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BECKET. A superior film spectacle based on Jean Anouilh's superior drama has a prodigally talented cast headed by Richard Burton as England's 12th century religious martyr and Peter O'Toole as Henry II.
THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT introduces Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth as a pair of antic New York juveniles scotching the adult delinquency of a lecherous concert pianist (Peter Sellers).
THE SERVANT. Hellfire gleams through the tea-party facade of Dirk Bogarde, the conniving "gentleman's gentleman" who serves up Director Joseph Losey's message about class distinction in Britain with a dash of bitters.
YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. The knowing eye of Director Vittoria De Sica scans Italy's greatest natural wonder, Sophia Loren, whose Vesuvian warmth bubbles through this three-part comedy co-starring the ubiquitous Mastroianni.
THE SILENCE is celestial, the passion terrestrial in Ingmar Bergman's bold, beautifully acted drama of life among the damned. Pleading humanity's case are a lesbian, a nymphomaniac and a child.
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and Peter Sellers detonate the bitter laughs in Stanley Kubrick's comedy of terrors.
THE GUEST. In this film version of Harold Pinter's drama The Caretaker, Donald Pleasence stunningly re-creates his stage role as a grubby, bigoted old derelict.
BOOKS
Best Reading
SELECTED POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE, edited by Hennig Cohen. The finest of U.S. novelists was not an outstanding poet, but there are enough good poems in this chronological sampling, such as the final lines of Billy Budd, to make it more than just a literary curiosity.
IN HIS OWN WRITE, by John Lennon. The oldest Beatle ("He's the arty one") explains his startling collection of post-Joycean jabberwocky: "As far as I'm conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I've ever ready." His readers shrdlu too.
THE SPIRE, by William Golding. Overriding church, chapter and parish, a saintly dean drives his architect to build a huge, prayer-envisioned stone spire on the shaky foundations of his cathedral, and then realizes on his deathbed that his spiritual inspiration was probably only worldly ambition. A metaphysical summation of his four previous novels (Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, etc.), William Golding's medieval fable is a provocative and often brilliant statement of the helpless and iniquitous nature of man.
DREAMTIGERS, by Jorge Luis Borges. Going blind, Argentina's greatest writer has turned inward to the mirrors of his mind, and in this slight volume of poems and parables has dreamed himself into multiplicity of recollections and roles.
STRANGERS ON A BRIDGE, by James B. Donovan. As onetime defense counsel for Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel, Lawyer Donovan reviews the trials and recounts his role in the subsequent spy-thriller negotiations that led to a dramatic moment of the cold war—the exchange of Colonel Abel for U-2 Pilot Francis Powers.