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Viridiana. Made in Spain on Franco's money but banned in Spain by Franco's decree, this peculiar and powerful film by Luis Bunuel predicts in parable the next Spanish revolution and contains an orphic orgy of Goyesque genius.
Sweet Bird of Youth. Tennessee Williams' Bird was an artistic turkey on Broadway, but as directed by Richard Brooks it makes a noisy and sometimes brilliant peacock of a picture. Paul Newman and Ed Begley are excellent, and Geraldine Page as an aging cinemama blazons a memorable skidmark on the go-away-and-don't-come-back trail.
Through a Glass Darkly. Sweden's icily intelligent Ingmar Bergman infuses unexpected warmth of feeling into a darkly metaphysical drama that depicts the birth of God in the form of an enormous spider.
Last Year at Marienbad. Alain Resnais, the grand admiral of the French New Wave, has produced a movie that is anything but a movie; a metaphysical enigma, a Platonic allegory, a treatise on cubistic cinema that attempts an Einsteinian revolution in the art of film.
Tomorrow Is My Turn. A military melodrama, directed by France's Andre Cayette, that has some discriminating things to say about apparent and actual freedom and bondage.
The Lower Depths. Akira Kurosawa's Japanization of the classic proletarian comedy by Maxim Gorky boils with demonic energy and rocks with large, yea-saying laughter.
The Night. Marriage without love and life without meaning are examined with talent, intelligence and despair by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), whose text might be from W. H. Auden: "The glacier knocks in the closet, / The desert sighs in the bed; / The crack in the teacup opens / A lane to the land of the dead."
Victim. An entertaining but tendentious thriller about blackmail and homosexuals.
Lover Come Back. Gagman Stanley Shapiro has written a situation comedy as smooth as baby food, and Director Delbert Mann manages to strain some humor out of Rock Hudson and Doris Day.
A View from the Bridge. Arthur Miller's attempt to find Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush errs in concept but succeeds in details.
One, Two, Three. Billy Wilder's rough-house comedy describes a Berlin interlude in the life of a hard-headed soft-drink salesman (James Cagney) before the Wall put an end to monkey business as usual.
TELEVISION
Wed., April 4 Howard K. Smith (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Comment on the week's events.
David Brinkley (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.).
Feature on Swiss Motion Sculptor Jean Tinguely. Color.
Fri., April 6 The Vanishing 400 (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Walter Pidgeon conducts a tour through the past of America's gentry; Cleveland Amory talks about its declining future.
Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). Walter Cronkite and news staff examine the major event of the week.
Sat., April 7
Masters Golf Tournament (CBS, 5-6 p.m.). Live coverage of the 26th annual from Augusta's National Golf Club.
Sun., April 8
Lamp Unto My Feet (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). An essay on Strycker's Bay, Manhattan's first urban renewal project, and its effect on the people who live in it.
Washington Conversation (CBS, 12:30-12:55 p.m.). Correspondent Paul Niven interviews Brazil's President Joao Goulart.
Masters Golf Tournament (CBS, 4-5:30 p.m.). The day's play.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The short, bitter story of Czechoslovakia, from Munich to the Communist seizure.
Theatre 62 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "Rebecca," with James Mason, Joan Hackett and Nina Foch. Color.
Mon., April 9
Academy Awards (ABC, 10:30 to conclusion). The 34th annual, with Bob Hope again master of ceremonies.
THEATER
On Broadway
The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. On a Mexican veranda, four people who have come to the frayed rope end of life find the strength to go on. In its acceptance of human limitations, this perhaps is Williams' wisest play. As drama, it is his best play since A Streetcar Named Desire.
Ross, by Terence Rattigan. The puzzle of T. E. Lawrence is pieced together in fascinating, though debatable, fashion in this play. John Mills portrays the hero with lacerating honesty.
A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, might have drawn its theme from Shakespeare's "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own." Acting Sir Thomas More, Paul Scofield is without flaw.
Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, makes God and man all too human, but Fredric March as God and Douglas Campbell as Gideon occasionally approach the sublime.
A Shot in the Dark, adopted from a Paris hit, is tres tres sleek and sassy, with Julie Harris starring as a sleep-around maid.
Write Me a Murder, by Frederick Knott. In this thriller, a murderer writes a letter-perfect crime and almost commits it, but justice beats out literature by a noose.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying taps out the Robert Morse code of officemanship, a gleefully self-appreciative rush to the corporate summit.
Off Broadway
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, by
Arthur Kopit. An unevenly funny, surrealistic foray into the no man's land of Momism. Nymphet Barbara Harris makes the scene, the play and the evening.
Brecht on Brecht is a packet of instant genius, a revue-styled evening of poems, letters, songs and scenes from a 20th century master of theater.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull. A sensitive and exhaustive biography of the '20s' literary golden boy, who was undone in the '30s by alcohol and neglect and died at 44 in the middle of a novel that might well have provided him with his comeback.
A Long and Happy Life, by Reynolds Price. A wry, humorous, uncommonly good first novel about a North Carolina country girl who does not quite know how to land her laggard suitor, and who, as she learns, finds error a trial.
The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries. Humorist De Vries continues to deal with absurdity, but in this bitter novel of a man's progress from religious to secular faith, absurdity is of the existential kind: life is a joke, and a bad one at that.
A View of the Spree, by Alson J. Smith. It seems that Kaiser Wilhelm had an American mistress, who, despite her Calvinist morality (she made him burn his collection of dirty pictures), became an ardent German nationalist. The author, her grandnephew, has set down a fascinating history, although he has failed to establish (as he believes) that Auntie was a major cause of World War I.
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, by John Updike. Another set of short passages by one of the most brilliant young stylists in the U.S., who should be setting his sights higher.
A Signal Victory, by David Stacton. A cool, clear fictional account of the Mayan civilization's collapse before the Spanish conquest.
The Rothschilds, by Frederic Morton. A family biography of the most fabulous banking dynasty of Europe, and the story of how its members rose from the ghetto to rival royalty.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. From the vantage point of a mental institution, an angry, anguished attack on the middlebrow establishment is made by the mentally ill hero of this fine first novel.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (1, last week)
2. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (2)
3. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (6)
4. The Fox in the Attic, Hughes (3)
5. The Bull from the Sea, Renault (4)
6. Chairman of the Bored, Streeter (5)
7. Little Me, Dennis
8. Daughter of Silence, West (10)
9. Captain Newman, M.D., Rosten (9)
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (8)
NONFICTION
1. My Life in Court, Nizer (1)
2. Calories Don't Count, Taller (2)
3. The Guns of August, Tuchman (3)
4. The Rothschilds, Morton (7)
5. The Last Plantagenets, Costain (6)
6. CIA: The Inside Story, Tully (4)
7. The Making of the President 1960, White (5)
8. The New English Bible (8)
9. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (9)
10. My Saber Is Bent, Paar (10)
* All times E.S.T.
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