesson in how times change though plots do not. Hope Lange is a chauffeur-chasing heiress who chases Chauffeur Glenn Ford, lures him to a booby-trapped love nest, and almost nabs him. Charles Boyer runs a school for would-be grooms, where Pupil Ricardo Montalban learns that even the aging Boyer is not yet a Casbah Milquetoast.

Five Miles to Midnight. Sophia Loren and Tony Perkins in a thriller that might have been a sort of Psycaccio. But this film about a neurotic ne’er-do-well who escapes from a plane wreck believed to have killed him and forces his wife to go along with a plot to collect his life insurance, is good, solid black-and-white suspense stuff.

The Birds. Hitchcock-a-doodle-doo in the form of a fatuous plot makes for a slow start; but when the birds finally get a chance to do their stuff, the feathers fly as hordes of gulls, finches and crows go to war against humanity.

The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. A whole new era of Hollywood kiddy stars may be launched by irresistibly talented Ronny Howard, 9. He does a pro job at finding a mate for Daddy Glenn Ford, Shirley Jones, Dina Merrill and Stella Stevens are the applicants.

The Balcony. Jean Genet’s allegory says that life is a bawdyhouse where men buy illusions at the price of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam who knows what her customers want.

Mondo Cane. Some episodes in this stomach-churning travelogue are almost Swiftian in their comment on human frailty. Others are simply funny. But the best/worst parts provide some of the bloodiest minutes to hit the screen in a long time.

How the West Was Won. This Cinerama epic goes wild and woolly with a wagonload of stars and a thousand thundering buffaloes that threaten to shake the balcony loose from its moorings.

To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize novel comes off almost better on the screen than on the page. Gregory Peck is wise and warm, and three children—Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna—are so convincingly rambunctious that they hardly seem to be acting at all.

Love and Larceny. Vittorio Gassman masquerades his way through one of the funniest Italian farces of the season.

The Wrong Arm of the Law. Sneaky Pete Sellers as a raffish Raffles heads a gang of candid-camera jewel robbers.

TELEVISION

Wednesday, April 17

CBS Reports (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* A look, both retrospective and prophetic, at Robert Moses, “The Man Who Built New York.”

Thursday, April 18

Purex Special for Women (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). Darren (Mike Hammer) McGavin stars in “The Problem Child,” a drama-documentary about an unruly son and his troubled parents. Repeat.

Twilight Zone (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). A children’s toy designer (Pat Hingle), himself more child than adult, finds a way to return to the past in “The Incredible World of Horace Ford.”

Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Drs. Charles Bickford and William Shatner argue their convictions about the practice of medicine in “Million Dollar Hospital.”

Friday, April 19

Here’s Edie (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Guest Comic Buddy Hackett clowns, and Edie Adams sings, about the five facets of love.

Alfred Hitchcock (CBS, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). While a British couple (Michael Wilding and Anna Lee) travels across the U.S. by car, their daughter is kidnaped in “Last Seen Wearing Blue Jeans.”

Saturday, April 20

Baseball Game of the Week (CBS, 1:25 p.m. to conclusion). From Philadelphia, the St. Louis Cardinals v. the Philadelphia Phillies.

The Defenders (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). “Judgment Eve,” the story of twelve jurors and their unpredictable ways.

Sunday, April 21

Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: Lieut. Colonel John H. Glenn Jr.

American Landmark: Lexington-Concord (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Fredric March narrates the story of the start of the American Revolution. Color.

The Sunday Night Movie (ABC, 8-10 p.m.). Don Murray stars as The Hoodlum Priest.

The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Metropolitan Opera Soprano Joan Sutherland pays tribute to her predecessors in “The Art of the Prima Donna.”

Du Pont Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A documentary account of the intense personal relationship between a parole officer and a young convict, called “Prisoner at Large.”

Monday, April 22 Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha stars John Wayne, not as the geisha. Color.

David Brinkley’s Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). The subject: France’s penal colony. Devil’s Island. Color.

Tuesday, April 23

Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). “A Vanishing Breed: Portrait of a Country Editor” focuses documentary attention on a Kentucky editor and the impact of his newspaper on his community.

Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A study of Communist strength in Italy.

THEATER

On Broadway

Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is a firestorm of a play, raging over the subjects of war, history, ideology, heroism, vice and virtue. Brecht robs his 17th century heroine of her three children without breaking her fierce will to survive. In the daunting title role, Anne Bancroft unfortunately is not quite the earth mother she strives to be.

Too True to Be Good, by George Bernard Shaw. This gallimaufry of tired Shavianisms on the religious temper, the military mind, and the desperate plight of the idle rich is a theatrical sleeping pill. A full cast of stars—Glynis Johns, Robert Preston, David Wayne, Cyril Ritchard, Eileen Heckart, Lillian Gish, Cedric Hardwicke, Ray Middleton—try to wake the play up.

Tovarich explores new frontiers of boredom in an unmusical noncomedy. As a White Russian grand duchess posing as a housemaid in Paris in 1927, lovely Vivien Leigh does a Charleston to remember, and otherwise lights up the proceedings like a matchflare in a catacomb.

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O’Neill. Time has added a comic flavor to this 4½-hour Freudian opus that the somber-spirited playwright never never intended. However, O’Neill’s innate theater sense saves all but the silliest lines, and the playing of effulgent Geraldine Page and her Actors Studio cohorts is a delight to behold.

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.

Photo Finish, by Peter Ustinov, is an amiable piece of geriatrickery. Miming an 80-year-old, Ustinov has the dubious but distinct pleasure of meeting his bygone selves of 20, 40 and 60. The multiaptituded Ustinov also meets himself as author and director.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. Rasping family squabbles are the scenes U.S. playwrights handle best, and this savage-witted nightlong bout of man and wife ranks with the best of the breed. Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen are the battlers.

Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long. Paul Ford’s preternatural gloom at the thought of becoming a father at 60 provokes a two-hour hailstorm of pelting laughs.

Little Me. Seven helpings of Sid Caesar make this show a rich musical comedy feast. Other goodies include Swen Swenson’s dancing and Virginia Martin’s ding-dong Belle Poitrine.

Beyond the Fringe. Four wickedly clever young English sharpshooters riddle such sacred institutions as God, Shakespeare and Harold Macmillan. The wackiest loon of the lunatic lot is Dr. Jonathan Miller.

Off Broadway

To the Water Tower. There is bee-stinging humor and zany, zooming fantasy in this new satirical revue by the Second City troupe as it buzzes busily around Cuba, camp counselors and bomb shelter salesmen.

Six Characters in Search of an Author employs the arena stage with remarkable intelligence and achieves a model revival of the Pirandello classic. The play is a philosophical melodrama in which illusion wrestles with reality and both ambiguously exchange identities. William Ball’s direction is organic, coursing like blood along a vein to the heart of the play, which is the mind.

The Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal. The eupeptic pleasure with which Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson cavort through these two clever one-acters is highly contagious. The Tiger is the better play, as it hoists two engineers of nonconformist clichés on their own pretentious petard.

The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter, are shivery comedies of menace in which murder and infidelity occur (or do they?), and meaning is made mysterious and mystery meaningful.

RECORDS

Sheherazade (Columbia) is a passionate performance of Maurice Ravel’s coldly exciting music, with Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel sharing the enthusiasm built behind her by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Berlioz’ Cléopátre, on the other side, is less remarkable music.

Poulenc: Concerto in D Minor (Angel) features the late Francis Poulenc and Jacques Fevrier as the two pianists in Poulenc’s familiar and joyously baroque double concerto. Concert Champétre for Harpsichord and Orchestra, on the other side, is not vintage Poulenc, though played with mercurial zeal by Harpsichordist Aimée van de Wiele.

Liszt: Concerto No. 1, Les Préludes (Andre Watts, pianist; the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein; Columbia) confirms the astonishing first impression 16-year-old Pianist Watts made in his New York debut in January. A fluent and subtle performance.

Bruckner: Mass No. 3 in F Minor (Berlin Symphony, St. Hedwig’s Cathedral Choir, conducted by Karl Forster; Pilar Lorengar, soprano, Christa Ludwig, alto, Josef Traxel, tenor, Walter Berry, bass; Angel) is a majestic work. Forster matches the full voice of his orchestra to the choral glories of the Mass, and only Soprano Lorengar’s obvious struggling brings him down to earth again.

Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle (Mercury) is a worthy love offering by the friends of the late Bela Bartok. It is an all-Hungarian recording of Bartok’s only opera, with Old Friend Basso Mihaly Szekely singing the lead and Old Friend Antal Dorati conducting. The performances are more devoted than the music justifies: the opera remains a penny poem.

Nielsen: Symphony No. 5 (New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein; Columbia) is an excited reading of the seldom heard work of the late Danish composer Carl Nielsen. Nielson’s melodious, strongly rhythmed music sounds like a primer to Shostakovich, and Bernstein makes the most of all its frenzied drama. It is, above all, a showcase for the New York Philharmonic’s superb percussionists.

Purcell: Come, Ye Sons of Art (Alfred Deller, countertenor; Vanguard) is a happy new appearance of Purcell’s birthday music for Queen Mary, this time with Deller and his countertenor son Mark sharing the sublime duet that crowns the work.

Vivaldi: Gloria (Roger Wagner Chorale; Angel) is a glittering rendition of Vivaldi at his festive best. The choir gets a bit thick at times, but the soloists are excellent and the recording is rich and sonorous.

Oistrakh (Monitor) presents David Oistrakh and his son Igor in a good collection of works for virtuoso violins: Haydn’s Duo in B-Flat, Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, Honegger’s Sonatina, and Louis Spohr’s Duetto II in D Major. The Oistrakhs play magnificently.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Speculations About Jakob, by Uwe Johnson. One of Germany’s most gifted young novelists finds the death—by suicide or accident—of a humble East German line dispatcher an excuse to delve provocatively and perceptively into the small tensions and the human concerns of a divided world.

The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith. A bitter and articulate account of Ireland’s potato famine (1845-49), by a British historian who is a master of creative research.

Fantastic Stories, by Abram Tertz. Parables by a pseudonymous Soviet writer that illustrate by the light of fantasy how the eye of Big Brother orders the realities of Soviet life.

Lawd Today, by Richard Wright. Written before Native Son, but now published for the first time (three years after Wright’s death), this novel of a brutalized Chicago Negro in the 1930s is a grim reminder of a time, not long ago, when the pain caused by race prejudice was mainly economic.

The Conservative Enemy, by C.A.R. Crosland. A hard-minded British socialist has at fossilized economic thinking of dogmatists in his own party.

A Favorite of the Gods, by Sybille Bedford. Grand opera without music, about the dynastic rich of 19th century Europe, by a novelist with a fine feel for the trials of being wellborn.

On Revolution, by Hannah Arendt. In a shrewd study, Historian Arendt examines the long-held notion that revolutions cure social ills, concludes that most of them do more harm than good.

That Summer in Paris, by Morley Callaghan. How it was on the Left Bank in the 1920s by a Canadian writer who once knocked Hemingway down in a boxing match while Scott Fitzgerald kept time.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction, Salinger (1, last week)

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

3. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (3)

4. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (4)

5. Triumph, Wylie (6)

6. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (5)

7. The Tin Drum, Grass (8)

8. $100 Misunderstanding, Gover (9)

9. The Centaur, Updike

10. The Moonflower Vine, Carleton (10)

NONFICTION

1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

2. The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper (2)

3. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (3)

4. Final Verdict, St. Johns (4)

5. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (5)

6. The Fall of the Dynasties, Taylor (6)

7. Silent Spring, Carson (9)

8. The Points of My Compass, White (7)

9. The Feminine Mystique, Friedan (10)

10. My Life in Court, Nizer (8)

* All Times E. S. T.