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GLUCK: ORFEO ED EURIDICE (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). An opera for people who do not like singing, Orfeo is long on dances, and its best-known aria (in the Dance of the Blessed Spirits) is reserved for a flute. Renato Fasano and the Virtuosi di Roma give a pastel but translucent orchestral performance, almost otherworldly, as befits the score. Unfortunately, the singers are a bit too bloodless, even the promising young mezzo, Shirley Verrett, who sings Orfeo.
CINEMA
LES BONNES FEMMES. All the humor, horror and futility in the lives of four commonplace Parisian shopgirls fill a downbeat but poignant tale by French Director Claude Chabrol (The Cousins).
MORGAN! An improper bohemian misfit (David Warner) goes ape and declares gorilla war on his former wife (Vanessa Redgrave) in a wayward British comedy that only occasionally gets out of hand.
HARPER. As a private eye focused on a kidnaping case, Paul Newman revives the Bogart tradition in lively style, with seedy-to-sumptuous local color supplied by Julie Harris, Arthur Hill and Lauren Bacall.
BORN FREE. How a tamed beast finally learns to survive in the wilderness is recalled in an enthralling adventure film, faithfully adapted from Joy Adamson's bestseller about her life with Elsa the lioness—superbly photographed on location in Kenya.
JUDEX. A sophisticated French tribute to period pop art, based on the serialized adventures of a half-forgotten superhero who liked to vanquish villains and save maidens in the silent-screen era.
THE GIRL-GETTERS. Bird hunters fill their quota at a sleazy English seaside resort, where one young beachnik (Oliver Reed) shows a singular flair for wasting his youth.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. The life of Christ, taken word for word from Scripture by Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist with a refreshingly earthy idea of how to do Bible movies.
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. A brilliant and graceful comedy about a young actress (Felicity Kendal) who encounters romantic complications while touring India with a tatty Shakespearean company left over from the British colonial era.
DEAR JOHN. Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren bases his tender, lusty lesson in love on the urgent biochemistry between a roaming sailor (Jarl Kulle) and a girl (Christina Schollin) having a weekend fling.
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. This rueful, Oscar-winning tragedy about the friendship between an Aryan carpenter (Josef Króner) and an old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kaminska) in Nazi-dominated Czechoslovakia incisively depicts the ravages of war on one man's conscience.
BOOKS
Best Reading EARTHLY PARADISE, by Colette; edited by Robert Phelps. Colette (1873-1954) was the most important woman novelist (Chéri, Gigi, Mitsou, Claudine) the French have produced in a century; this magnificent collection of her random reminiscences shows that she was just as important as a memoirist, a female Montaigne who drank the cup of folly till she tasted the dregs of wisdom.
1066: THE STORY OF A YEAR, by Denis Butler. Nine centuries ago, the Battle of Hastings cost King Harold I of England his kingdom and his life—a price, as Author Butler suggests in this excellent first book, that may have been dearer than England knew.