Cinema: Apr. 26, 1963

The Ugly American. Marlon Brando arrives in mythical South Sarkhan (or possibly South Viet Nam) to take over the embassy, and walks smack into a revolution triggered by his old wartime buddy, a native named Deong. As an ambassador, Brando looks like something out of an old Grace Moore movie, but he seems cut out for the job: his Sarkhanese is better than his English.

Bye Bye Birdie. This adolescent operetta loses a lot in translation from stage to screen. Ann-Margret, as the girl from Sweet Apple, Ohio, who gets involved with mush-mouthed rock-‘n’-roller named Conrad Birdie, can’t fool anybody into believing that she is 16 years old. But then she doesn’t really try.

I Could Go On Singing. If much of this movie is like a collection of scenes from some as-yet-unproduced Judy Garland Story (she wrangles over the custody of a child, she twitches with distress, she Goes On With the Show), Judy is acting every minute. And Garland’s acting, unlike her singing, gets better and better.

Love Is a Ball. In this Riviera-based frappė, Hope Lange is an heiress who chases Chauffeur Glenn Ford. Charles Boyer adds a zestful touch of Gallic.

Five Miles to Midnight. Sophia Loren and Tony Perkins in a thriller about a ne’er-do-well who escapes from a plane wreck and involves his wife in a plot to collect his life insurance. It is good, solid, black-and-white suspense stuff.

The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock hates birds and the Audubon Society hates Alfred Hitchcock.

The Balcony. Jean Genet’s allegory of life as a bawdy house 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.

TELEVISION

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Wednesday, April 24 Portrait (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.).*Metropolitan Opera Soprano Eileen Farrell discusses her career as singer and alternate offstage role of wife and mother.

Thursday, April 25

Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). “The Town That Died” stars Dana Andrews in a drama about an island town that shrivels up and turns to dust.

Friday, April 26

Jack Paar (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Kate Smith, Jonathan Winters, Cliff Arquette. Color.

Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The top news story of the week.

Saturday, April 27

Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). The cultural-educational children’s series focuses on stamps, ravens, and the harp. Color.

The Defenders (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). The Prestons’ clients this week: three men charged with a lynch murder, featuring Larry Hagman, Roy Poole and Milton Selzer.

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11:05 p.m.). Three Coins in the Fountain, starring Clifton Webb, Dorothy McGuire, Louis Jourdan and Rossano Brazzi, all in living color.

Sunday, April 28

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A documentary, “Frogmen of the Future,” on underwater training techniques taught by the U.S. Navy.

White Paper (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Chet Huntley on “The Business of Gambling.”

Monday, April 29

Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). The Hunters, with Robert Mitchum, Robert Wagner, Richard Egan and May Britt. Color.

Ben Casey (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A female psychiatrist (Patricia Neal) uses a truth serum to rouse one of her unresponsive patients.

Tuesday, April 30

Close-Up! (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A survey of Britain’s serious air-pollution problem.

THEATER

On Broadway

Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, follows the harsh fortunes of its shrewd heroine as she peddles belts and brandy to soldiers and loses her three children in the Thirty Years War. Astringent, ironic, mockingly antiheroic, the play is a black comedy with the purgative power of tragedy, but Anne Bancroft lacks the granitic authority that the central role demands.

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O’Neill. Time has added a comic flavor to this 4½-hour Freudian opus that the somber spirited playwright 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.

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 gloom at the thought of becoming a father at 60 provokes a two-hour hailstorm of pelting laughs.

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 bombshelter salesmen.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a model revival of the Pirandello classic, 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 enginers of nonconformist cliches on their own pretentious petard.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A Life of One’s Own, by Gerald Brenan. A sharp-eyed and superbly honest autobiography by a 69-year-old Englishman who at 25 opted out of civilization to pursue a hermit’s vocation.

The Brutal Friendship, by F. W. Deakin. In a scrupulously documented study, Historian Deakin shows how unacknowledged friction between Hitler and Mussolini poisoned the relations and disrupted the war efforts of their two countries.

Bonaparte in Egypt, by J. Christopher Herold. The vividly detailed saga of Napoleon’s three years in Egypt and of the gradual erosion of both his army and his dream of Eastern empire.

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.

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

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. The Glass-Blowers, Du Maurier

6. Triumph, Wylie (5)

7. The Tin Drum, Grass (7)

8. The Moonflower Vine, Carleton (10)

9. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (6)

10. $100 Misunderstanding, Cover (8)

NONFICTION 1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

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

3. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (3)

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

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

6. Final Verdict, St. Johns (4)

7. Silent Spring, Carson (7)

8. The Feminine Mystique, Friedan (9)

9. My Life in Court, Nizer (10)

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

*All times through April 27 E.S.T.; after that, E.D.T.