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CARL NIELSEN: SINFONIA ESPANSIVA (Columbia). Leonard Bernstein and the Royal Danish Orchestra do a brisk, lucid job with a slick musical pastiche that seems to combine Sibelius strings, Bruckner mysticism and Grieg schmalz. Along the way there are some very disconcerting faraway voices giving tongue on distant Scandinavian mountaintops. But what is authentically Nielsen's is his sense of theater; it is also authentically Bernstein's.
CINEMA
HELP! The Beatles romp through sight and sound gags, pursued by a band of sinister Orientals out to make a human sacrifice of Ringo. Addicts will welcome the shots of the Beatles' communal pad, which—among other things—has wall-to-wall grass.
THE KNACK. Director Richard Lester, who Helped! the Beatles, makes Rita Tushingham the goal of three zany British bachelors. At the final guffaw, it's three down and goal to go.
RAPTURE. A gloomy farm household on the coast of Brittany harbors an escaped criminal (Dean Stockwell) who fulfills the various needs of an embittered ex-judge (Melvyn Douglas), his otherworldly daughter (Patricia Gozzi), and a bed-minded serving wench (Gunnel Lindblom). The tragic result is a triumph for English Director John Guillermin.
DARLING. Julie Christie irresistibly shows how to succeed in bed without hardly trying. This tale has its own kind of moral: when you finally get there, it's time to get up and go somewhere else.
THE IPCRESS FILE. Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is an un-Bonded type of counterspy who can hardly see without his glasses and does his job only to keep from being sent to jail. But he does it well and interestingly enough to make a thriller that is fun all the way.
SHIP OF FOOLS. Grand Hotel afloat, with such passengers as Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner rocking Katherine Anne Porter's boat.
BOOKS
Best Reading
LANGUAGE ON VACATION, by Dmitri A. Borgmann. The author is a word fanatic of the most ingenious order, produces resolutely useless, teasingly fascinating information about anagrams, antigrams, palindromes. How many people can look at Satan and see Santa?
THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM, by Brian Moore. A tough, uncompromising novel about a very young man who learns the value of self-respect by daring to meet the crises caused by an air raid during World War II. Author Moore (The Luck of Ginger Coffey) casts a cold eye on contemporary society but warms it with Irish wit.
MRS. JACK, by Louise Hall Tharp. An immensely readable biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, one of Boston's most colorful Victorian lady eccentrics. Armed with money, an unfettered imagination and a whim of iron, she kept Boston's newspapers in copy with her antics for half a century—and along the way assembled a collection of great art, now housed in the Gardner Museum.
SQUARE'S PROGRESS, by Wilfred Sheed. Hounded by his wife and bored to death by the suburb of Bloodbury, Sheed's hero sets out to discover the world of the beats. He does, and is lucky to escape, gratefully, with his sanity intact.