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AFTER THE FALL. Angry and autobiographical, Arthur Miller's play questions the limits of responsibility, and details tormenting relationships with friends, family and wives.
RECORDS
Folk Music
HEATHER AND GLEN (Tradition). Folk singers in Aberdeenshire and the Hebrides tell their tales, most often laments—for James MacPherson, dangling from the gallows when his pardon arrives; for William Chisholm. the young husband who died for Prince Charlie in 1746. There are also work songs. Gentle Lady is sung to the rhythmic accompaniment of milk squirting into a pail. It would be hard for any cow to resist Kate Nicholson crooning: "Ruddy-faced and smooth-cheeked, gentle lady, you are my dear one. The calves have sucked, O gentle lady." The real thing by real folk, collected and selected by Alan Lomax and two Scottish experts.
ADVENTURES FOR 12-STRING, 6-STRING AND BANJO (Elektra). Leadbelly used to be about the only fellow to play the 12-string guitar, but now even the boy next door is learning the strums. One of the dozen new records featuring the instrument is this extravaganza of plucking by Richard Rosmini, who plays everything in sight. The 12-string alone sounds like a guitar accompanying itself, but here Rosmini uses three other guitarists, plus Jazz Bassist Red Mitchell picking away stylishly at the likes of John Hardy, Jelly Roll, St. James Drag. No singing.
JUDY COLLINS #3 (Elektra). Joan Baez is still queen, but many of her subjects owe allegiance to Collins as well. Her voice is less pure, but it has body and conviction, and she has a good repertory of songs that are more indigenous to Greenwich Village than her native Colorado. In her third and best album, she sings Dylan and Seeger, but her stopper is a haunting new ballad about an ancient injustice done to a girl named Anathea, in bed, of all places.
EVENING BELLS AND OTHER RUSSIAN FOLK SONGS (Capitol). Dark nostalgia dished out by Metropolitan Opera tenor, Nicolai Gedda, with the help of the Cappella Russian Male Chorus and some balalaikas. "Gedda was born in Sweden of a Russian father, and he sings of the snow-swept steppes, the willows and the fields of rye like one of the dispossessed.
THE VOICE OF AFRICA (RCA Victor) is Miriam Makeba, late of South Africa and also dispossessed. The music here is not only African: there is a taste of gospel, a pop tune and even opera (the Willow Song from Otello). Makeba can manage them all, but her heart is in the songs of her own people, like Ohude and Uyadela. "When all the beasts of the earth had gone to fetch their tails," she sings in Zulu, "the rock rabbit had long given up all hope, hence the absence of his tail."
CINEMA
THE ORGANIZER. Playing a sad, scraggly revolutionary who leads an unsuccessful strike of textile workers, Marcello Mastroianni sews up his status as the international cinema's most versatile leading man.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. The incredible adventures and immoderate amours of Agent 007, alias James Bond, alias Actor Sean Connery, lead to Istanbul in this uproarious parody of Ian Fleming's fiction.
THE NIGHT WATCH. Five men seek an underground escape route from a Paris prison—a commonplace theme developed with uncommon skill in this taut French thriller.