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RAVI SHANKAR IN NEW YORK (World Pacific). The master sitarist's latest rendition of the sound that has infiltrated jazz and indeed reOriented all Western popular music. Ever since the Beatles endorsed Shankars traditional Indian music last year, his ragas have become all the rage. From the long-necked, gourd-bellied sitar, Shankar strokes a whining, hypnotizing stream of spontaneous melodies within the framework of a predetermined pattern of notes. The Eastern "scales" he uses are now definitely required running by jazz musicians, especially bassists, whose solos frequently echo his soulful, inscrutable improvisations.
CINEMA
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Channing and Bea Lillie flip through some oh-you-kidding dialogue and some ricky-ticky tunes in an otherwise lackluster musical set in the '20s.
LA VIE DE CHÂTEAU. French Screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau (That Man From Rio) makes his directorial debut with a fresh and funny farce about the German Occupation and the French preoccupation —sex.
ULYSSES. Director Joseph Strick has fashioned if not the best, certainly not the worst possible film version of James Joyce's novel, helped by a fine cast of actors (particularly Milo O'Shea as Bloom) who ring as true as Irish shillings.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Director Franco Zeffirelli have mounted the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier's Henry V.
PERSONA. A famous actress (Liv Ullman) and a nurse (Bibi Andersson) exchange personalities in this absorbing, if sometimes difficult, movie directed by Sweden's master film maker, Ingmar Bergman.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. This movie version of the 1961 Broadway smash hit musical succeeds by sticking close to the original, but also disappoints a bit by not really trying for fresh cinematic values.
THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE IN MATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UN DER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. An excellent film rendering of the Royal Shakespeare Company stage production of Peter Weiss's play, with laurels again to Director Peter Brook.
FALSTAFF. Actor Orson Welles has caught more of the dark than the light side of Shakespeare's pun-prone, fun-filled roisterer, and Director Welles's amalgam of five of the historical plays is often stonily dull, despite some sparks of genius.
LA GUERRE EST FINIE. A peek through the other end of the spyglass as French Director Alain Resnais examines the mind and mores of a Communist agitator left over from the Spanish Civil War but still traveling the dreadmill.
YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW. Peter Kastner heads an impressive cast that includes Julie Harris, Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page and Rip Torn in this daft if not always deft first effort by Director Francis Ford Coppola.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE UNICORN GIRL, by Caroline Glyn The 19-year-old novelist, a great-granddaughter of English Novelist Elinor Glyn, takes the reader on a hilarious guided tour of a Girl Guide summer camp, where chaos reigns unrestrained and girlish tears flow often.