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Schooled in classic composition, Byrd is writing spirituals with jazz textures and African rhythms. There are stretches of monotony, but mostly the music comes to life, catalyzed by the performance of the excellent small choir and combo. The Black Disciple is the most effective, with its unusual rushed rhythms.
TRUE BLUE (Atlantic). A specialist in "soul" like Ray Charles, with whom he played for five years, Alto Saxophonist Hank Crawford performs some of his own pieces (Shake APlenty, Skunky Green) with a small, well-integrated band. Nothing cosmic, just cheerful blues, short, catchy and swinging.
FOLK 'N' FLUTE (Pacific Jazz). Folk music is so popular today that blues singers call themselves folk singers and jazz combos have been known to swing John Henry and We Shall Overcome—violently. Bud Shank and the Folkswingers, featuring Shank's cool flute and Joe Pass's warm guitar, stay close to the spirit of the ballads in their gentle improvisations on songs like This Land Is Your Land and Blowin' in the Wind.
CINEMA
GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. She seemed too good to be true in A Taste of Honey. In her second picture, Liverpool's Rita Tushingham, 22, seems even better than that: a girl who both acts like an angel and looks like a star. Peter Finch plays her middle-aged lover and plays him well, but Rita's dazzling presence turns Finch to sparrow.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. A treat for the Beatle generation. The holler boys' first film is fresh, fast and funny, and it may moderate the adult notion that a Beatle is something to be greeted with DDT.
HARAKIRI. A gory, sometimes tedious, sometimes beautiful dramatic treatise on an old Japanese custom: ritual suicide.
CARTOUCHE. French Director Philippe de Broca, the brilliant satirist who made The Five-Day Lover, has executed a careless but wonderfully carefree parody of a period piece in which Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the Robin Hood of 18th century Paris.
THAT MAN FROM RIO. De Broca and Belmondo are at it again, but this time they do better. Rio is a wild and wacky travesty of what passes for adventure in the average film thriller.
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. In John Huston's version of Tennessee Williams' play, several unlikely characters (portrayed with talent by Richard Burton and with competence by Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner) turn up in the patio of a not-very-grand hotel in Mexico and talk, talk, talk about their peculiar problems. Often they talk well.
LOS TARANTOS. With mingled dance and drama and burning Iberian intensity, Spanish Director Rovira-Beleta tells the story of a gypsy Romeo and Juliet.
ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS. This intelligent and tasteful tale of an Indian girl (Celia Kaye) who shares an island exile with her dog is a model of what children's pictures ought to be but seldom are.
A SHOT IN THE DARK. Sellers of the Surete sets a new style in sleuthing: let the murderer get away but make sure the audience dies laughing.
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. Young love becomes a Sicilian nightmare in a sometimes wildly farcical, sometimes deeply affecting tragicomedy by Director Pietro Germi, already famed for Divorce—Italian Style.
ZULU. A bloody good show based on a historical incident that occurred in 1879: the siege of a British outpost by 4,000 African tribesmen.