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THE IRISH UPRISING (CBS Legacy). The story of the Irish rebellion against England from 1916 to 1922, a struggle that W. B. Yeats said had "a terrible beauty." The beauty is here reborn in the narration of Charles Kuralt, in the memories of the rebellion's survivors, and in the ballads of the time and the place, sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.
MIRACLES (Caedmon). The title is the judgment of this anthology of beautifully wrought poems by English-speaking children in all parts of the world. Whether the subject is 2,200,000 fish or simply the wind and the rain, the insights are as fresh as childhood itself. Read with the proper amalgam of wonder and authority by Julie Harris and Roddy McDowall.
THE ART OF LOVE (Vanguard). A surprisingly tasteful blend of erotica and exotica as Saeed Jaffrey, an Indian actor who has been seen on Broadway (A Passage to India), reads his own translation of the Kama Sutra—the classic Hindu celebration of sex—against a background of shimmering Indian music.
THE BALCONY (Caedmon). Jean Genet's decadence has enjoyed a worldwide vogue since the beginning of the decade; this Balcony view of the world shows why. Even minus the trappings of the bordello in which it takes place, the effect remains undiminished in vengeance and comic force. Read by a superlative cast including Pamela Brown, Patrick Magee, Cyril Cusack and a gifted English company.
LOVE FOR LOVE (RCA Victor). Another all-English cast, this time with an all-English play. Love for Love is hardly the finest flower of the Restoration, but as performed by the National Theater of Great Britain. Congreve's period piece blossoms into fine, bawdy fare. The credit is divided between Director Peter Wood and Sir Laurence Olivier, who as the dim-witted Tattle makes every line shine.
THE CONTROVERSY (Capitol). With lofty disdain, this report decries the "scavengers" who continue to profit by President Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath. But it joins the very group it pretends to despise by presenting little more than a rehash of old tapes of the four black days in Dallas, a mishmash of Warren Report detractors, and the smuggled-out bedside interview with Jack Ruby shortly before he died. The interview, like the record, is shabby and unrevealing.
CINEMA
LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour) explores the mind of an old-guard Spanish Civil War Communist (Yves Montand), and builds a biography that may be overly literary but never tedious.
YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW. Writer-Director Francis Ford Coppola, 27, exudes energy, freshness and promise in his first major film—a wacky farce about a Little Boy Blue (Peter Kastner) who turns out to be as green as they come when he tries to paint the town red.
BLOWUP. Italy's anatomist of melancholy, Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), moves his cameras to London, where he commences by filming the mod scene with abandon and then, in midflight, abruptly transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. The result is one of the most talked about and popular films around.
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Robert Bolt's hit play about Sir Thomas More has been made into a brilliant film for all seasons by Director Fred Zinnemann and a notable cast led by Paul Scofield.
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