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THE STAPLE SINGERS: AMEN! (Epic). The Staple family—Roebuck, his son Purvis, Daughters Mavis and Cleotha—is one of the liveliest gospel groups around, and they raise the roof with More Than a Hammer and a Nail and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. But they are entertainers too (their title song, Amen, comes from the movie Lilies of the Field), and they incidentally demonstrate the strong kinship of gospel to rock 'n' roll.
CINEMA
THE OVERCOAT. In this virtually flawless Russian film based on Gogol's classic story, Roland Bykov is superb as the nondescript clerk for whom a new overcoat becomes a matter of life and death.
A BOY TEN FEET TALL. An orphaned British lad (Fergus McClelland) wandering alone through Africa falls in with a grizzled old diamond poacher (Edward G. Robinson) in a crackling adventure story with the charm of Huck Finn and the ruggedness of a Hemingway safari.
THE TRAIN. Boxcars full of French art are the rolling stock of Director John Frankenheimer's muscular World War II drama about a Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) and a Resistance leader (Burt Lancaster), playing tug-of-war with trains.
DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Director Luis Bunuel (Viridiana) mitigates the imperfections of his corrosive satire with some artistry—and with Jeanne Moreau, who is cast as the Parisian servant girl in a rural landscape teeming with sadism, fetishism, frigidity, rape and murder.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Julie Andrews winningly upstages the Tyrolean Alps and surmounts heaps of sugary sentiment in this Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein operetta about the Trapp Family Singers who fled Nazi-dominated Austria in 1938.
HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. Uxoricidal impulses, batted around with a slapstick by Jack Lemmon as a reluctant husband, Terry-Thomas as his woman-hating Man Friday, and Italy's Virna Lisi as the superfluous lady.
NOTHING BUT A MAN. With impressive insight and objectivity, this drama gets under the skin of a young Negro (Ivan Dixon) who tries to run away from his life, his wife (Abbey Lincoln) and his color.
MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. After 20 years of fun, a pastry merchant (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers that his home-loving harlot (Sophia Loren) has hoarded up enough wild oats for a wedding cake.
ZORBA THE GREEK. The heart and soul of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel are brought roaringly to life by Anthony Quinn, as the wicked old brute who teaches a timid essayist (Alan Bates) to put away his books and plunge into real trouble.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FAMILY MOSKAT, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story of a rich Warsaw family from pre-World War I days until 1939, told with richness and scope reminiscent of the great 19th century Russian novels. Singer, too often tagged as "the master of Yiddish prose," ranks among the best contemporary novelists in any language.
SOUL OF WOOD, by Jakov Lind. The author, whose Austrian Jewish parents were killed by the Nazis, picks relentlessly at the fabric of guilt and complicity that made all humanity an accessory to Germany's crimes. Lind has a mocking, graceful wit that is both casual and lethal.