As part of an excellent series, U.S.A.: The Novel, National Educational Television (NET) stations in Boston, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle this week are showing “The Nonfiction Novel,” a self-portrait of Truman Capote, who talks about his bestselling book, /// Cold Blood. Dates and time vary locally. NET’s 94 other stations will broadcast the show over the next few months.
Wednesday, February 16 CHRYSLER PRESENTS A BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Hope and Danny Thomas play poker with Jill St. John as the table stakes; Martha Raye plays Batgirl with Hope as an archvillain called Lobster Man; and Les Brown plays music with the Righteous Brothers.
Thursday, February 17 CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Harvey, Hollywood’s fairly successful attempt to pull a rabbit out of a Broadway topper.
Friday, February 18
AN EVENING WITH CAROL CHANNING (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Satirical potshots aimed at art (Carol as a Dollyesque Mona Lisa), culture (U.N.C.L.E.’s David McCallum reading poetry), vaudeville (Comedian George Burns and Carol spoofing the old routines) and TV’s star-glazed travelogues (“Carol Channing’s Los Angeles”).
Saturday, February 19
ABC’S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The New York Athletic Club Track & Field Meet at Madison Square Garden.
Sunday, February 20
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Moscow University, housed in a 39-story skyscraper, provides a view of higher education in the U.S.S.R.
THE DAUGHTERS OF ORANGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). An examination of the Dutch ruling family and the troubles that beset modern monarchy in general.
THE WAY OUT WEST (ABC, 8-9 p.m.).
San Francisco, Seattle, San Simeon, Yosemite and Los Angeles are some of the stops on this tour guided by the likes of William Saroyan, Willie Mays, Pierre Salinger, Francis X. Bushman and Lee Remick.
THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Sound and the Fury, in which Yul Brynner, in a wavy wig, is about as unrecognizable as the Faulkner novel on which the film is based. Margaret Leighton, however, wearing a Southern accent, can’t (and shouldn’t) be missed.
Monday, February 21
THE STROLLIN’ ’20s (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Langston Hughes’s memento of Harlem, with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll and Duke Ellington.
Tuesday, February 22
THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONCERT (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).
The Seventh Annual Young Performers’ Program in which Leonard Bernstein conducts selections from Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, with four young pianists taking turns as soloist.
THEATER
On Broadway
SWEET CHARITY. In this musical, Gwen Verdon proves that she is still the dancer assolnta of the U.S. stage. Bob Fosse’s choreography is wry and witty and winning, but the book, written by Neil Simon, is consistently stale, as if he had heard rather than written the gags.
THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. The inventive direction of Peter Brook and the superb performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company players as madmen in a masque make exciting theater out of Peter Weiss’s philosophical drama.
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. John Osborne has orchestrated the plight of a man out of time with his time, working in themes of frustration and painful self-recognition, building to a crescendo of despair. Actor Nicol Williamson is the virtuoso.
CACTUS FLOWER. This French transplant, nurtured by Director Abe Burrows, thrives on Gallic sex humor and farcical romance. Lauren Bacall as a spinster turned siren is as stingingly funny as she is decorative.
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. To be and let be is the code of a slightly nutty Manhattan family. Mama writes because a typewriter was delivered by mistake; papa makes firecrackers in the basem*nt; grandpa left the office 35 years ago and hasn’t checked back in since. The APA revival of this 1936 George Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy envelops the humor in nostalgia.
RECORDS
Jazz
ERROLL GARNER (MGM), one of the most recorded pianists in jazz, has not made an LP for two years and sounds mightily refreshed as he settles down for a Night at the Movies, reeling backward through the ’40s (Stella by Starlight) and the ’30s (You Made Me Love You) to the beginning of the talkies (Al Jolson’s Sonny Boy). Garner used to play while audiences sang to the bouncing ball, and his timeless, full-bodied theatrical style is just right for a cinematic anthology.
CHARLIE MINGUS (Limelight) appears as both bassist and composer in this rich and varied reissue, Mingus Revisited, recorded in 1960. The major piece, Half-Mast Inhibition, played by an orchestra of 22, compresses a dozen dreamlike moods into eight minutes, and could be called classical music as well as jazz. Another treat is Mingus’ Bemoanable Lady, who is lamented by the late Eric Dolphy, with all the eloquence of his alto sax.
JAMES MOODY (Argo), bandleader as well as Gillespie sideman, calls his album Cookin’ the Blues, and the frenetic accent is on the cookin’. Moody swings on both saxophone and flute, whether he is playing his own Moody Flooty, riffing through Little Buck, or weaving a silky skein around It Might As Well Be Spring.
JOHN COLTRANE (Impulse) amuses himself by playing with Mary Poppins’ Chim
Chim Cherce like a wildcat with a catnip mouse. Nature Boy is more complex, with an extra bass throwing one more monkey wrench into the quartet’s already deliberately disjointed rhythms. Tenor Saxophonist Coltrane also plays two of his own long, emotive, free-association compositions, Brazilia and Song of Praise.
THELONIOUS MONK (Columbia). Monk Misterioso is a mixed bag of eight pieces, recorded live-sometimes half alive-in concerts from Newport to Tokyo. The rhythm men seem to do little more than mark time, and though Tenor Saxophonist Charlie Rouse is excellent, Monk fans will want to hear more piano. Misterioso itself is flaccid. But the quartet wakes up to play a swinging, unsentimental I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.
DIZZY GILLESPIE (Limelight) leads a 26-man band in a symphony-length composition, Lalo Schifrin’s The New Continent. This is jazz in white tie and tails, more at home in Philharmonic Hall than at the Five Spot, but it is exciting, with suggestions of Inca and Aztec music as well as Spanish and African, and, of course, some interludes of Dizzy trumpeting.
GERRY MULLIGAN (Limelight) calls his album If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em. ‘Em refers to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Roger Miller and their ilk, whose best-selling songs Mulligan has borrowed for a bit of jazzing around. His baritone sax sounds rich and growling in A Hard Day’s Night and quietly insinuating in Mr. Tambourine Man, but most of the time Mulligan and his men are licked. They neither beat ’em nor join ’em.
CINEMA
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Set in Nazi-controlled Slovakia in 1942, this perfectly played Czech masterpiece reduces an awesome tragedy to human size. Its seriocomic hero is a well-meaning Aryan nonentity (Josef Kroner) who seizes the button shop owned by a feeble, trusting old Jewess (Ida Kaminska) and finds himself a partner in her fate.
KING AND COUNTRY. Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) unfolds the pity-and terror-filled tale of a World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) who is doomed to die and of the British officer (Dirk Bogarde) who is doomed to defend him.
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. Survivors of a plane crash in the Sahara, among them James Stewart, Hardy Kruger and Richard Attenborough, struggle to construct an airworthy vehicle from the wreckage, and work up plenty of excitement in the attempt.
OTHELLO. As Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice, Laurence Olivier makes this filmed stage production a spectacular display of virtuosity, though he spends so much of his talent impersonating a Negro that the characterization often seems skin-deep.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie head an exceptional cast in Director David Lean’s breathtaking, thoroughly romantic evocation of life and love in Russia a half-century ago.
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.
Espionage made grim, grey and as engrossing as it was in John le Carre’s novel, with Richard Burton perfectly cast as the worn-out British intelligence hack on an excruciatingly subtle mission behind the Berlin Wall.
DARLING. This bittersweet satire sheds crocodile tears for a jet-set playmate (Julie Christie) who lives and learns that a girl who is no better than she should be can do very well indeed.
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Director Federico Fellini (8½) looks into the mind of a troubled matron, played by Giulietta Masina, and finds a three-ring circus of fantasy.
BOOKS
Best Reading
ALLENBY OF ARABIA, by Brian Gardner.
Lawrence of Arabia is more famous today, but Allenby of Arabia was a much greater soldier, or so Historian Gardner says, and he demonstrates the proposition with eloquence and scholarship in a biography of Sir Edmund Allenby that includes a superb description of his military masterpiece: the Palestine campaign that knocked Turkey out of World War I.
A VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. Published 16 years after it was written, this early satirical distillation of Burgess’ comic imagination is worthy of his later work. A Vision unfolds the misadventures of a mild-mannered sergeant in the British Army Vocational and Cultural Corps who muddles through World War II in that incongruous bastion of Britannia atop the rock of Gibraltar.
IN COLD BLOOD, by Truman Capote.
Whatever it is called—and its author calls it a “nonfiction novel”—this meticulous reconstruction of a multiple murder in Kansas elevates journalism to art.
A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. A faithful, just and absorbing account of the Kennedy years by a presidential adviser and professional historian who measured the subject with a clarity that is reflected throughout the book.
THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara Tuchman, whose experienced pen (The Guns of August) reconstructs the edifice of Europe-comfortable, complacent, seemingly secure-that was to topple forever before the guns of August 1914.
BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1874-1897), edited by Dan H. Laurence. The first of four volumes takes Shaw from adolescence to the early years of fame and glamour in London. A tireless and brilliant correspondent who bridled neither mind nor emotions, he pursued subjects ranging from love to Fabianism to the evils of drink.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)
2. Those Who Love, Stone (2) 3. The Lockwood Concern, O’Hara (3) 4. The Double Image, Maclnnes (5) 5. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (4)
6. The Comedians, Greene
7. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (6) 8. Hotel, Hailey
9. The Embezzler, Auchincloss 10. The Magus, Fowles (10)
NONFICTION 1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)
2. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (2)
3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (3)
4. Games People Play, Berne (5)
5. Kennedy, Sorensen (4)
6. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (6)
7. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (8)
8. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (7)
9. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (9) 10. Is Paris Burning?
Collins and Lapierre (10)
* All Times E. S. T.
