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PORTRAIT OF A QUEEN. Victoria stands out like a jewel in the long line of English crowns, and these successfully dramatized excerpts from journals and documents exhibit the many facets of a complex woman and revered ruler. Dorothy Tutin, James Cossins and Dennis King bring historical figures to stirring stage life.
PLAZA SUITE. Neil Simon makes three bids to provide amusement and, ably assisted by Director Mike Nichols and Actors Maureen Stapleton and George C. Scott, comes up with a grand slam.
Off Broadway
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS is a crystalline evening of songs that avoid sentimentality yet move deeply.
ERGO is a feverish farce by Austrian Author Jakov Lind, fervently directed by Gerald Freeman.
YOUR OWN THING is a rock musical that uses an Elizabethan vehicle, Twelfth Night, to celebrate the modern spirit.
THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX is a chilling glimpse of urban violence.
IPHIGENIA IN AULIS is a painful, potent treatise of ambition and war, written some 2,400 years ago.
IN CIRCLES is Gertrude Stein's 360° play set to round music by Al Carmines.
CINEMA
I EVEN MET HAPPY GYPSIES. In all of this violent and tragic Yugoslav film, there is not a single happy gypsy, but despite many flaws and inconsistencies of style, it depicts in muted, melancholic color the odd, anachronistic ways of an all-but-forgotten people.
NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY. Adroitly blending bloody homicide and black comedy, this thriller pits a psyched-up killer with a closetful of disguises (Rod Steiger) against a callow New York cop (George Segal).
UP THE JUNCTION. Suzy Kendall, the newest and perhaps brightest of Britain's new blonde birds, is reason enough to recommend this trip to a broken-down Battersea slum, based on a novel by Nell Dunn (Poor Cow) and directed by Peter Collinson (The Penthouse).
THE QUEENS. A four-part Italian confection made mainly of sex and well glazed with the talents of Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale and Capucine.
THE TWO OF US. The performances of two superb French character actors, one a 73-year-old man (Michel Simon), the other a nine-year-old boy (Alain Cohen), make a genuine triumph of this cheerful, warm comedy about—of all things—anti-Semitism.
THE PRODUCERS. Writer-Comedian Mel Brooks's first film is a wildly funny joy ride with two canny Broadway showmen (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who set out to make a fortune by staging a flop.
BOOKS
Best Reading
TO WHAT END, by Ward S. Just. The violent confusion of Viet Nam is artfully conveyed in these impressions by a Washington Post reporter who was wounded while covering the war.
DeFORD, by David Shetzline. In this sensitive first novel, an aging carpenter hangs on to his dignity and memories amidst the defeat and depravity of Skid Row.
TUNC, by Lawrence Durrell. The author's first novel since the completion of the Alexandria Quartet in 1960 has a scientist struggling against the restrictions of established order and ultimately confronting the paradoxes of freedom.
VICTORIAN MINDS, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. A first-rate historian culls the lifework of nine not-so-long-ago thinkers in search of the roots of some of the modern world's more piquant follies.