Cinema, Television, Theater, Books: Jun. 23, 1961

CINEMA

While a number of domestic comedies are on view, ranging from fair to sad the field at the moment is dominated by foreign films, most of them grim

IN ITALIAN: Violent Summer is an old wave film about a short, sensuous, foredoomed affair played out in Fascist Italy In Two Women, mother (Sophia Loren) and daughter (Eleonora Brown) prove that in World War II Italy, only those who suffer can love. La Dolce Vita is a sprawling, formless masterpiece of modern Rome’s spiritual depravity and sexual excess, and L’Avventura is another endless but masterly dissection of the malignant tedium that grips contemporary Italy’s empty-souled profligates.

IN POLISH: Ashes jaid Diamonds is a powerful and ironic farewell to arms, set Poland in the days just after the Nazi surrender. In Kanal, a group of resistance fighters, trapped in the sewers of German-occupied Warsaw, struggle to their doom A welcome break in the lowering skv comes with Eve Wants to Sleep, a zany cops-and-robbers farce, whose cops are Keystone and whose badmen are clearly friends of Mack the Knife.

IN U.S. MOVIES: the accents are fairly grim, too. The plot of The Young Savages is straight from Hollywood’s pasteboard jungle, but the documentary scenes of punks and finks roaming through Manhattan’s tenement-glutted, garbage-strewn juvenile jungle carry the authority of the headlines. In The Secret Ways, Richard Widmark is the hero on the run, and the Communists are the heavies.

TELEVISION

Wed., June 21

Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS 10-11 p.m.).* The Story of Gordon Seagrave, M.D., the “Burma Surgeon,” told again with films made on location in Namhkam.

Thurs., June 22

Summer Sports Spectacular (CBS 7:30-8:30 p.m.). An anthology of Australian athletics, including shark fishing, crocodile hunting surfboard racing, log splitting, sheep shearing, Australian football, jalopy racing—everything but billy-bonging

Bell & Howell Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). The program documents the daily lives of two U.S. diplomats, one in Chile, the other in East Pakistan, attempting to redress the notion that the Foreign Service is a gay and easy life: the cookies they push are sometimes hardtack.

Fri., June 23

Person to Person (CBS, 10:30-11 pm ) Visits to the homes of three of Bing Crosby’s sons—Phillip, Dennis and Lindsay.

Sat., June 24

ABC’s Wide World of Sports (ABC 5-7 p.m.). National A.A.U. track and field championships at Randalls Island, NY

The Nation’s Future (NBC, 9:30-10-30 p.m.). Debate subject: “How Free Should the Press Be?” Among participants: Aleksei Adzhubei, son-in-law of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and editor of Izvestia, Pierre

Salinger, U.S. presidential press secretary and Reporter Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times.

Sun., June 25

Look Up and Live (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). The Marquette University Players in Part IV of The Coventry Mystery Cycle, a series of medieval miracle plays. This program covers the Agony in the Garden, the Resurrection and the Ascension, and the Last Judgment.

Eichmann on Trial (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.). Summary of last week’s developments.

Issues and Answers (ABC, 4:30-5 p.m.). Interviewed: Postmaster General J. Edward Day.

Dr. B. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Filmed in Flemington, N.J., the program documents the life and practice of a family doctor.

THEATER

On Broadway

DRAMA. The only survivors are the Pulitzer-prizewinning idyl, All the Way Home; A Far Country, more or less how young Dr. Freud discovered psychoanalysis in three easy sessions; The Best Man, Gore Vidal’s breathless but depthless dramatization of electoral politics; and A Taste of Honey, which mixes tenderness and bitterness in a raffish setting. Plus last season’s The Miracle Worker, superb even without the original cast.

COMEDY. Jean Kerr’s Mary, Mary is not only funny but wise; lonesco’s Rhinoceros is not only funny but provocative Come Blow Your Horn is a long, often amusing, Jewish family joke. An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, two people who may just possibly abolish boredom, can and should still be caught before the show closes in two weeks.

MUSICALS. On balance, Camelot has a far more engaging score than was at first conceded; with a splendid cast and sets, the troubled book is almost overcome! The most charming musical around remains Irma La Douce, the freshest Carnival! and Bye Bye Birdie and Fiorello! are both unpretentiously funny. Do Re Mi has Phil Silvers, but despite the inspired help of Nancy Walker, book and music combine to make this a lot less entertaining than Bilko reruns. Donnybrook!, another one of those hopeful musicals that believe in the magic of the exclamation point is a corny mixture of Irish sass and sentiment. As for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, it is so sweet it hurts, but it does have Mary Martin.

Off Broadway

Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a mocking kaleidoscopic allegory of race hatred, is probably the most interesting item around. Genet’s other long-running offering is The Balcony, an amusing charade in which the world is seen as a vast brothel. Rising Dramatist Edward Albee, who has not yet written a full-length play, has built a reputation on lonesco-like one-acters, of which The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith are now on view. Also recommended: Hedda Gabler, with Anne Meacham doing Ibsen to the hilt-and Under Milk Wood, a fine performance of Dylan Thomas’ ribald and rueful elegy to a little Welsh town.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Essays and Introductions, by William Butler Yeats. These are the thoughts of the early Yeats, the prophet of the Celtic Twilight. Here is the cult of beauty, the mystique of art as religion, and the strange notions that somehow fed the glories of his poetry.

Memed My Hawk, by Yashar Kemal An appealing first novel from Turkey tells the story of an Anatolian village lad who grows up to be a modern Robin Hood.

Sumer: The Dawn of Art, by Andre Parrot. A handsome display of bookmaking devoted to some of the earliest art works fashioned by civilized man.

At Fever Pitch, by David Caute. For obvious reasons, British writers are tops when it comes to describing disintegrating empires. The locale in this fine first novel is Africa.

The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey. Another novel of Africa in which a black and a white student first tightrope-walk and later trip on the color line.

The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, and Poems, by George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner. The first book-length chance U.S. readers have had to become acquainted with the two greatest poets of 20th century Greece and with their timely and timeless sense of the past.

Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by George Kennan. There is grace and reflective melancholy in this highly informative chronicling of U.S.-Russian relations, 1917-45.

The Morning and the Evening, by Joan Williams, and The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. More impressive proof, if any is needed, that a prime Southern crop is superior first novels.

Best Sellers ( √ previously included in TIME’S choice of Best Reading)

FICTION

1. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (1)*

√2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (2)

√3. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (3)

√4. A Burnt-Out Case, Greene (4)

5. Don’t Tell Alfred, Mitford

6. China Court, Godden

7. Mila 18, Uris

8. The Incredible Journey, Burnford

9. Hawaii, Michener (6)

10. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (8)

NONFICTION

√1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1)

2. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (2)

√3. The New English Bible (3)

√4. Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell (4)

5. My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, Parks (5)

√6. Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennan (8)

√7. Fate Is the Hunter, Gann (7)

8. The Sixth Man, Stearn

9. Reality in Advertising, Reeves (9)

10. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Hauser (6)

* All times are E.D.T., * Position on last week’s list.