(3 of 4)
THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. As Italo Bombolini, Anthony Quinn so skillfully cowers and struts in his roles of husband and boozy mayor that he achieves nothing less than comic-operatic stature. Anna Magnani, as his wife, proves every bit the match for the bombastic Bombolini with a performance as strong as the lines indelibly etched on her face.
ALICE'S RESTAURANT. This is a film about young people that is, as they say, very much together. Taking Arlo Guthrie's hit song of a couple of years ago, Director Arthur Penn has fashioned a sad, funny, tragic, beautiful picture of a way of life.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, two of the screen's biggest antiheroes, find compassion and companionship in each other to make this one of the most memorable love stories in American cinema history.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Woody Allen (who shared the authorship of this zany crime flick) makes his star (an inept criminal played by Woody Allen) stumble through such an incredibly long list of bungles and pitfalls that the film loses much of its comic momentum. However, the director (Woody Allen) sustains it all by providing some insanely funny moments.
MEDIUM COOL. Writer-Director Haskell Wexler challenges Hollywood both with stylistic innovations and by dwelling on contemporary politics (the Chicago convention). Add forcefully realistic performances by a cast of unknowns and the result is dynamite.
EASY RIDER. Using townspeople playing themselves and drawing a topnotch performance from Jack Nicholson, Actor-Director Dennis Hopper has added a new dimension to the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer.
ADALEN '31. Director Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) paints a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history and conveys the ineffable quality of a single decisive moment in a man's life.
THE BED SITTING ROOM. This is Director Richard Lester's second surrealistic attack on the homicidal excesses of war; it makes his first aggressive stab against the military (How I Won the War) look like a warm-up exercise.
BOOKS
Best Reading
PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. In a collection of clever, surreal—and sometimes repellent—short stories, the author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, plays a literary shell game with his readers.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, by John Fowles. A fascinating novel that uses the tricks and turns of Victorian fiction to pound home the thesis that freedom is the natural condition of man.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER, by Stephen Becker. An excellent period morality tale about a Union Army officer who attempts to save the life of a teen-age Rebel who shot him during a Civil War skirmish.
PRESENT AT THE CREATION, by Dean Acheson. Harry Truman's Secretary of State, in these well-written memoirs, recalls the formative years of the cold war with much wit, knowledge and insight.
BARNETT FRUMMER IS AN UNBLOOMED FLOWER, by Calvin Trillin. Soft implosions of mirthful satire that trouble the social and political pretensions of those who would be with it.
POWER, by Adolf A. Berle. A former F.D.R. brain-truster and State Department official compellingly examines the sources and limitations of power and its relationship to ethics.