Television: Apr. 9, 1965

Wednesday, April 7

HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.)* Original teleplay dramatizing the life of Florence Nightingale, who is portrayed by Julie Harris. Color.

Thursday, April 8

PERRY COMO’S MUSIC HALL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Como entertains Singer Connie Stevens, Comedian Woody Allen and Trumpeter Al Hirt.

Friday, April 9

SAGA OF WESTERN MAN (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Custer’s Last Stand. Color.

F.D.R. (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.”). The President wins an unprecedented third term.

Saturday, April 10

MASTERS GOLF TOURNAMENT (CBS, 5 6 p.m.). Arnold Palmer attempts to defend his title in this 29th Masters tournament.

MISSION TO MALAYA (ABC, 9:30-10;30 p.m.). A continuing series on “The Daring American” focuses on two Peace Corps nurses in Malaya.

Sunday, Aoril 11

DIRECTIONS ’65 (ABC, 1-2 p.m.). The Final Ingredient, an opera celebrating Passover, composed by David Amram and Arnold Weinstein.

MASTERS GOLF TOURNAMENT (CBS, 4-5:30 p.m.). Final holes.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Portrait of Socialist Leader Norman Thomas.

WORLD WAR I (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). The last program in this worthy series examines the mood of the postwar world.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-12 midnight). Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker star in William Wyler’s The Big Country. Color.

THE ROGUES (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). David Niven helps Smuggler’s Assistant Suzy Parker deliver stolen jewels to Scotland Yard. Repeat.

Monday, April 12

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Agents Solo and Kuryakin are captured by beautiful Thrush operatives.

F.D.R. REMEMBERED (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). A commemorative program marking the 20th anniversary of Roosevelt’s death focuses on his private life.

Tuesday, April 13

THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Olivia de Havilland is host to Dorothv Collins, Richard Tucker and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Color.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE ODD COUPLE consists of a gruff sportswriter (Walter Matthau) and a fuss-budgety newscaster (Art Carney) who share living quarters after losing their wives. Thanks to them, plus Playwright Neil Simon and Director Mike Nichols, this ménage is a Niagara of laughter.

TINY ALICE. The symbolic heroine or Edward Albee’s opaque allegory is either God or the absence of God—no one seems to know, but everyone seems to enjoy talking about it, and Sir John Gielgud’s performance is an indisputable gem.

LUV. Murray Schisgal sees life as a sickness from which most people recover, and he amusingly deflates the gassy, self-pitying bosh that is said about it. Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson ride this troika of hilarity.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, in the persons of a bookstore clerk (Alan Alda) and a prostitute (Diana Sands), hoot and claw at each other until they discover that they have something uncommonly common in common.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Zero Mostel, a virtuoso of the mind’s merriment and the heart’s grief, dominates this wistfully nostalgic musical about a small Jewish community in the Russia of 1905.

Off Broadway

JUDITH. The late French Dramatist Jean Giraudoux cleverly plays Freudian and Shavian hob with the apocryphal tale of the Jewish heroine who saved Israel by killing the Assyrian general Holofernes. In the title role, Rosemary Harris is tartly, tenderly, elusively and enchantingly feminine.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE has the tensile strength of some of Arthur Miller’s least pretentious and least self-conscious writing. Robert Duvall plays the doomed longshoreman hero with the uncompromising force of a body blow.

THE ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE. In these two one-acters, Britain’s Harold Pinter conjures up menace with the easy authority of a Hitchcock and poses Pirandelphic conundrums about the nature of truth and reality.

RECORDS

Opera

BELLINI: NORMA (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). Joan Sutherland is too bland an actress for the role of the passionate Druid priestess, but there is nothing tame about her voice. It soars effortlessly along the arching melodies, pours forth the Casta Diva like a shower of silver, and even when demanding blood and carnage, never turns shrill. Mezzo Marilyn Horne is Sutherland’s rival in love and her runner-up in bel canto; understandably, with two such prima donnas singing for his favors, Tenor John Alexander sounds a little overwhelmed. With the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Richard Bonynge.

STRAVINSKY: THE RAKE’S PROGRESS (Columbia; 3 LPs). The music is a slightly dissonant, eerie echo of 18th century opera, atinkle with harpsichord, but the libretto, by W. H. Auden and Chester Kailman, though set in Hogarth’s London, is a 20th century nightmare. Tom Rakewell, goaded by Nick Shadow, the devil, marries a bearded lady to assert his freedom from both passion and reason, and dies in the madhouse thinking he is Adonis. Tenor Alexander Young is a lyrical, sensitive rake-in-progress, Baritone John Reardon a sly devil, and Soprano Judith Raskin is sweet-voiced in the pallid role of Anne Truelove, Tom’s lost innocent. Stravinsky himself conducts.

MOZART: THE MAGIC FLUTE (Angel; 3 LPs). Otto Klemperer leads the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus a bit too deliberately, as though savoring all the riches at his disposal, which admittedly are considerable. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig are two of the unnamed Ladies, and they make the trios a delight. Tenor Nicolai Gedda, singing Tamino, never sounded better. The two leading sopranos, though virtually unknown in the U.S., should be so no longer. They are Lucia Popp, the coldly crystalline coloratura Queen of the Night, and Gundula Janowitz, a meltingly sweet and pure Pamina.

HANDEL: ALCINA HIGHLIGHTS (London). Six soloists appear one after another to sing arias, the coloring and texture of their voices closely contrasted like flowers in a mixed bouquet. The sopranos are Joan Sutherland, Graziella Sciutti and Mirella Freni; the mezzos, Teresa Berganza and Monica Sinclair; the tenor, Luigi Alva. Sciutti is perhaps the most eloquent of all as she sings Believe in My Unhappiness.

WAGNER: DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NüRNBERG (RCA Victor; 5 LPs). There is no single coruscating star unless it is Conductor Joseph Keilberth, who makes the long score snap with life rarely caught even when recorded, as this was, during a performance (the opening of the rebuilt National Theater in Munich). Basses Otto Wiener and Hans Hotter give their well-established interpretations as Hans Sachs and Veit Pogner, but the freshest voices belong to two Americans, Soprano Claire Watson as Eva and Tenor Jess Thomas as Walther.

CINEMA

THE OVERCOAT. In this virtually flawless Russian film based on Gogol’s classic story, Roland Bykov is superb as the nondescript clerk for whom a new overcoat becomes a matter of life and death.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL. An orphaned British lad (Fergus McClelland) wandering alone through Africa falls in with a grizzled old diamond poacher (Edward G. Robinson) in a crackling adventure story with the charm of Huck Finn and the ruggedness of a Hemingway safari.

THE TRAIN. Boxcars full of French art are the rolling stock of Director John Frankenheimer’s muscular World War II drama about a Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) and a Resistance leader (Burt Lancaster) playing tug-of-war with trains.

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. As a Parisian servant girl employed in a French provincial home, Jeanne Moreau grapples with family skeletons and smoothly finds her way through the murkier passages of a bleak, bitter satire directed by Luis Buñuel (Viridiand).

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. The Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein operetta looses a landslide of sentimental song, but its most spectacular effects are achieved by Julie Andrews and the Tyrolean Alps.

RED DESERT. A wasteland created by heavy industry pollutes the psyche of a young wife (Monica Vitti) in Director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. Uxoricidal impulses, batted around with a slapstick by Jack Lemmon as a reluctant husband, Terry-Thomas as his woman-hating Man Friday, and Italy’s Virna Lisi as the superfluous lady.

MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. After 20 years of fun, a pastry merchant (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers that his homeloving harlot (Sophia Loren) has hoarded up enough wild oats for a wedding cake.

ZORBA THE GREEK. The heart and soul of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel are brought roaringly to life by Anthony Quinn as the wicked old brute who teaches a timid essayist (Alan Bates) to put away his books and plunge into real trouble.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN, by Christina Stead. This singular novel of family life was considered too intemperate when it was first published in 1940. Now, countless case studies later, Miss Stead’s distillation of the warfare between neurotic parents rings terrifyingly true.

CASTLE KEEP, by William Eastlake. A medieval castle deep in the Ardennes Forest is occupied by a decadent count, his child-wife, and a bumbling, boondoggling bunch of G.I.s who find themselves squarely in the path of the German thrust for Bastogne. Interweaving satire, tragedy and gothic mystery, Novelist Eastlake has created a surreal small masterpiece.

MY SHADOW RAN FAST, by Bill Sands. Sentenced to “one year to life” on three counts of armed robbery, rebellious Convict Sands was rehabilitated almost overnight by Clinton T. Duffy, the crusading warden of San Quentin. He now crisscrosses the U.S. trying to convince other convicts to go “square.”

THE FAMILY MOSKAT, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story of a rich Warsaw family, told with richness and scope reminiscent of the great 19th century Russian novels. Singer, too often tagged as “the master of Yiddish prose,” ranks among the best contemporary novelists in any language.

LINCOLN’S SCAPEGOAT GENERAL, by Richard S. West Jr. Next to McClellan, the Union’s most controversial Civil War general was Benjamin (“Beast”) Butler. Like McClellan, he was weak in the field, but he was an efficient military governor of New Orleans and a doughty champion of liberal causes during the Reconstruction.

THE GOLD OF THE RIVER SEA, by Charlton Ogburn. His plot has enough vigor and ingenuity to sustain a three-year television serial, but Novelist Ogburn’s most memorable achievement is his depiction of the Amazon, an evocation in the tradition of Twain’s Mississippi.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)

2. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (2)

3. Hurry Sundown, Gilden (5)

4. The Man, Wallace (4)

5. Hotel, Hailey (6)

6. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

7. Don’t Stop the Carnival, Wouk

8. The Legend of the Seventh Virgin, Holt (9)

9. The Ordways, Humphrey (7)

10. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (8)

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Queen Victoria, Longford (2)

3. The Founding Father, Whalen (4)

4. The Italians, Barzini (3)

5. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (5)

6. Reminiscences, MacArthur (6)

7. Life with Picasso, Gilot and Lake (7)

8. Catherine the Great, Oldenbourg (10)

9. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (8)

10. Iwo Jima, Newcomb (9)

*All times E.S.T.