Cinema: Jun. 16, 1961

While a number of domestic comedies are on view, ranging from fair to sad—including The Pleasure of His Company, The Last Time I Saw Archie, On the Double—the field at the moment is dominated by the grim and the foreign.

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 and Diamonds is a powerful and ironic farewell to arms, set in 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.

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 in this derring-documentary, photographed with edgy excitement.

TELEVISION

Wed., June 14

Kraft Mystery Theater (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* First of a new chiller series filmed in England is “The Professionals,” about a safecracker who gets out of prison and into trouble.

United States Steel Hour (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A custody fight turns into a murder investigation in “Trial Without Jury,” a courtroom drama presented live.

Thurs., June 15

Summer Sports Spectacular (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Filmed report on this year’s Grand Prix de Monaco, a sports-car race won by the thickness of a coat of paint.

CBS Reports (10-11 p.m.). A year after his first TV appearance, Walter Lippmann again comments on the world’s troubles.

Ernie Kovacs Special (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). More sight-and-sound gags by an entertainer who has not heard that TV comedy is dead.

Fri., June 16

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). One of the week’s major news stories.

Sat., June 17

ABC’s Wide World of Sports (5-7 p.m.). Driver Stirling Moss describes the action in the 24-hour sports-car race at Le Mans.

National Open Golf Championship (NBC, 5:30-7 p.m.). A duffer’s delight: the Open’s last four holes.

Sun., June 18

Major League Baseball (NBC, 2:30 p.m. to conclusion). Twins v. White Sox, except in major-league areas.

Family Classics (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). The Heiress, with Julie Harris, Farley Granger and Barry Morse. Repeat.

This Week Around the World (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). The week’s major stories, presented in a “magazine” format.

Tues., June 20

Focus on America (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.). In “The Constant Protectors,” a good local documentary, cameras prowl the streets of St. Louis with a police patrol car.

THEATER

On Broadway

This is how things stand near the end of a dismal season:

DRAMA. The only survivors are the Pulitzer Prizewinning idyl, All the Way Home; A Far Country, which might also be titled Young Dr. Freud; and A Taste of Honey, a gentle treatment of some bitter episodes. All are worthwhile, plus, of course, last season’s The Miracle Worker, superb even without the original cast, for anyone who has not yet seen it.

COMEDY. Jean Kerr’s Mary, Mary is a hilarious must, with lonesco’s Rhinoceros a provocative near-must. Come Blow Your Horn recommended for fanciers of Jewish family humor. An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May recommended for everyone, at least once but preferably twice.

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 an excessively corny mixture of Irish sass and sentiment. As for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, it is a national monument made of sugar, and should appeal to anyone who likes monuments, sugar or 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. The classics are represented by a vivid and remarkably durable Hedda Gabler, with Anne Meacham doing Ibsen to the hilt. Also recommended: Under Milk Wood, a fine performance of Dylan Thomas’ ribald and rueful elegy to a little Welsh town; a City Center revival of Rodgers & Hart’s raffish and memorable Pal Joey.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Sumer: The Dawn of Art, by André Parrot. A handsome display of bookmaking devoted to some of the earliest art works fashioned by civilized man. Under the general editorship of André Malraux, Sumer is the first of some 40 volumes that promise to reduce the celebrated “Museum Without Walls” to paper.

At Fever Pitch, by David Caute. As ineffectual Britons drop another position of empire, cynical black Africans claw at each other for the pieces in this searing first novel that explores, rather than exploits, the headlines.

The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey. Another disturbing African novel about an oddly matched pair of students, McNair (white) and Mukasa (black), and a journey that turns them into Cain and Abel.

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. A graceful, informative account of the relations between Russia and the West, 1917-45.

The Morning and the Evening, by Joan Williams, and The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. The small-town South (Mississippi) and the big-city South (New Orleans) chronicled with arresting talent.

Phaedra and Figaro, translated respectively by Robert Lowell and Jacques Barzun. The fire of Racine’s tragedy and the froth of Beaumarchais’ farce evoked with sense and sensitivity.

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. Winnie Ille Pu, Milne (8)

6. Hawaii, Michener (6)

√ 7. Midcentury, Dos Passos (7)

8. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (10)

9. A Shooting Star, Stegner

10. Advise and Consent, Drury (5)

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

√ 7. Fate Is the Hunter, Gann (7)

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

9. Reality in Advertising, Reeves (10)

√ 10. Skyline, Fowler

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