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VIVA MARIA! Photography by Henri Decae enhances the allure of Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, who do what they can with Director Louis (The Lovers) Malle's rather slapdash farce about a pair of dance-hall girls involved in a Central American revolution.
THUNDERBALL. Sean Connery returns as 007, equipped with a backpack jet and aqualung for all sorts of spectacular conquests by land, sea and air.
LAUREL AND HARDY'S LAUGHING 20'S. Witless innocence runs amuck in excerpts from the silent classics of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, assembled with hilarious results by Cinema Anthologist Robert Youngson.
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8½), ostensibly exploring the subconscious of a mild little matron (Giulietta Masina) whose husband has strayed, makes her problems materialize as a Freudian three-ring circus in full color.
REPULSION. This chilling case study by Writer-Director Roman Polanski describes how a tormented blonde manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) retreats into a nightmare world, working considerable mischief along the way.
THE LEATHER BOYS. Motorcycling, teen marriage and homosexuality complicate the life of a serio-comic British strumpet (Rita Tushingham) whose young husband prefers to spend all his evenings out with the boys.
DARLING. John Schlesinger's brittle jet-set satire stars Julie Christie as the playgirl who makes a name for herself by doing the wrong things with the right people.
BOOKS
Best Reading
A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. In this topnotch and for the most part balanced retrospective, Historian Schlesinger has done full justice to his craft and to the President he loved and served.
THE WILD SWAN, by Monica Stirling. A tender and touching biography of Master Storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, who lived to be 70 and was still seeing life as a fairy story more magical than any he wrote.
MY LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS AND ON THE PLAINS, by David Meriwether. Dictated to a granddaughter and now published for the first time 72 years after his death, this gruffily matter-of-fact autobiography overflows with anecdotes that show life on the early American frontier as a grim and dangerous business.
IN MY TIME, by Robert Strausz-Hupé. The distinguished director of the University of Pennsylvania's Foreign Policy Research Institute looks back without anger at his youth amid the ruins of a Middle Europe shattered by World War I, weighs his own nostalgia for a lost bourgeois civilization against the dynamics of the atomic age.
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL, by Elizabeth Bishop. In the first book of poems that she has published since 1954, a fine but unprolific poet presents a slender sampling of superb descriptive verse.
THE BEGGAR, by F. M. Esfandiary. The injustice of justice and the crime of punishment are shrewdly displayed in this fiercely ironical parable—composed by an Iranian-in-exile—that demonstrates how the devil takes the hindmost when men play God.