Television: Sep. 25, 1964

Having held back while NBC and ABC unveiled their new programs, this week it is CBS’s turn. Most of its new offerings are situation comedies, with situations ranging from the all-too-probable to the all-too-inconceivable. This just about completes the new season with only one or two stragglers coming in later.

Wednesday, September 23

THE PRESIDENCY: A SPLENDID MISERY (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).*A CBS News special with the words of various Presidents read by Actors James Daly, Gary Merrill, Sidney Blackmer, Macdonald Carey, E. G. Marshall, Herbert Marshall, Dan O’Herlihy, and Robert Ryan. Fredric March is host-narrator.

THE CARA WILLIAMS SHOW (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). A comedy about a husband and wife who work for a company that bans intra-office matrimony. Première.

Thursday, September 24 THE MUNSTERS (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). A new comedy series about a family of cheesy monsters. Première.

THE BAILEYS OF BALBOA (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). A new situation comedy about a poor family living on a houseboat in the luxury Balboa Yacht Basin—a kind of Beverly Hillbillies afloat—starring Paul Ford as Papa Bailey. Première.

DANIEL BOONE (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Expectable adventures every week, starring Fess Parker as Boone. Première.

Friday, September 25

THE ENTERTAINERS (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A new revue series starring Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart and Caterina Valente, with occasional appearances by Art Buchwald, Tessie O’Shea and others. Première.

GOMER PYLE-U.S.M.C. (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). A new series in which Jim Nabors plays a rookie marine. Première.

THE REPORTER (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Harry Guardino and Gary Merrill will star in this new series about a New York daily newspaper. Première.

THE JACK PAAR PROGRAM (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Mary Martin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, with film clips of the Paar family’s visit to Brazil. Color.

Saturday, September 26 ABC’S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Women’s World Softball championships and the Oklahoma Live Rattlesnake Hunt.

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). A new series about a fishing party that gets stranded on an uninhabited island à la Swiss Family Robinson. Premiere.

MR. BROADWAY (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Craig (Peter Gunn) Stevens stars in Garson Kanin’s new series about a public relations man. Première.

Sunday, September 27

QUEBEC-OUI: OTTAWA-NON (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). An NBC News special on Canadian nationalism.

MY LIVING DOLL (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). A new situation comedy with a new situation: Julie Newmar plays a top-secret Government robot, and Robert Cummings is the psychiatrist assigned to watch over her control box. Première.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, unforgettable as members of an all-girl orchestra in Some Like It Hot.

Monday, September 28

OLYMPIC PREVIEW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A special about the history of the games, including some old film footage of the 1900 Paris Olympics, Japan’s preparations for next month’s contests in Tokyo, and film clips of the athletes who will participate in them. Color.

RECORDS

Pop

Seldom if ever have pop singles sold as fast as they have in the last weeks of summer. Since the popularity of a 45 often attaches itself to the LP from which it came or which it hastily inspires, sales of albums too are soaring. Some of the fast-moving LPs, all lifted up the charts by a two-minute tune:

EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY (Reprise) was also the title of Dean Martin’s million-selling single and is surrounded here by other songs (Baby-O, My Heart Cries for You, A Little Voice) awash with similarly sudsy sentiments. Dino swallows his consonants and sounds as though he has no bones, but who cares when he sings such warm things?

I DON’T WANT TO BE HURT ANYMORE (Capitol) was the hit in Nat King Cole’s anthology for jilted lovers, including Only Yesterday, You’re Crying on My Shoulder, Road to Nowhere, and Was That the Human Thing to Do?. It seems as though Everybody Hurts Somebody.

ALL SUMMER LONG (Capitol). “My buddies and me are gittin’ real well known,” sing the Beach Boys, who sailed over a million with / Get Around. The Beach Boys feature the good California life, just surfing and riding their “groovy little Hondas.” But the end of all this Fun, Fun, Fun may be in sight. “We know they’re right when they say we’re not ready,” sings one treble boyish voice. “We’ll run away and get married anyhow.”

RAG DOLL (Philips). The Four Seasons resemble the Beach Boys in playing arrangements scored primarily for guitars and cash registers. Philosophically, however, they tend to be more conservative. It was they who warned Dawn to go away, and now along comes this sad rag doll. “I’d change her sad rags into glad rags if I could,” sings the hero, “but my folks won’t let me.”

HONEY IN THE HORN (RCA Victor). Trumpeter Al Hirt piped such a jolly rendition of Java that he’s had nothing but good news ever since. Honey, with Java in it, remains in perpetual motion in the record shops, and now two more bestselling collections have flowed from Hirt’s horn of plenty: Cotton Candy and Sugar Lips.

ROGER AND OUT (Smash). Roger Miller is the noisiest sinner in or out of Nashville. He spent the grocery money and half the rent on liquor and then jammed the air waves confessing. “Dang me, they ought to take a rope and hang me,” he keeps singing. Nobody is arguing with him, but so far the only action against him has been taken by Ruby Wright, who sings an answer to Dang Me called Dern Ya. In the meanwhile Miller has gone on writing songs like those that fill this album, e.g., Squares Make the World Go Round.

CINEMA

TOPKAPI. Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov make a jewel theft in Istanbul look like grand foolery in Director Jules Dassin’s niftiest caper since Rififi.

THE APE WOMAN. Italian Director Marco Ferreri creates a sublime parable of man’s inhumanity out of this squalid tale about a fast-buck promoter who meets, marries and makes a freak show of a girl (Annie Girardot) covered from head to toe with brown silky hair.

MARY POPPINS. In Walt Disney’s drollest movie in years, Julie Andrews works miracles as the rosy-cheeked young nanny who slides up bannisters and whisks the kiddies off to the airier reaches of a fantasy that offers many more lifts than lapses.

ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS. Based on valid speculation, this science-fiction saga imagines what might happen to a U.S. astronaut marooned on the red planet.

I’D RATHER BE RICH. In one of the season’s liveliest comedy sleepers, Sandra Dee gets hilarious support from two wide-awake oldtimers, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold, and a pair of newcomers, Robert Goulet and Andy Williams.

RHINO! is a brilliantly scenic safari that combines the usual African flora and fauna with highly entertaining melodrama and a sharp sense of fun.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A maiden ventures down the primrose path and stumbles over the brutal Sicilian social code in Director Pietro Germi’s savage tragicomedy, which is more biting but perhaps a bit less bubbly than his memorable Divorce—Italian Style.

GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. Britain’s Rita Tushingham is cute, earnest, cunning, brassy and just about everything else that a movie actress should be in this warm ly witty account of an Irish colleen’s romance with an aging author (Peter Finch).

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. The Beatles hit their nimble stride in a smooth, fresh, surprisingly funny comedy that is the answer to a maiden’s prayer, and then some.

THAT MAN FROM RIO. Jean-Paul Belmondo dodges poisoned darts and mad scientists in Philippe de Broca’s (The Five-Day Lover) wildly hilarious parody of Hollywood’s next-earthquake-please epic.

A SHOT IN THE DARK. As a bumbling police inspector, Peter Sellers pursues a seductive murder suspect (Elke Sommer) from corpse to corpse.

ZULU. A heroic band of British redcoats fights off hordes of proud native warriors in this bloody, bristling adventure film based on a historic battle at Rorke’s Drift, Natal, in 1879.

BOOKS

Best Reading

CORRIDORS OF POWER, by C. P. Snow. Sir Charles stalks the British Establishment again. This time his quarry is a brilliant M.P. who hitches his considerable ambitions to an excellent cause but fails to reckon on the complex motivations of both friends and enemies.

GIDEON’S TRUMPET, by Anthony Lewis. A lively account of Clarence Earl Gideon, the jailhouse lawyer who changed the Jaw of the land, is used to animate a complex subject—the changing philosophy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the last quarter century.

THE GOLDEN BEES, by Theo Aronson. A busy book indeed: the gossipy story of all the Bonapartes and their clamorous pursuit of instant aristocracy.

BEGINNING AGAIN, 1911-1918, by Leonard Woolf. In the third volume of his memoirs, the author writes of the early years of his marriage to the young esthete and writer, Virginia Stephen. In loving but painful detail, he recounts Virginia Woolf’s first flights into insanity years before her great novels were published.

THE ITALIAN GIRL, by Iris Murdoch. British Novelist Murdoch’s eighth book has a message that, for current writers, is almost universal: better to have botched up life than not to have lived at all. But she says it all her own way, which means with wit, understatement and plain old sedition.

THE LOST CITY, by John Gunther. To those who remember the days of beats and journalistic feats in the ’30s and ’40s, Gunther’s novel has enormous nostalgic value. The lost city is Vienna, and among its dashing celebrants were Dorothy Thompson and Vincent Sheean.

A START IN FREEDOM, by Sir Hugh Foot. Sir Hugh has spent his adult years and his considerable talents on helping British colonies to independence; his book is interesting both as memoir and practical political science.

GERMANS AGAINST HITLER, by Terence Prittie. Historians have been curiously reticent about the Germans who fought Hitler from the pulpit, in pamphlets and by direct action—mostly at the cost of their lives. Prittie’s book does belated justice to those who battled Nazi totalitarianism.

A MOTHER’S KISSES, by Bruce Jay Friedman. A very funny novel about a domineering mother and her miserable teenage son. Friedman balances bitter humor and driving obsession to create an inimitable comic style.

MOZART THE DRAMATIST, by Brigid Brophy. A brilliant interpretation written so gracefully as to disarm criticism of the author’s heavily Freudian outlook.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carré (3 last week)

2. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (1)

3. Armageddon, Uris (2)

4. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (5)

5. Julian, Vidal (4)

6. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (8)

7. This Rough Magic, Stewart (6)

8. The 480, Burdick (9)

9. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (7)

10. Boys and Girls Together, Goldman

NONFICTION

1. Harlow, Shulman (1)

2. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (3)

3. The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross (2)

4. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (4)

5. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (6)

6. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (5)

7. The Italians, Barzini (10)

8. Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver (7)

9. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (8)

10. Crisis in Black and White, Silberman (9)

*All Times E D T