CINEMA
To Kill a Mockingbird. Like the Pulitzer Prize novel by Harper Lee, this picture is two things in one: a black-and-white meller and a tomboy ode to the Great American Childhood. Gregory Peck is appealing as the father figure, and the children (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna) are three little darbs.
The Trial. Orson Welles is a cinema genius whose flops are more fascinating than the hits of lesser men, and in this eerie piece of esoterica, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's parable of the Anxious Age, he has produced the most fascinating failure of his career, a madhouse matinee that is so far out it's in.
Term of Trial. A good film about a bad marriage. Sir Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret play Mr. & Mrs. with charm and impressive skill.
Love and Larceny. A naughty, nutty comedy from Italy about a con man who discovers that a liar and his lira are seldom parted.
Days of Wine and Roses. Jack Lemmon is the life of the party but he wakes up to a long mourning after in this savage study of alcoholism.
David and Lisa. In his first movie, made for less than $200,000, Director Frank Perry tells a heartrending, heart-warming tale of two psychotic adolescents (Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin) who find love at the bottom of the snake pit.
Lawrence of Arabia. Blood, sand and stars (Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy), with the help of a top director (David Lean) and a $10 million budget, make this the best superspectacle since Ben-Hur.
TELEVISION
Wednesday, March 6
Festival of the Performing Arts. This excellent program, in which highly talented performers are given free rein by Producers David Susskind and James Fleming to spend one hour on the air doing whatever they please, has returned for its second season. It is not a network show, but is seen in many parts of the country, as magnetic tapes are shipped to various cities. On Washington, D.C.'s WTTG, 9-10 p.m.,* Actor Jason Robards Jr. appears in a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up.
Friday, March 8
The New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Last of this season's programs, about Latin American music.
The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Paar's guests include former Vice President Richard Nixon and Neuro-Psychologist John C. Lilly, who does research on dolphins.
Sunday, March 10
Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). World's Figure Skating Championships, from the Olympic Ice Stadium in Cortina, Italy.
Wild Kingdom (NBC, 3:30-4 p.m.). A study of the postures various wild animals assume when they are on the attack or trying to defend themselves.
Festival of the Performing Arts. The Robards show (see col. 1) will be broadcast in Raleigh, N.C. (WRAL-TV, 4-5 p.m.), Boston (WHDH-TV, 4-5 p.m.), and Philadelphia (WFIL-TV, 3-4 p.m.), plus repeat performances in Washington, D.C. (WTTG, 8-9 p.m.), and New York (WNEW-TV, 8-9 p.m.).
Exhibition: 14 American Painters (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). A special showing American painters at work in their studios, including Robert Motherwell, James Brooks, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann, Stuart Davis, Larry Rivers, Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
What Is Happening to Our Farm Families? (ABC, 4:30-5 p.m.). Changing technology and its effect on modern farmers and farming.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite interviews Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).
Filmed at a Florida hotel, this program follows Shelley Berman--perhaps the tensest man alive--through his daily routine as a performing comedian.
Monday, March 11
Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Prince Valiant, with James Mason, Janet Leigh, Robert Wagner, Debra Paget and Sterling Hayden.
Tuesday, March 12
Festival of the Performing Arts. Pianists Robert and Gaby Casadesus perform in the New York area on WNEW-TV, 9-10 p.m.
Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A comparison of British and American handling of the narcotics problem.
THEATER
On Broadway
Photo Finish, by the triply talented Peter Ustinov (writer, director and star), cleverly places an 80-year-old man beside his onstage 60-, 40-, and 20-year-old selves with amusing and ironic results. Ustinov's consummate mugging shores up the weak spots.
The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, turns a Broadway stage into an 18th century drawing room. John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Geraldine McEwan give of their stylish best to this durable comic classic.
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any-More, by Tennessee Williams, raises the specter of death before a horrible and gallant old woman, magnificently played by Hermione Baddeley, and conjures up the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil before a Christ figure whom Paul Roebling makes as real as this strange religious allegory will permit.
Little Me shows the high-polish professionalism that Broadwayites are always claiming for the U.S. musical without much tangible evidence. Sid Caesar's frivolity quotient borders on genius.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, turns a college professor's living room into a lethal conversation pit. Poised at each other's jugulars, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen are comic terrors to behold, and impossible to forget.
Off Broadway
The Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal, are both clever two-character one-acters; the first concerns two self-appointed nonconformists who eat their own cliches, the second a pair of drab office workers whose entire lives drain away from 9 to 5. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson assist the playwright immeasurably.
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter, are just past the 100-performance mark, but it is doubtful if any playgoer has fully resolved--or ever will--the enigmatic terrors and ironic absurdities with which the playwright invests his eerily modern one-act parables.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. Exchanges full of bombast, flattery and genuine admiration between two writers who are probably only near geniuses, despite what they tell each other.
The Liberator, by John L. Thomas. The great abolitionist emerges from this objective biography as a fanatic who infuriated his fellow abolitionists as much as the slaveowners.
Coat Upon a Stick, by Norman Fruchter. A brilliantly illuminated day in the dotage of an old immigrant Jew who rages the more against life as he senses it slipping away from him.
Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus. Plotlessly presenting Hollywood as a series of tangentially connected lives, the author is surprisingly successful in a kind of latter-day Nathanael Western.
The Price of Glory, by Alistair Home. The battle of Verdun, one of the great military and emotional turning points of World War I, is examined with prose precision and historical understanding.
Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti. Taking all human history as his province, the author brilliantly shows how man's urge to power finds fulfillment in a crowd and how menacing this is to civilization.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--An Introduction, by J. D. Salinger. Further doings in the steadily proliferating saga of the Glass family.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (1, last week)
2. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (3)
3. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (2)
4. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--An Introduction, Salinger (4)
5. A Shade of Difference, Drury (5)
6. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (6)
7. $100 Misunderstanding, Gover (7)
8. The Cape Cod Lighter, O'Hara (8)
9. Ship of Fools, Porter (10)
10. Genius, Dennis (9)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)
2. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (2)
3. Final Verdict, St. Johns (3)
4. Silent Spring, Carson (5)
5. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (6)
6. My Life in Court, Nizer (7)
7. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (8)
8. The Points of My Compass, White (4)
9. The Fall of the Dynasties, Taylor (9)
10. Renoir, My Father, Renoir (10)
*All times E.S.T.
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