(3 of 4)
CACTUS FLOWER is a Gallic sex farce that not only survived the transplant from Paris, but, as deftly tended by Abe Burrows, has thrived as a long-blooming Broadway hit.
Off Broadway
EH?, by Henry Livings. This English import is a gorgeous farce with a stubbornly heroic anti-hero whom no machine, man or woman can tame. In a perfect cast, Dustin Hoffman is pluperfect.
THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN first opened in 1925, and is the only play that George S. Kaufman ever wrote without a collaborator. This show-biz saga sags a bit now, and the lines are scarcely howlers, but period costumes and an able, loving cast endow it with innocent nostalgia.
ClNEMA
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. Even though Director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night, The Knack) tries hard, he cannot spoil all of the fun in this hilarious burlesque based on the plays of Plautus. The funniest things happen to Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers and Jack Gilford, playing Pseudolus, Lycus and Hysterium, three dirty old men in dirty old Rome.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment; Kiss Me, Stupid) tackles that great pastime, cheating the insurance company. His anti-hero is a leering, sneering shyster lawyer, played by Walter Matthau, who pulls the strings for the supposedly injured party, Jack Lemmon, and ends up stealing the show.
GEORGY GIRL. In an ordinary British comedy, Lynn Redgrave (daughter of Sir Michael, sister of Vanessa) displays extraordinary zest as an overweight, forlorn young creature who dreams only of romance and motherhood. Instead, she finds the path to matrimony an obstacle course of tragicomic misadventures, middle-aged satyrs, and a modish menage a trois.
LOVES OF A BLONDE. Czech Director Milos Forman, 34, explores the pleasures and pains of youth in this touching comedy about a small-town girl and her brief encounter with a dashing young hipster from Prague.
CRAZY QUILT. Henry (Tom Rosqui), by profession a termite exterminator, is a completely illusionless man. Lorabelle (Ina Mela), who believes in Providence and butterflies, is a visionary maid. How this unlikely couple meet, marry, and share a long life together is the bittersweet burden of this American fable.
BOOKS
Best Reading
LA CHAMADE, by Franchise Sagan. Another swift vignette of autumnal love in Paris, turned out with crisp economy by a Gallic miniaturist.
THE SECRET SURRENDER, by Allen Dulles. This account of the capitulation of 1,000,000 Nazi and Italian troops during World War II, told by the man who arranged it, demonstrates that fact can sometimes be an improvement on espionage fiction.
THE BIRDS FALL DOWN, by Rebecca West. To her nonfictional catalogue of traitors, Dame Rebecca in her sixth novel has now added the imaginary figure of a double agent, plying his unscrupulous trade in fin de siècle Europe.
ROBERT FROST: THE EARLY YEARS, by Lawrance Thompson. An expert and surprising portrait of the poet as a precious, mixed-up young man who had to work hard to become a serene country sage.
A HOUSE IN ORDER, by Nigel Dennis. There is a very fine difference between being savagely witty and wittily savage, and Author Dennis never confuses the two in this anguished parable of a man who chooses to be a gardener instead of a soldier.