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SCUBA DUBA is in the tradition of the "new comedy" that draws its laughs not from funny-ha-ha but from funny-peculiar. Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses) puts one of his pop-skulled, Mom-obsessed neurotics in a chateau on the Riviera during the night his wife is out cuckolding him with a Negro. Jerry Orbach is wildly, excruciatingly believable as a modern victim-persecutor, one minute hiding under the coats in the closet, the next brandishing a threatening scythe at his enemy, the world at large.
STEPHEN D. replays the symphony of sound composed by James Joyce in his two autobiographical novels. While not sufficiently theatrical—the images called up by Joyce's words are more vivid than the vignettes seen on the stage—the production provides a pleasant, literate evening on the banks of the Liffey.
CINEMA
THE COMEDIANS. Graham Greene's Haitian purgatory has an excellent cast (Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Ford) and enough transcendent drama to absolve it from its most glaring sin: at two hours and 40 minutes, it is too long.
WAIT UNTIL DARK. A blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) who has become the nearly helpless victim of a trio of terrorists led by Alan Arkin tries to equalize the situation by removing all the light bulbs in the house; but she forgets the one in the refrigerator—with chilling results.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Director John Schlesinger and Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who collaborated on Darling, now bring Thomas Hardy's Victorian novel vividly to the screen, with solid performances by Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp.
ELVIRA MADIGAN. A Swedish cavalry officer (Thommy Berggren) deserts his wife, children and career to spend a summer of delirious happiness with a tightrope walker (Pia Degermark) in this spare and remarkably sensitive pastoral film.
FINNEGANS WAKE. A surprising number of James Joyce's Eire-borne visions survive in the screenwriter's version of the screedwriter's novel, thanks to Director Mary Ellen Bute's audacious dream sequences and witty collages and montages.
BOOKS
Best Reading
MEMOIRS: 1925-1950, by George F. Kennan. A close-up look at a crucial quarter century of U.S. diplomacy by a man who was one of the first to see the cold war coming, and who was also one of the first to predict a thaw.
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, by Mikhail Bulgakov. Satan saunters through
Moscow in this manic farce, which, after 25 years of suppression, has again seen light in Russia and received two new translations in the U.S.
CAUGHT IN THAT MUSIC, by Seymour Epstein. A distinguished novel set in New York City in the years just before World War II. The hero may stun today's war protesters: to become a "whole man," he enlists in the U.S. Army.
THE MANOR, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A popular Yiddish storyteller powerfully projects his own sense of exile, while demonstrating that he has the credentials of a major novelist, in this tragicomedic account of the changes that rack a Victorian Polish-Jewish family.