(3 of 4)
THE SOUND OF MUSIC. This Rich ard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical about the Trapp Family Singers who fled Austria after the Anschluss of 1938 has more sugar than spice, but a buoyant performance by Julie Andrews makes the show seem irresistibly gemiitlich.
RED DESERT. Against bleak industrial landscape near Ravenna, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, La Notte) explores the neurotic problems of a young wife (Monica Vitti) and, frame by frame, fills his first color film with precisely shaded insights and breathtaking beauty.
JOY HOUSE. Director Rene Clement (Purple Noon) mixes chills with chuckles in an absurd but enjoyable thriller about a Gallic gigolo (Alain Delon) who eludes assassins on the Riviera, only to fall into the clutches of a coltish femme fatale (Jane Fonda).
TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC. This stark and timeless historical drama by Director Robert Bresson is based on actual transcripts of Joan's heresy trial, preserved in French archives since 1431.
HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. As a care free bachelor who gets waylaid into matrimony, Jack Lemmon pleads the case for uxoricide, though his manservant (Terry-Thomas) makes the crime nonsensical, and his scrumptious lady (Italy's Virna Lisi) makes it practically unthinkable.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. Young love's spring song fades gradually to a swan song in this sadly cynical French musical by Director Jacques Demy.
MARRIAGE—ITALIAN STYLE. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni pour all their charm into a hilarious old tearjerker about a home-loving harlot who parlays a few crumbs of love into a wedding feast.
ZORBA THE GREEK. An uproarious Bacchanalian bash based on Nikos Kazantzakis' novel and superbly acted by Anthony Quinn as the wild old goat whose life is a series of total disasters.
NOTHING BUT A MAN. The anguishing reality of what it means to be born black in America is set forth with power and poignancy in a straightforward drama about Negro newlyweds (Abbey Lincoln,
Ivan Dixon) struggling to find their place in the white man's world.
GOLDFINGER. To save the gold at Fort Knox, James Bond (Sean Connery) endures sex, sadism, and other in-line-of-duty disturbances—all impeccably tailored, of course.
SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. A throat-drying English thriller, built around Kim Stanley's subtly menacing performance as a deranged medium whose "voices" tell her to kidnap a child.
BOOKS
Best Reading
HAKLUYT'S VOYAGES, edited by Irwin Blacker. The highlights of Richard Hak-luyt's amazing compendium of travel diaries, letters and essays, which eloquently chronicle Elizabethan England's rise from seagirt obscurity to world power.
MERIWETHER LEWIS, by Richard Dillon. The lively tale of the explorer who charted the American frontier but died in alcoholic ruin a few years after his triumph.
THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS, by Philip Larkin. Crystalline images and insights distilled from commonplace settings and circumstances by the reticent British librarian whose spare, introspective lines have won him a reputation as Britain's finest contemporary poet.