CINEMA
Phaedra. Melina Mercouri purrs, snarls and shrieks in the title role of this modern-day version of an old Greek myth. Raf Vallone, as her ship-tycoon husband, is healthily Hellenic in a role with obvious overtones of Onassisism. Only Tony Perkins, as Vallone's stepson over whom all the trouble brews, seems not quite believable. Director Jules Dassin has sought to bring off cinematic high tragedy in a contemporary setting.
The Longest Day. General Zanuck's war games are played off like cops and robbers. With 42 stars and a musical score by Ludwig van Beethoven and Paul Anka to inspire them, Zanuck's troops have a splendid time on D-day outfoxing those funny old Germans. Day is three hours long, and while it is never boring, it is basically an episodic documentary that sometimes has the bad taste to say: war is swell.
Long Day's Journey into Night. The greatest and most personal of Eugene O'Neill's plays has been respectfully translated by Director Sidney Lumet and a capable cast (Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Stockwell) into one of the year's finest films.
Gigot. Jackie Gleason wallows and blubbers through this maudlin comedy set in Paris, and is so monumentally unwashed that audiences might wish some of the film's soapy sentiment had got behind the hero's ears.
Barabbas. Anthony Quinn stars as the man who went free when Christ went to the Cross. Christopher Fry's dramatization of Par Lagerkvist's novel is filled with vigor as well as religious insight.
Divorce--Italian Style. This wickedly hilarious lesson in how to break up a marriage in divorceless Italy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a Sicilian smoothie who sheds his wife by doing the only Latin-gentlemanly thing: he resorts to bullets instead of court billets.
Yojimbo. A Japanese movie that begins as a grisly and noisy parody of Hollywood westerns samurai-style, Yojimbo develops into a masterpiece of film making, and proves that Director Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa is one of the world's greatest masters of satire.
TELEVISION
Wed., Oct. 31
The Tunnel (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* The documentary that resulted from NBC's widely criticized backing of Berlin students who dug a 450-ft. underground passageway into East Berlin to rescue 59 men, women and children from behind the Wall.
Thurs., Nov. 1
The Nurses (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Louis Gossett, as guest star, is a gunman hospitalized after having been shot in a holdup. Treating his wounds are the series regulars: Head Nurse Liz Thorpe (Shirl Conway) and Student Nurse Gail Lucas (Zina Bethune).
Alcoa Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Series Host Fred Astaire stars as "Mr. Lucifer" in a comedy about a kind of Madison Avenue Satan.
Sat., Nov. 3
Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). Dr. Albert R. Hibbs conducts a new educational series for children five to eleven, designed to stimulate young interest in language, music, mathematics, social studies and science.
Sun., Nov. 4
Politics '62 (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). William H. Lawrence will interview six regional correspondents on the elections.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). News Correspondent Daniel Schorr documents how East Germany sends undercover agents to spy on NATO forces.
Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). "The Richard Rodgers Concert," an hour-long musical profile of the composer, will originate live in Carnegie Hall with Gordon MacRae, Peggy Lee, Roberta Peters and Cesare Siepi to sing, and with Rodgers himself to take a bow.
Du Pont Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Greer Garson and Lois Nettleton in "The Shadowed Affair," a love story about a Nobel-prizewinning novelist and his psychotic wife, who is quite willing to throw her husband at pretty girls.
Tues., Nov. 6
Election Night Coverage (NBC and CBS, 7 p.m.; ABC, 7:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite and Eric 'Sevareid will anchor for CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley for NBC, Howard K. Smith, William H. Lawrence and Ron Cochran for ABC.
THEATER
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by
Edward Albee, is rather like seeing a cockfight in a college professor's book-lined living room. On the recent U.S. stage, there has been nothing quite like this play's mortal battle of the sexes for nonstop grim-gay savagery. The matchless combatants, Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, ably abetted by George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon, help make Virginia Woolf an entrail-churning experience.
The Affair is an affair of justice. Adapted from the novel by C. P. Snow, the play relies on tension rather than passion, and its evocation of an English university milieu is donnish, literate and civilized.
A Man's a Man, by Bertolt Brecht. This Eric Bentley adaptation of a 1926 play by the late great German playwright uncannily prefigures the process of brainwashing. It sounds a stylized, sardonic, 20th century dirge over the death of the individual.
Playgoers may also patronize several holdovers of merit. A Man for All Sea sons might have taken its theme from Shakespeare's "Every subject's duty is the King's but every subject's soul is his own." Torn between duty and conscience is Sir Thomas More, played by Emlyn Williams. There is fresh comedy in the conformist cry for nonconformity as raised by A Thousand Clowns. As a nonworking anti-square, Jason Robards Jr. is supported by a prize cast of plodballs. Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary is baited with laughs, and Barbara Bel Geddes hooks every one, as this funfest nears 700 performances.
It takes a rare gift for meshing story, song and dance to fashion an outstanding musical comedy. That gift is brilliantly displayed in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Dynamic Robert Morse supplies high-voltage clowning. High-styled low comedy of the vaudeville-cum-burlesque variety sets the house roaring with belly laughs at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Zero Mostel is the pluperfect master of the zany revels.
BOOKS
The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. This first complete, unbowdlerized collection of letters reveals Wilde as something far more profound than the talented fop of his own caricature.
Chekhov, by Ernest J. Simmons. An absorbing if overdetailed portrait of the mercurial Russian doctor who became, without meaning to, one of the world's great storytellers and playwrights.
The Vizier's Elephant and Devil's Yard, both by Ivo Andric. Two books--the first, three short novels, the second, a single not very long one--by the Yugoslav author of the powerful novel of tyranny in Bosnia, The Bridge on the Drina. His target is still tyranny, some of it ancient and some, as is clearly legible between the lines, quite modern.
Say Nothing, by James Hanley. In a bitter, compressed book, a powerful British novelist probes the isolation of three cruelly interlocked lives.
The Kindly Ones, by Anthony Powell. The author's familiar gallery of upper-class English clowns, cuckolds and bounders in the not entirely comic opera that was England between the wars.
A Company of Heroes, by Dale Van Every. A workmanlike history of the long and little-known struggle during the American Revolution between tenacious settlers and desperate Indians on the western frontier.
Images of Truth, by Glenway Wescott. Shrewd portraits of fellow authors (Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Mann and others) by one of the U.S.'s best non-practicing novelists (he wrote The Pilgrim Hawk).
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. A Shade of Difference, Drury (3, last week)
2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2)
3. Ship of Fools, Porter (1)
4. The Prize, Wallace (4)
5. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (5)
6. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (7)
7. The Thin Red Line, Jones (6)
8. Act of Anger, Spicer (8)
9. Uhuru, Ruark (9)
10. The Reivers, Faulkner (10)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2)
2. The Rothschilds, Morton (1)
3. Silent Spring, Carson (6)
4. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)
5. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (4)
6. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (5)
7. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (8)
8. Final Verdict, St. Johns (9)
9. In-Laws and Outlaws, Parkinson
10. The Guns of August, Tuchman (10)
* All times E.S.T.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.