(3 of 4)
THE STREETS OF NEW YORK blinks rather amusingly through the crocodile tears of Dion Boucicault's 19th century melodrama. The singing voices in this lively musical have near-perfect pitch, and the spoofing is stylish.
CINEMA
HIGH AND LOW. In modern Yokohama, a vicious kidnaper bungles his attempt to nab a wealthy shoemaker's child. And Director Akira Kurosawa coolly demonstrates that all it takes is genius to transform a routine suspense yarn into fascinating drama.
KNIFE IN THE WATER. Aboard a sloop go two bristling males, one with a knife, one with a wife—and Director Roman Polanski runs a taut ship in this first-rate thriller from Poland.
THÉRÈSE. This adaptation of François Mauriac's 1927 novel about a woman who poisons her husband because he is so thoroughly provincial offers visual beauty, literate dialogue, and a truly stunning performance by Emmanuèle Riva, heroine of Hiroshima, Man Amour.
TOM JONES. Albert Finney is Tom. Hugh Griffith is Squire Western. And Director Tony Richardson is the man responsible for wresting a movie masterpiece from Fielding's ribald classic about the "favourite Follies and Vices" of 18th century England.
MURIEL. Though it cannot match the gossamer style of Last Year at Marienbad, this latest work by France's Alain Resnais is an interesting failure, distinguished by the presence of beautiful Delphine Seyrig as a greying widow full of ineffable yearnings for yesteryear.
MARY, MARY. A soupcon of wisdom, a lot of wit are laced into Jean Kerr's zingy comedy about marriage-on-the-rocks. Debbie Reynolds and Barry Nelson star in the screen version of the play.
THE MUSIC ROOM. India's Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy) examines the affectingly human decline and fall of a proud, fat, foolish old Bengali aristocrat.
MY LIFE TO LIVE. A young wife turned prostitute seeks her strangely satisfying salvation in the pursuit of pleasure, a racy theme developed with unblemished artistry by French Director Jean-Luc Godard, maker of Breathless.
BOOKS
Best Reading
APOLLINAIRE, by Francis Steegmuller. An excellent biography separating fact from the multiplying legends about the flamboyant French poet who was an early experimental voice in modern French poetry and the cultural midwife of the cubist movement in painting.
THE FIRST DAY OF FRIDAY, by Honor Tracy. Although this light satire about an impoverished Irish vicar does not quite make it down the author's Straight and Narrow Path, it is still mad enough to make very good reading.
DOROTHY AND RED, by Vincent Sheean. Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis were mismarried for 14 years. He drank like a school of fish; she harassed him by conducting stifling salons. She also recorded all the grim details in her diary, and whatever she missed Old Friend Sheean provides in a running commentary of his own.
A SENATE JOURNAL, by Allen Drury. As U.P. correspondent in the Senate from 1943 to 1945, Author Drury (Advise and Consent) wrote a journal as well as dispatches. Since he loved politics and understood the Senators, his record of the war as seen from Capitol Hill is acute and vivid.