(3 of 4)
ONCE AGAIN (RCA Victor). Ethel Ennis combines qualities found together less often than one would expect: natural musicality and an appealing voice. She seems to have narrow interests (Like Love, Wild Is Love, Love for Sale), but she has a way of setting a soft ballad floating for miles and then conducting a sultry, teasing tète-á-tète.
RITA PAVONE (RCA Victor). The U.S. wantonly sent rock 'n' roll rockin' round the globe, and now it's coming back from every quarter. Following the British contributions comes Italy's teen star, Rita Pavone. who looks like Jackie Coogan and who sings about various minor emotional mix-ups with a strong voice, weak English, and a peculiar Latin fury more suitable for political denunciations. She makes her opposite number in the U.S., 18-year-old Lesley Gore (Boys, Boys, Boys; Mercury) sound like a singing nun.
CINEMA
THAT MAN FROM RIO. Jean-Paul Belmondo ducks poisoned darts, outwits mad scientists, and narrowly escapes a Brazilian crocodile in Director Philippe de Broca's wonderfully wacky parody of all the adventure movies ever made.
YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. Sophia Loren separates the men from the boys in three racy Italian fables directed with gusto by Vittorio De Sica. All three men are Marcello Mastroianni.
THE ORGANIZER. Marcello Mastroianni is superb as a scraggly 19th century revolutionary in this timeless, beautifully photographed, warmly human drama about workers who finally get up the nerve to strike against sweatshop living in a Turin textile mill.
THE NIGHT WATCH. Five prisoners trying to dig their way out of a cell unearth some bitter truths about the nature of freedom in this agonizing thriller from France.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. This dry spoof of Ian Fleming's fiction follows Secret Agent 007 (Sean Connery) to Istanbul, where wine, women and wrongs are swiftly and impeccably Bonded.
THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT. A pair of teen-age furies, Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, pursue Pianist Peter Sellers around Manhattan with hilarious results.
THE SERVANT. Director Joseph Losey's smooth, spooky essay on class distinction in Britain casts Dirk Bogarde as the malicious valet who slyly cons his master out of his proper place.
NOTHING BUT THE BEST. In this cheeky, stylish, often mordantly funny variation on Room at the Top, an aristocratic wastrel (Denholm Elliott) teaches a lowly British clerk (Alan Bates) how to attain Establishment status.
THE SILENCE. Lightning bolts of Ingmar Bergman's genius illuminate a dark, chilling allegory in which two women and a child travel to a city abounding in lust, loneliness and death.
BOOKS
Best Reading
RAINER MARIA RILKE, THE YEARS IN SWITZERLAND, by J.R. von Salis. From an eventless life spent alone, Rilke drew lyric and contemplative poems that have made him a source of modern thought as well as modern poetry. Von Salis retraces what he can find of Rilke's life and describes the few people (all women) who influenced it.