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TOPKAPI. Director Jules Dassin (Rififi) lightens larceny with laughter as Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov head a crook's tour of exotic Istanbul in pursuit of four fabulous emeralds.
THE APE WOMAN. A girl who looks simian becomes a meal ticket for the con man who exploits her misfortune in this ferociously funny Italian comedy about the beastliness of Homo sapiens.
MARY POPPINS. Julie Andrews proves she is a girl to conjure with in Walt Disney's droll musical fantasy about a London nanny who slides up banisters and performs all sorts of diverting miracles.
I'D RATHER BE RICH. In this surprisingly sprightly comedy, Sandra Dee occupies an acute romantic triangle with Andy Williams and Robert Goulet while Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier sharpen its points.
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl's dishonor sets off a sunny Sicilian nightmare in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which is less warm but no less wicked than his memorable Divorce—Italian Style.
RHINO! African melodrama as it should be done—with scenic splendor and crackling humor—tied to a timely story about a hunt for a pair of rare white rhinos.
GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. A skillful British director, Desmond Davis, and a superlative British actress, Rita Tushingham, transform this rather banal tale of a young girl's affair with a middle-aged author into a movie of unusual warmth and wit.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Hitting nary a false note, the Beatles shrewdly play the Beatles in a comedy that is yeah, yeah, yeah nearly all the way.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE DIARY OF CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. The son of John Quincy and the father of Henry, Charles Francis lacked the dash and eloquence, but not the recording zeal, of the more famous members of his remarkable family. These first two of 18 volumes planned by the publishers show that as a youth he had a biting wit, a contempt for politics, and a "peculiar" susceptibility to comely young ladies.
THE WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. After a series of increasingly labored, metaphysically morose works, Sartre has written a clear-eyed, warm, but very sad account of his early years, which were outwardly placid and pampered, inwardly tormented. The despair of modern existentialism, it turns out, is partly rooted in the struggle for sanity of a bookish, lonely child.
THIS GERMANY, by Rudolf Leonhardt. In a series of provocative essays, a West German journalist tries to clear up the many mysteries of the German character.
THE ITALIANS, by Luigi Barzini. Foreigners often love Italy for the wrong reasons, thinks one brilliant Italian journalist, who goes on to consider his countrymen in damaging detail. Italians are hams, says Barzini, and what is worse, they believe their own act; the result is a distrust of idealism and a retreat into cynicism.
VIVE MOI! by Sean O'Faolain. It took this Irish novelist 30 years to come to terms with his provincial Irish upbringing; in an engaging autobiography, he records the painful process and the dilemma of a man forever "impaled on one green corner of the universe."