(3 of 4)
MIRAGE. An amnesic scientist (Gregory Peck) with a top secret tucked away in his head worries his way through an absorbing jigsaw plot, aided by a reluctant private eye (Walter Matthau) who doesn't take the work too seriously.
CAT BALLOU. This waggish western spurns heroics and drums up unbridled hilarity when Jane Fonda, as a schoolmarm turned outlaw queen, gets mixed up with a couple of no-good gunfighters—both spoofed to perfection by Lee Marvin in a duel role.
THE YELLOW ROLLS-ROYCE. Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Shirley MacLaine, Omar Sharif and Ingrid Bergman, climb in and out of a 1930-model Phantom II, lending elegance and star power to an episodic movie about roadside amour.
NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE. In sensitive, semidocumentary style, Canadian Writer-Director Don Owen explores the problems of two rebellious Toronto teen-agers (Peter Kastner and Julie Biggs) as if his camera were merely eavesdropping.
THE ROUNDERS. More horse-operatics, with Fonda pere (Henry) and Glenn Ford filling the wry open spaces with amiable nonsense about two lazy broncobusters and an unbustable mount.
IL SUCCESSO. Italy's affluent society yields one wriggling, upwardly striving nobody (Vittorio Gassman) who is Exhibit A in this fiercely funny satire about the price a man pays for life at the top.
IN HARM'S WAY. Director Otto Preminger remembers Pearl Harbor just long enough to launch John Wayne, Patricia Neal and other heroic types into several exciting tales of World War II.
A BOY TEN FEET TALL. A rough-cut diamond thief (Edward G. Robinson) and a wandering British boy (Fergus McClelland) get together for some refreshing runaway adventures in modern Africa.
THE PAWNBROKER. Rod Steiger gives a virtuoso performance as an embittered old Jew whose half life in Spanish Harlem is shaped by the memory of Nazi terrors.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the Trapp Family Singers sometimes swells around an audience like marshmallow cream, but
Julie Andrews makes the sticky stuff easy to swallow.
RED DESERT. Soul-searching against the blighted landscape of industrial Ravenna, with Monica Vitti as a neurotic young wife whose alienation is stunningly visualized in Director Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film.
BOOKS
Best Reading
DOG YEARS, by Gunter Grass. A powerful, complex, exhausting novel of two men —one Jew. one Gentile, neither wholly admirable—who belonged to "the Nazi generation" in Germany. Grass's theme is, of course, guilt, and few postwar writers have evoked it so powerfully.
THE VIOLENT LAND, by Jorge Amado. Set in Bahia. Brazil's equivalent of the American West, this novel is something of a Brazilian Ox-Bow Incident. The characters, situations and locale are those of a western, but Amado's writing skill lifts them above the routine.
THE VALLEY OF THE LATIN BEAR, by Alexander Lenard. Two years ago, the author charmed his way into literary life with the succes foil of the season—a translation into Latin of Winnie the Pooh. In this book, as charming in its way as Pooh was. Lenard expounds his genially picaresque philosophy of life and tells of his years as a doctor and pharmacologist in a remote village in southern Brazil.