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SUNDAY IN NEW YORK. Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson add style to a frail charade detailing the decline and fall of a 22-year-old virgin who has found virtue unrewarding.
THE GUEST. A superb performance by Donald Pleasence, repeating his stage role, enhances this film version of Harold Pinter's offbeat, ambiguous The Caretaker.
THE FIANCES. Italian Director Ermanno Olmi (The Sound of Trumpets) turns his camera to a couple engaged so long that they scarcely remember why.
POINT OF ORDER. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Attorney Joseph Welch are adversaries in a bristling documentary taken from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.
THE EASY LIFE. One of the funniest-and saddest—Italian films in years offers Vittorio Gassman as a flashy Roman playboy whose jetaway pace spells disaster for a shy young law student.
TO BED OR NOT TO BED. A study of sexual mores in Sweden, conducted con brio by Alberto Sordi as a roving but forever disappointed Italian businessman.
TOM JONES. From Fielding's bawdy, boisterous 18th century classic, Director Tony Richardson has fashioned one of the best movies in many years.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE CHILDREN AT THE GATE, by Edward Lewis Wallant. The last manuscript completed before the author's death last year at 36, this novel tells of a daft but saintly man and how another slowly takes life and grace from him.
THE MARTYRED, by Richard Kim. Also dealing with spiritual agony, this remorseless and controlled first novel takes the Korean war as its setting and the presumed martyrdom of twelve Christian ministers as its theme. Modern sainthood, the author finds, most often is achieved by men racked by doubt.
THE BARBARY LIGHT, by P. H. Newby. A slight, wise tale about a successful con man who, in an unfortunate moment of candor, decides to tell his wife and his mistress about each other. To his dismay, they become fast friends.
WHEN THE CHEERING STOPPED, by Gene Smith. For the last 17 months of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson was grievously ill, mentally and physically. Reporter Smith piles up evidence to show that the President's wife and doctor kept the knowledge from the public while "the U.S. Government went out of business."
ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN, by Kingsley Amis. The author's best novel since Lucky Jim tells of the misadventures of a rich, snobbish English publisher among some very irreverent Americans.
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL, by John Cheever. In this tender, moral tale of uprooted America, the 19th century Wapshots come to painful if comic terms with the 20th. Neither mourn nor imitate the old ways, says Author Cheever, but cherish their spirit as "a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter."
REUBEN, REUBEN, by Peter De Vries. A raffish, gifted poet, who very much resembles Dylan Thomas, visits U.S. suburbia and proves to be a catalyst in combination with sex and liquor. The partying and the pratfalls are followed by a typical De Vries hangover of brooding second thoughts about modern life.
A FINE MADNESS, by Elliott Baker. Another lighthearted novel about a poet, souse and womanizer who keeps the plot in motion with his talent for anarchy, his tropism for cops, and his tendency to rant at strangers.