(2 of 3)
ATLANTA, GA. Civic Center. How Now, Dow Jones with Tony Randall and Arlene Fontana. Set in the golden canyons of Wall Street, the musical manages occasional humor about stocks and bonds.
BARDSTOWN, KY. My Old Kentucky Home State Park is, appropriately, the setting for the Stephen Foster Story, a song-filled tribute to the composer.
CLEVELAND, OHIO. Musicarnival. On Time, a new revue, takes some of the unlikeliest sources—King Lear, The Seagull, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and the Bible —to illustrate its theme, the generation gap through the ages. It was compiled by Howard da Silva, Felix Leon and Alfred Drake, who also stars; music and lyrics by Charles Burr.
MILWAUKEE, WIS. Melody Top Tent. I Get a Kick out of You, You're the Top, Blow, Gabriel, Blow, and of course the title song Anything Goes are just four of the numbers that made Cole Porter's 1934 musical the tops for so long. It is still going strong, with Gretchen Wyler playing the original Ethel Merman role.
LOS ANGELES, CALIF. Ahmanson Theater, the Music Center. José Ferrer plays the dual Don Quixote-Cervantes role in Man of La Mancha, a romantic operetta that resembles Don Quixote as it might have been written by Sancho Panza. But the settings and costumes are handsome.
CINEMA
EASY RIDER. From the unpromising material of drugs and motorcycles, debuting Director Dennis Hopper has made a strong odyssey starring himself, Peter Fonda and a brilliant newcomer named Jack Nicholson. The film occasionally slips into self-pity, but the places and the faces of mid-America are true and tragic.
THE WILD BUNCH. Under Sam Peckinpah's direction, this film becomes a huge and beautifully composed canvas of violence in the waning West. The script may be a campfire yarn but the final shoot-out is one of the most raucous, violent and magnificent gun battles ever put on film.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Love is literally blind in this film version of Nabokov's novel. Nicol Williamson is a sightless and insightless Englishman deceived by Anna Karina, a tarty movie usherette.
THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Yves Montand comes on strong as a sardonic, Gallic Bogart in this lively little French farce directed with wry mockery by Philippe de Broca.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight exchanges his Texas desolation for an even more loveless scene—Manhattan, where he meets Dustin Hoffman, another loner. Their vaulting performances bring to life one of the most unlikely and melancholy love stories in the history of the American film.
TRUE GRIT would be nothing but another creaky western comedy except for a superb, self-mocking performance by John Wayne, who at 62 has never seemed more like The Duke.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel in her Children of Violence series, the author takes her heroine, Martha Quest, from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.