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MOZART: SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS IN D (London). Vladimir Ashkenazy, poetic young Russian pianist, and Malcolm Frager, dynamic American virtuoso, have been friends since Ashkenazy made his American debut in 1958. They have fused their talents in a high-spirited but incisive performance of Mozart's sonata and a warm reading of Schumann's Andante and Variations for Two Pianos, Two Cellos and Horn (with two British cellists and Britain's Barry Tuckwell).
CINEMA
THE COLLECTOR. A psychotic clerk (Terence Stamp) turns from collecting butterflies to capture a vivacious young art student (Samantha Eggar) in Director William Wyler's gripping, if somewhat glamorized, thriller based on the novel by John Fowles.
THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES. While Stuart Whitman and James Fox fly to win the favor of winsome Sarah Miles, this disarming comedy assigns its zanier thrills, spills and laughter to Terry-Thomas, Gert Frobe and Alberto Sordi, all clowning in outrageous but flyable aircraft as competitors in a great London-Paris air race of 1910.
SYMPHONY FOR A MASSACRE. French Director Jacques Deray, smoothly working variations on the themes of The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi, follows five men through a suspenseful million-dollar caper that turns into a deadly game of dishonor among thieves.
LA TÍA TULA. A beautiful spinster (Aurora Bautista) is tormented by mixed desire and disgust for her widowed brother-in-law in Spanish Director Miguel Pica-zo's impeccable first film, an essay on the rigors of Castilian-style virginity.
MIRAGE. Amnesia, murder and nuclear secrets spell trouble for Scientist Gregory Peck, though his burdens are lightened considerably by Walter Matthau as a whimsical private eye with no appetite for danger.
CAT BALLOU. Lee Marvin is hilarious twice over as a pair of roguish gunslingers, one to help, one to hinder a way-out Western lass (Jane Fonda) who gives up schoolteaching to become a desperado.
THE ROUNDERS. Two experienced cow-hams, Fonda père (Henry) and Glenn Ford, deftly spoof the leathery roles they used to play for real as they try to break a stubbornly unbreakable horse.
THE YELLOW ROLLS-ROYCE. Among the luminous bodies who find love, then lose it, during three smooth but shallow intrigues staged in the back seat of a 1930 Phantom II are Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Shirley Mac-Laine, Omar Sharif and Ingrid Bergman.
THE PAWNBROKER. The nightmare world of Spanish Harlem awakens the humanity of a wretched old Jew whose past and present come stingingly to life in the performance of Rod Steiger.
RED DESERT. Director Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film is a provocative, painterly study of alienation in a young wife (Monica Vitti) whose neurosis thrives amidst a 20th century Inferno created by heavy industry in Ravenna.
BOOKS
Best Reading
MISSION IN TORMENT, by John Mecklin. The author, who was USIS chief in Saigon from 1962 to 1964, takes a balanced second look at U.S. policy toward Viet Nam and especially toward the late Ngo Dinh Diem. Mecklin feels that the U.S. measured Diem only by his intransigence, thereby condoning the coup that led to seven more coups.