(3 of 4)
THE AGE OF BEL CANTO (2 LPs; London). A festive addition to the current revival of "beautiful singing," these 23 arias, duets and trios are by familiar composers (Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Handel) as well as unfamiliar ones (Piccinni, Lampugnani, Bononcini, Shield). Joan Sutherland is the heroine of the album, her brilliant voice describing perfect arabesques in the stratosphere. Richard Conrad's flowing tenor blends beautifully with hers, and there is also ample opportunity to judge the fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Home, whose range, power and flexibility are formidable but who is not yet in the same galaxy as Sutherland.
WAGNER: KUNDRY-PARSIFAL DUET (RCA Victor). Among all her recordings, this 25-year-old reissue was Kirsten Flagstad's favorite. Lauritz Melchior is her Parsifal, awakened to his holy search by her kiss and, one would think, by her voice.
CINEMA
NOTHING BUT A MAN. The anguishing reality of how it feels to be inside the skin of an American Negro is forcefully conveyed in the story of a proud but imperfect man (Ivan Dixon) who tries to run away from the whites, his wife and his own color.
MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. A slut's progress from a bawdyhouse to a legal bed takes 20 years, but time passes quickly—thanks to Director Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) and his well-tempered stars, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. All the soulful clichés of young love shimmer with freshness and style in this splashy, sparkling French musical by Director Jacques Demy.
WORLD WITHOUT SUN. In this fascinating, full-color documentary by Oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau (The Silent World), seven oceanauts spend a month in a manfish bowl full fathom five below the surface.
GOLDFINGER. In another exuberant travesty of Ian Fleming's fiction, James Bond (Sean Connery) braves a mad Midas and some hilariously horrible sight gags.
ZORBA THE GREEK. The hell, the horror and the sheer animal delight of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel are served up larger than life by Director Michael Cacoyannis, with Anthony Quinn magnificently cast as the goatish old Greek who butts his way through a series of disasters.
SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. Kim Stanley simultaneously masters the dark arts of bitchery, poignancy and deadly menace in a thriller about a demented psychic who conjures up a kidnaping plot.
BOOKS
Best Reading
PRINCE EUGEN OF SAVOY, by Nicholas Henderson. A polished biography of the Paris-born Savoyard who, after Louis XIV felt he was too frail for military service, defected to become the Habsburgs' top general and Louis' greatest nemesis.
JONATHAN SWIFT, by Nigel Dennis. The horror and tragedy of the God-haunted cleric who was English literature's most powerful ironist, consummately examined by a noted contemporary British satirist.
THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS OF JEAN MACAQUE, by Stuart Cloete. A series of bittersweet fables of love, stylishly narrated by a fictional philandering journalist who believes that "with enough beds, there might be no battlefields."
LOVE AND REVOLUTION, by Max Eastman. The autobiography of a onetime radical editor and longtime happy warrior against repression, be it sexual (he once shared a mistress with Charlie Chaplin) or Communist.