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WHAT PASSING BELL (Argo). If war exposes the beast in man, it sometimes brings out the best in literature, from The Trojan Women to War and Peace. This recording marches to the distant drum of World War I, and contains some of the finest and most moving war poetry ever written, notably by Britain's Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action in November 1918, and Siegfried Sassoon, who survived. The verbal montage of irony, pathos, and ribald gallantry is much akin to last season's searing musical, Oh What a Lovely War.
ROMEO AND JULIET (Caedmon) is a strange romance in this recording. Albert Finney, who can be as forceful as TNT, has conceived a Romeo who sounds like a world-weary anti-hero out of Chekhov. Claire Bloom is girlishly gigglish; yet Shakespeare's Juliet is young only in years, and packs a woman's wiles in a woman's body. The lovers are upstaged by the nurse, Dame Edith Evans, a paragon of timing, inflection and character immersion who could teach Finney and Bloom a thing or three about Shakespearean acting.
CINEMA
BORN FREE. Fine photography displaces some of the African lore in Joy Adamson's delightful book about the taming and untaming of Elsa the lioness, and this filmed biography glows with dusty golden beauty, the lion's share of it supplied by the big cats themselves.
MORGAN! A misfit artist tries to woo back his divorced wife by behaving like King Kong in a hilarious, offbeat comedy that might easily run amuck except for polished clowning by David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, two of Britain's showiest young stars.
HARPER. Private-eye melodrama is revived in lively style by Paul Newman, as a gum-chewing gumshoe whose search for a missing millionaire implicates Lauren Bacall, Arthur Hill and Shelley Winters.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. The life of Christ in a fresh and fascinating film based wholly on Scripture and played like an act of faith by a non-professional cast under Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. An Indian playboy (Shashi Kapoor) wavers between his movie-star mistress (Madhur Jaffrey) and an English actress (Felicity Kendal) who is touring the provinces with a troupe of tatty Shakespeareans. The real show is U.S. Director James Ivory's delicate study of fading British influence in India.
DEAR JOHN. The urgent biochemistry between a robust sailor (Jarl Kulle) on the make and a girl (Christina Schollin) who probably won't say no is analyzed to near-perfection by Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren, a sensitive defender of the thesis that sex sometimes precedes love.
THE GROUP. Mary McCarthy's bitchy bestseller about Vassar's class of '33 retains its period flavor in this movie version by Director Sidney Lumet, with eight captivating young actresses as the grads going forth to seek fulfillment of one kind or another during the Roosevelt era.
THE LAST CHAPTER. The long bitter history of Jewish life in Poland is ruefully recounted in rare stills and film clips, with a moving narration by Theodore Bikel.
BOOKS
Best Reading
PAPA HEMINGWAY, by A. E. Hotchner. An old friend paints a wonderfully perceptive and poignant portrait of the writer who was both a symbol and an idol to his generation.