CINEMA
Barabbas. A religious spectacle that is also something of a religious experience: Par Lagerkvist's novel about the man who went free when Christ went to the Cross has been dramatized with spiritual insight by Christopher Fry, and played with crude vigor by Anthony Quinn.
Divorce--Italian Style. A murderously funny study of what happens when a marriage breaks up in Italy--it doesn't go pffft!, it goes rat-tat-tat. Marcello Mastroianni is hilarious as the husband, a tintypical Sicilian smoothie.
The Island. A Japanese movie that means to be great: the story, told without words, of the hard but beautiful life a poor farmer and his family lead on an isolated islet in Japan's Inland Sea.
Yojimbo. A Japanese movie that really is great: a work by Akira (Rashomori) Kurosawa that seems no more than a bloody and hilarious parody of a Hollywood western but develops into a satire that can stand with the beastliest and best of Bertolt Brecht.
The Gift, made for $3,123.17 by a 35-year-old commercial artist named Herbert Danska, describes with graceful obliquity a creative crisis in the life of a painter. Undoubtedly the most original U.S. movie released this year.
Guns of Darkness. A routine bit of bananality about a Central American revolution that surprisingly develops into a philosophical thriller.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes. A young French director named Jean-Gabriel Albicocco has turned Balzac's dated daydream of Sapphic sensuality into an updated, unregenerate nightmare.
Money, Money, Money. Jean Gabin plays a canny old counterfeiter in a clever French comedy that tells how to make money without really working.
TELEVISION
Wed., Oct. 10 The Virginian (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.). Tonight a rich South American, played by Ricardo Montalban, attacks the ranch with an army of hired gunmen.
The Eleventh Hour (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Wendell Corey is a psychiatrist in this ex cellent program; this episode deals with a soldier who deserted the Army in World War II and has been brought home for court-martial 17 years later.
Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The subject of tonight's semi-docu mentary is automobile insurance frauds.
Thurs., Oct. 11 McHale's Navy (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.).
A premiere of a situation comedy in which Ernest Borgnine stars as the skipper of a PT boat during World War II.
Fri., Oct. 12 The Jack Paar Show (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Alan King and Peggy Cass.
Sat., Oct. 13 Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Automobile races in Trenton, N.J., and at Longchamps in Paris.
Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11:05 p.m.). Clifton Webb, Dorothy Maguire, Louis Jourdan, Jean Peters, Maggie McNamara and Rossano Brazzi in Three Coins in the Fountain.
Sun., Oct. 14
Lamp Unto My Feet (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). A dramatic study of St. Teresa of Avila.
Look Up and Live (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). Euripides' short drama, The Bacchae.
Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: California's Governor Pat Brown.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The Allied attack on Cassino in film clips and narrative. Special guests are General Mark Clark and Nazi General Fridolin von Senger, who fought it out there. Repeat.
The Sunday Night Movie (ABC, 8-10 p.m.). William Holden and John Wayne in The Horse Soldiers.
The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Guests: Tenor Richard Tucker, Ballerina Maria Tallchief, Soprano Patrice Munsel.
Tues., Oct. 16
The Jack Benny Program (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Guest: Raymond Burr, TV's Perry Mason.
As Caesar Sees It (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Premiere of a new monthly series starring Sid Caesar in various comedic situations.
THEATER
On and Off Broadway, the new season got under way with two imports of distinction.
The Affair. Faithfully adapted by Ronald Millar from the novel by C. P. Snow, this play scrupulously tracks justice through a lair of university dons. Intellectually sprightly and impeccably acted, The Affair offers playgoers the added pleasure of hearing literate English spoken with grace and precision.
A Man's a Man. This Eric Bentley adaptation of a 1926 play by the late great Bertolt Brecht proves a black-biled comedy of terrors and an uncanny anticipation of brainwashing in which the hero is transformed from a simple-minded Irish laborer into a blood-bloated killer whose only self is the print on his identity card.
There are several holdovers of quality. The New York Drama Critics Circle best foreign play prizewinner, A Man for All Seasons, probes the mind, heart and faith of Sir Thomas More, who chose to lose his life rather than his soul. Emlyn Williams portrays the hero-martyr. A Thousand Clowns, freshly and resourcefully comic, stars Jason Robards Jr. as a man who tries to grope his way out of group-think toward the good life. Barbara Bel Geddes delivers Jean Kerr's subcutaneous witticisms with flair in long-running Mary, Mary.
Musicals are often the bane and sometimes the boon of Broadway's existence. The coursing humor of Abe Burrows and the kinetic energy of Robert Morse's performance help to make How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying one of those rare musicomedy triumphs of form over formula. The belly laugh is the convulsive vogue at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, where Zero Mostel, lewdly assisted by clowns and houris, is pillaging the comic genius of Plautus to vulgar and insane perfection.
BOOKS
Best Reading A Company of Heroes, by Dale Van Every. An absorbing account of the most savage and perhaps least known side of the Revolutionary War--the long blood feud between settlers and Indians on the western frontier.
Images of Truth, by Glenway Wescott. The author, one of the U.S.'s best nonwriting novelists (he wrote The Pilgrim Hawk), ends a long silence with a fine collection of critical portraits of fellow authors--Katherine Anne Porter, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann and others.
Morte d'Urban, by J. F. Powers. A gently satirical novel about the surprisingly secular problems of a fund-raising Catholic priest, written with fondness and perception but, the Lord be thanked, not a trace of cuteness.
The Climb Up to Hell, by Jack Olsen. The north face of Switzerland's Eiger (Ogre) Mountain is perhaps the most suicidal climb in the Alps, and the author's account of four ill-equipped men who tried to climb it in 1957 is thoughtful and exciting.
Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain. These savage, scatologically irreligious papers, long suppressed by Twain's daughter, were a product of the deep and deepening melancholy of the humorist's old age.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. The gentle, haunting tale of an old mansion and its strange inmates by one of the masters of seance fiction.
Boswell's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett. On horseback in the Scottish islands, the great doctor is still a monster of wit, wisdom and prejudice.
The Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead. Like its predecessor, The White Nile, this account of war and trade along the great river is a rich pageant of scenes and characters.
Best Sellers FICTION 1. Ship of Fools, Porter (1, last week) 2. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (2)
3. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (4)
4. The Prize, Wallace (3)
5. Another Country, Baldwin (7)
6. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey
7. A Shade of Difference, Drury
8. The Reivers, Faulkner (5) 9. Uhuru, Ruark (6) 10. Hornblower and the Hotspur, Forester (9)
NONFICTION 1. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)
2. The Rothschilds, Morton (2)
3. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)
4. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (4)
5. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (10)
6. Who's in Charge Here?, Gardner (6)
7. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (5)
8. The Guns of August, Tuchman
9. Veeck--as in Wreck, Veeck (9) 10. Final Verdict, St. Johns
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