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LUTHER. Albert Finney's Luther is a fiercely burning torch—dampened by tormenting disagreement with his church, threatened by the double dangers of self-doubt and physical pain, but shedding the guiding light of the Reformation.
Off Broadway
THE TROJAN WOMEN. With anguish, protective passion and wounded nobility, Mildred Dunnock, Joyce Ebert and Carrie Nye decry their fate, surrounded by a chorus whose every movement echoes the powerful and evocative words of the Euripides classic.
IN WHITE AMERICA. The pain, the humor, the anger and the pride of the U.S. Negro's history spring to pulsing life in this collection of dramatizations drawn from newspapers, journals and letters.
THE STREETS OF NEW YORK are drenched in crocodile tears in this gay musical spoof of Dion Boucicault's bustling and be-bustled 19th century tale of a dastard of a banker.
CINEMA
POINT OF ORDER. The undoing of Senator Joe McCarthy is the theme of this Washington political drama, a striking documentary gleaned from TV coverage of the historic Army-McCarthy hearings.
THE EASY LIFE. Almost as funny as Divorce—Italian Style, almost as mordant as La Dolce Vita, this brilliant thriller is one of the best Italian movies of 1963: the story of a pixy Quixote (Vittorio Gassman) who grabs himself a solid squire (Jean Louis Trintignant), mounts his sports car and rides madly away on a quest for nothing at all.
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER. The time is now, the place is Manhattan, the boy is Steve McQueen, the girl is Natalie Wood—and when this comedy-drama remembers to take itself lightly, the results are grade A Hollywood romance.
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. And all hail Adolfas Mekas, a young and impecunious U.S. director who in his first feature film has produced a far-out and very funny farce, the first cubistic comedy of the new world cinema.
BILLY LIAR. As hilariously mirrored by Actor Tom Courtenay, a young man's fancies turn to lust, liquor, fascism, bloody revenge, anything at all to escape the grime-and-grind of working-class life in modern Britain.
TO BED OR NOT TO BED. Alberto Sordi brings his sunny southern warmth to this Italian comedy about a frisky fur merchant who discovers firsthand that sex in Stockholm is still in the Ice Age.
TOM JONES. Vice triumphs—most engagingly, too—in this movie masterpiece wrested by Director Tony Richardson from Fielding's ribald 18th century classic. Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith head a superb cast.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, by John le Carre. This grim, exciting cold war thriller about a genuine professional in the international spying game is a good antidote for mystery fans fed up with excessively flashy Fleming.
TWO BY TWO, by David Garnett. The author refloats the Ark again with a wine-guzzling Noah at the helm. The resulting fantasy can be taken as frivolously Biblical or ominously nuclear.
LOOKING FOR THE GENERAL, by Warren Miller. Billy Brown, alienated nuclear physicist, seeks redemption for a decadent world in the arrival of supermen from another planet. Of course, it doesn't turn out that way, but Billy's voice is satirically refreshing.