Cinema: Jul. 26, 1963

The Great Escape. Seventy-six Allied officers accomplish the impossible: a mass breakout from the Nazis’ top-security prison camp. The plans and preparation are shown in almost hypnotic detail, and once the escape is under way, the suspense tightens like pincers. Steve McQueen. James Garner, Donald Pleasence, Richard Attenborough head an excellent all-male cast in one of the season’s most exciting pictures.

This Sporting Life. Hulking Richard Harris is a professional rugby player who hits the big time in England but is no hero to his love-starved mistress. A jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and confused motivation, This Sporting Life was better as a novel.

Call Me Bwana. Bob Hope, Anita Ekberg and Edie Adams on a spy chase through darkest Congo. Hope springs eternal, but Ekberg is a couple of jumps ahead of him.

My Name Is Ivan. This extraordinary Russian film glows with human understanding as it explores the relationship between Ivan, a twelve-year-old spy behind the Nazi lines, and the Russian army officers who are at once his idols, his masters and his equals.

Murder at the Gallop. Margaret Rutherford plays the indomitable Miss Marple again in a hilarious Agatha Christie story that gives her full opportunity to display her basset-like qualities in tracking down a murderer.

8½. A surface look at Federico Fellini’s newest film reveals an autobiographical plot about a movie director (Marcello Mastroianni) who cannot seem to get started on a new picture; but there is much more to be seen in this monumentally abstract, overwhelmingly pictorial cinematic psychoanalysis.

PT 109. Cliff Robertson, as Lieut, (j.g.) John F. Kennedy, eschews the J.F.K. mannerisms of speech and gesture, but nothing else has been left out of this reverently made grade-B picture about the President’s wartime exploits.

RECORDS

Charles Ives: Washington’s Birthday and Three Outdoor Scenes (William Strickland conducting the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Imperial Philharmonic of Tokyo; Composers Recordings). The four previously unrecorded pieces by Ives run from a delightfully winterstruck evocation of all outdoors to the musical equivalent of pop art—an aural collage of clipped folk tunes and imitative sounds. On the other side, the music of Composer William Flanagan gives a chaste and lovely setting to an early poem that Edward Albee now likes to forget he ever wrote.

Beethoven: Christ on the Mount of Olives (Jan Peerce, Maria Stader and Otto Wiener, soloists; the Vienna Academy Chorus and State Opera Orchestra conducted by Hermann Scherchen; Westminster). Put a few dozen voices anywhere under a choral director and they’re apt to belt out the rousing final chorus of this oratorio; but its starkly eloquent arias are seldom heard. Singing Beethoven’s Jesus, Tenor Peerce builds to a marvelous anguish, which unfortunately tends to increase when he is coping with high notes.

Prokofiev: Concerto No. 4 for Piano (Left Hand) and Orchestra (Rudolf Serkin; Columbia). This controversial concerto was written in 1931 for Paul Wittgenstein, the one-armed pianist, but languished unheard for 25 years. “Aggressively modern,” snorted Wittgenstein, refusing to play it. His was a harsh verdict, judging by Serkin’s performance.

Schumann: Carnaval (Artur Rubinstein; RCA Victor). Some of Schumann sounds like the fourth draft of a suicide note from a heartsick spinster. But here is an unpremeditated celebration of life, in which Rubinstein’s firm hand keeps Schumann’s Gemütlichkeit infectious rather than cloying.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (West German Radio-Cologne Electronic Studios; Deutsche Grammophon) comes on like the launching of a thousand spaceships and fades out like a souped-up sound track for Hitchcock’s The Birds; it happens to be the most communicative example of electronic music yet recorded. Midst a welter of high-decibel cacophony, the voice of a boy soprano speaks of God.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Spectacular Rogue: Gaston B. Means, by Edwin P. Hoyt. He could have lived in splendor on the take from just one of his spectacular swindles, but for Means the joy of a lie was in living it, so he conned the rich (mostly women) the slow, dramatic way.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle, by Ved Mehta. A report from the high ivory tower occupied by Oxbridge philosophers and historians. The thin air is filled out by the author’s gossipy patter and sure sense of extravagant anecdote about eccentric dons.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Armed with the latest recording paraphernalia and intellectual questions, the editors have again set down the words of important writers (Katherine Anne Porter, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell, Marianne Moore). Shy subjects seem remote, but garrulous ones talk magnificently and at length.

Elizabeth Appleton, by John O’Hara. The prolific author’s archetypal story—of a woman, her husband and her lover. This time it is set on the campus of a small college, and O’Hara snipes at the much-satirized world of academe.

Harry the Rat with Women, by Jules Feiffer. Seeking love and finding oneself is a contradiction in terms, says Cartoonist Feiffer, so his mirror-magnetized hero is ruined by the love of a good woman.

The Contrary Experience, by Herbert Read. Born in time to be chased through the entire 20th century, Sir Herbert has been a fine soldier, successful bureaucrat, acclaimed critic, and in this memoir he comments on his complex life as one of the “alienated souls” who seek values without the support of religion.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (1, last week)

2. Elizabeth Appleton, O’Hara (2)

3. The Glass-Blowers, Du Maurier (3)

4. City of Night, Rechy (6)

5. Grandmother and the Priests, Caldwell (5)

6. Raise High the Roof Beam, Salinger (4)

7. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (7)

8. The Bedford Incident, Rascovich (9)

9. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (8)

10. Stacy Tower, Walter (10)

NONFICTION

1. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (2)

2. The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper (1)

3. I Owe Russia $1,200, Hope (5)

4. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, Lewis (3)

5. Terrible Swift Sword, Catton (6)

6. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (4)

7. Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White (7)

8. The Feminine Mystique, Friedan

9. The Great Hunger, Woodham-Smith (10)

10. The Living Sea, Cousteau (9)