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HUGH MASEKELA alternates smoldering African folk singing with blazing jazz trumpeting in his first album, The Americanization of Ooga Booga (MGM). He has a good rhythm section, and his trumpet, while fast and facile, is also strong and deep-voiced. His tutor in folk singing is an expert: his exwife, Miriam Makeba.
THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET engages in what they call a Jazz Dialogue (Atlantic) with the All-Star Jazz Band. It turns into a one-sided argument, however, for the band talks down the quartet. The delicate tracing of Milt Jackson's vibes and John Lewis' piano disappears into a lush and sometimes too lax setting for pieces like Django and Animal Dance.
CINEMA
LE BONHEUR. A fascinating Gallic fable of infidelity, drenched with springtime color and quite dispassionate in its point of view toward a handsome young carpenter who rather casually betrays his beloved first wife but finds equal happiness with her successor.
BORN FREE. How a tamed beast learns to survive in the wilderness is recalled in an enthralling adventure film based on Joy Adamson's bestseller about her life with Elsa the lioness—superbly photographed on location in Kenya.
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! David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave brighten a black British comedy in which a fey young artist is slowly destroyed by his emotional dependence on Karl Marx, King Kong and his former wife.
HARPER. A millionaire disappears, and Private Eye Paul Newman beats the perfumed shrubbery of Southern California to find him. Among the shady ladybirds he flushes in passing are Julie Harris, Lauren Bacall and Shelley Winters.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. With dialogue taken wholly from Scripture, Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist, stirringly portrays Christ's journey to Calvary as the pilgrimage of a saintly social agitator.
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. The vestiges of British influence in India color a wry, graceful comedy about a young English actress (Felicity Kendal) who tours the provinces doing Shakespeare and finds her real-life romantic role more difficult to play.
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. This rueful, Oscar-winning tragedy about the friendship between an Aryan carpenter (Josef Kroner) and an old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kaminska) in Nazi-dominated Czechoslovakia incisively depicts the ravages of war on one man's conscience.
DEAR JOHN. Sex precedes love for a lusty sea captain (Jarl Kulle) and a lonely waitress (Christina Schollin) in a memorable film by Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren.
BOOKS
Best Reading
MEMOIRS 1945-53, by Konrad Adenauer. In the first of two autobiographical installments, der Alte reviews the years from World War II to the Administration of Harry Truman, whom Adenauer deeply respected.
IN MY FATHER'S COURT, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Boyhood years in a Polish rabbi's household are evoked in energetic and engaging detail by Yiddish Writer Singer, now recognized as one of the great contemporary novelists.
A GENEROUS MAN, by Reynolds Price. Sex and symbolism are intimately interwoven in this funny fable about a North Carolina farm boy in pursuit of his manhood.