(3 of 4)
ZULU. A heroic band of British redcoats fights off hordes of proud native warriors in this bloody, bristling adventure film based on a historic battle at Rorke's Drift, Natal, in 1879.
BECKET. The tragedy of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the greatest dramatic themes of the Middle Ages, is cleverly treated in this cinema adaptation of the play by Jean Anouilh. Richard Burton as the Archbishop at times seems uncertain how to seem uncertain as he struggles with his conscience, but Peter O'Toole is often fascinating as the King. If the film lacks style, it certainly has manner, the grand manner that makes a merely vivid picture seem in sections a remarkable one.
BOOKS
THE ITALIAN GIRL, by Iris Murdoch. British Novelist Murdoch's eighth book has a message that, for current writers, is almost universal: better to have botched up life than not to have lived at all. But she says it all her own way, which means with wit, understatement and plain old sedition.
THE LOST CITY, by John Gunther. To those who remember the days of beats and journalistic feats in the '30s and '40s, Gunther's novel has enormous nostalgic value. The lost city is Vienna, and its dashing celebrants were U.S. correspondents as distinguished as Dorothy Thompson and Vincent Sheean assigned there just before the Anschluss.
A START IN FREEDOM, by Sir Hugh Foot. Scion of a British family that rivals the notorious Mitfords in brilliance and eccentricity, Sir Hugh has spent his adult years and his considerable talents on helping British colonies to independence, and his book is interesting both as memoir and practical political science.
GERMANS AGAINST HITLER, by Terence Prittie. Historians have been curiously reticent about the Germans who fought Hitler from the pulpit, in pamphlets and by direct action—mostly at the cost of their lives. Prittie's book does belated justice to those who battled Nazi totalitarianism.
THE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE (1940-1946). A moving chronicle of one man's fighting faith in France in his blackest hour. De Gaulle was grimly aware of the price of total commitment, and far more accurately than Roosevelt and Churchill, he gauged the realities of the postwar world.
A COFFIN FOR KING CHARLES, by C. V. Wedgwood. This cool, precise account of the infamous trial and execution of England's Charles I does not take sides between the King and Oliver Cromwell, but history has already decided the case: Charles is noble and brave, and Cromwell remains the ambitious, dour man who made revolution and regicide popular.
MOZART THE DRAMATIST, by Brigid Brophy. A brilliant interpretation written so gracefully as to disarm criticism of the author's heavily Freudian outlook.
A MOTHER'S KISSES, by Bruce Jay Friedman. The author of the widely praised Stern faced even worse problems than most second novelists in confronting Tils cult. But Kisses is as funny as its predecessor on the same subject: a man dominated by a driving mother.
THE GAY PLACE, by William Brammer. Those who wonder if the energies of our ear-pulling President have been exaggerated in the press should turn to this roman a clef about Johnson. Ex-Aide Brammer has caught the voice, the idiom, the excesses, but most of all the protean vigor of the President.