Time Listings: May 18, 1962

Five Finger Exercise. A perspicuous and painful study of a family that has risen from rags to wretchedness.

State Fair. Composer Richard Rodgers has added new songs to this remake of the 1945 film, in which the corn is somehow taller and the color louder.

Moon Pilot. A skillful Walt Disney comedy about nervous astronauts and slow-thinking FBI men.

The Horizontal Lieutenant. A dogface farce that may not fracture any funny bones but manages to pile up a bumper crop of nuts on a Pacific island. It stars Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton, who are surely the most promising romanticomedians around.

Bell’ Antonio. An Italian film that seriously and discreetly discusses a case of impotence.

All Fall Down. Angela Lansbury is painful and fascinating as a mother hen who clucks inanely over a bad egg (Warren Beatty), but the picture is just painful.

Only Two Can Play. Peter Sellers is perfectly hilarious as a lubricous bookworm, a wan don who thinks he is a Don Juan.

Viridiana. Made in Spain on Franco’s money but banned in Spain by Franco’s decree, this peculiar and powerful film by Luis Buñuel predicts in parable the next Spanish revolution.

Through a Glass Darkly. Ingmar Bergman’s thematic analysis of four lives, as subtle as Wild Strawberries but solider in substance.

The Night. A marriage dissected by Director Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy’s great pathologist of morals.

Lover Come Back. Doris Day and Rock Hudson as adman and adwoman in a stock situation comedy worked out as smoothly as a chess problem: opening gambit, queen’s sacrifice, knight rooked, mate.

Jules and Jim. France’s Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) has created a gay, grotesque little fable about two men in love with a Lorelei (Jeanne Moreau).

The Counterfeit Traitor. A spate of spy stuff, slick and scary, with William Holden and Lilli Palmer playing hugger-mugger in Hitlerland.

Sweet Bird of Youth. In most Hollywood movies chrome does not pay, but in this case Writer-Director Richard Brooks has redipped and triple-polished a hunk of junk by Tennessee Williams until it glitters like a junkie’s eyeball.

Last Year at Marienbad. A Gordian knot of cinema tied by two ingenious Frenchmen, Scenarist Alain Robbe-Grillet and Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour).

A View from the Bridge. Arthur Miller’s attempt to find Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush.

TELEVISION

Wed., May 16

Howard K. Smith: News and Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Summary of the week’s most important news items, with analysis.

David Brinkley’s Journal (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Interview with Welterweight Champion Emile Griffith. Color.

Fri., May 18

NBC White Paper (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). A clinical look at a slum in Palermo, Sicily, diet Huntley is narrator.

Sat., May 19

The 86th Preakness (CBS. 5:30-6 p.m.). The running of the $150,000 added classic from Pimlico Race Track, Baltimore.

Sun., May 20

Look Up and Live (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). Aria da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s dark comedy on man’s frail frivolity in the face of his commanding vices.

Directions ’62 (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). Last in a series of spring music concerts presenting music written before 1750.

News Special (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.). President Kennedy speaks on medical care for the aged.

Du Pont Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A Sound of Hunting, a drama based on the 1945 stage play, tells the ordeals of an American rifle squad pinned down by German machine guns in the Italian campaign. Starring Sal Mineo, Peter Falk and Robert Lansing.

Mon., May 21

Ben Casey (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A brilliant chemist becomes vegetative after a faulty operation, and Dr. Casey, of course, is furious. Starring James Franciscus.

Tues., May 22

The Emmy Awards (NBC, 10-11:30 p.m.). Television’s chance to heap praise on itself. Johnny Carson is host in New York, David Brinkley in Washington and Bob Newhart in Hollywood.

Bell and Howell Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). “The Overseas Chinese.” their power and potential danger in Southeast Asia. Particular focus on Singapore.

THEATER

On Broadway

A Thousand Clowns, by Herb Gardner. To conform or not to conform—that is the shopworn question that this ingratiating comedy answers with fresh and infectious humor. The cast, headed by Jason Robards Jr. and Sandy Dennis, is great fun to be with.

The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. This New York Drama Critics Circle prize play carries four desperate people toward self-acceptance and self-transcendence. Margaret Leighton, who acts with the purity of light, has won a Tony Award for her performance.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. A resonant drama of probity about probity. Paul Scofield’s playing of wise, witty Sir Thomas More is a theatrical act of grace. Voted best foreign play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle.

Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, treats God and man as back-fence neighbors, more humorous than awesome, more colloquial than eloquent, but there are occasional glints of religious fervor in Chayefsky’s firmament.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a delightful spoof of officemanship. Org Man Robert Morse conducts an irresistible, evening-long romance with himself as he scrambles up a corporate hill of bean-brains. Voted best musical of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle.

Off Broadway

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, by Arthur Kopit. Mom never had it so bad. Amid the Venus flytraps, Barbara Harris glistens as a hilariously voracious sexling.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Wax Boom, by George Mandel. A tense symbolic war novel explores the near insanity that afflicts men too long exposed to combat.

Shut Up, He Explained, selections from Ring Lardner edited by Babette Rosmond and Henry Morgan. Tidbits likely to whet the appetite for a full-scale revival of America’s greatest comic sharpshooter.

Patriotic Gore, by Edmund Wilson. Threading together an apparently haphazard series of essays on the literature of the U.S. Civil War, Wilson achieves an important work in history, more stirring than an account of the bloodiest battles.

The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Harry T. Moore. Epistolary barbs and insights from the pen of a pungent novelist-poet.

Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. A brilliant and often savage account of life on a prewar German cruise ship becomes a universal study in human folly.

George, by Emlyn Williams. The celebrated playwright and actor writes with warmth and wryness about the poverty of his Welsh childhood and the near disasters of his career at Oxford.

Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull. A richly detailed biography of the author of The Great Gatsby.

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, by John Updike. The accomplished author of Rabbit, Run and Poorhouse Fair scores another major triumph in his minor mode.

A Long and Happy Life, by Reynolds Price. This wise, skillful first novel about a Carolina country girl’s attempts to keep both her fiance and her virtue is marred only by an occasional too-sweeping bow toward William Faulkner.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Ship of Fools, Porter (1, last week)

2. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (4)

3. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (2)

4. Devil Water, Seton (6)

5. The Fox in the Attic, Hughes (5)

6. The Bull from the Sea, Renault (3)

7. Captain Newman, M.D., Rosten (9)

8. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (8)

9. Island, Huxley (7)

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (10)

NONFICTION

1. The Rothschilds, Morton (2)

2. Calories Don’t Count, Taller (1)

3. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)

4. The Guns of August, Tuchman (5)

5. Six Crises, Nixon (4)

6. In the Clearing, Frost (6)

7. The Making of the President 1960, White (8)

8. The Last Plantagenets, Costain (9)

9. CIA: The Inside Story, Tully

10. Scott Fitzgerald, Turnbull (10)

*All times E.D.T.