(4 of 5)
HOLLYWOOD BOWL, Los Angeles (July 8-Sept. 6), has entertained Angelenos in its mammoth open-air stadium for 48 seasons. Home ground for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Bowl presents traditional music by big-name performers, who this year include Soprano Joan Sutherland, Conductors Sixten Ehrling and Seiji Ozawa, and London's Royal Ballet.
CINEMA
RING OF BRIGHT WATER and MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN. Ring tells the story of a London accountant and his pet otter; Mountain is about a Canadian youth who leaves his home for the mountains. Both films are worth leaving home for an evening's entertainment.
WINNING. The husband-and-wife team of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman have to struggle with a one-cylinder plot. But the tale of marital infidelity—set against the background of auto racing —sputters to life in occasional scenes.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Under the direction of John Schlesinger, Jon Voight, as a Texas drifter, and Dustin Hoffman, as a Bronx loner, make a genuinely moving picture out of one of the least likely and most melancholy love stories in the history of American film.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Nicol Williamson gives a powerful performance as a wealthy blind Englishman who is obsessed with a lustful usherette (Anna Karina). The script and Tony Richardson's direction are as blackly comic as the Nabokov novel from which the film was adapted.
POPI. A Puerto Rican widower (Alan Arkin) struggles to get his two sons out of El Barrio, the New York ghetto. The film is comic, bright and, now and then, powerfully angry.
THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer's newest film is the harrowing and moving chronicle of a Jewish handyman battling prejudice and degradation in Czarist Russia. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm perform with passion and compassion.
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Richard Benjamin and AH MacGraw act with skill and candor in this film adaptation of the Philip Roth novella. The sexual frankness, the Jewish skepticism and the Roth dialogue are there, but the film too frequently mistakes burlesque for social comment.
THE FOOL KILLER and THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET. Youth is the focal point of both films. In The Fool Killer a 12-year-old orphan runs away from his guardians—an adventure that brings him to the beginning of maturity. The Boys of Paul Street uses the classroom as a microcosm to provide a glimpse into the irretrievable era when student protest was whispered in a corridor.
BOOKS
Best Reading
CRAZY OVER HORSES, by Sam Toperoff. "Horses, horses, horses, crazy over horses," the old song goes. Less repetitive but equally obsessed, the author has transformed a lifelong weakness for the ponies into an oddly winning novel-memoir.
WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK, by L. Woiwode. A young couple expecting a baby embarks on a seemingly idyllic honeymoon in the Michigan woods and discovers terrors in paradise. A remarkable first novel.
THE ECONOMY OF CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. Operating as curmudgeon and gadfly, but with a love of cities that overshadows mere statistics, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities explores the financial aspects of growth and decay in urban centers.