(3 of 4)
LOVE IS ALIVE AND WELL (Tower). This is an effort by Kim Fowley, songwriter, singer and professional hippie, to collect pollen from various flower arrangements (Flower City, Flower Drum Drum, Flowers, Super Flower, Me). The spirit is willing, but the songs are weak.
LET'S LIVE FOR TODAY (Dunhill). The Grassroots have blossomed into flower people of a sort. Love, mostly the personal kind, is their pitch, and Rob Grill is their melodic and persuasive pitchman. His cheerful proposal: "May others plan their future/I'm busy loving you/Sha la-la-la-la-la/Live for today."
EVOLUTION (Epic). An internationally popular quintet of sentimentalists from the north of England, the Hollies have a hit in Carrie-Anne. They remember their school days ("I played a janitor—you played a monitor"), and how they used to press their noses against the panes of Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe. Their nicest bit is Stop Right There, an arresting, minor-keyed ballad with violin obbligato.
CINEMA
THE THIEF OF PARIS. French Director Louis Malle (The Lovers) could have used a first story for this disjointed film about a fin de siècle second-story man. Even so, there are a few stolen treasures, including Jean-Paul Belmondo's performance.
THE BIG CITY. Director Satyajit Ray expertly dissects a slice of Indian life and shows how a young Bengali couple cope with Calcutta's mechanized realities while bound to an ancient morality.
UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. Sandy Dennis re-creates with considerable grace the tyro schoolmarm of Bel Kaufman's bestselling novel about a "problem area" high school.
THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS. Adultery—Italian style, by Divorce—Italian Style Director Pietro Germi. Virna Lisi supplies the sugar and spice. Really quite nice.
THE WHISPERERS. An old, retired domestic on the dole in an English industrial town is the somewhat sociological subject of this film, which nevertheless rises to uncommon heights because of a soaring performance by Dame Edith Evans.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE COLD WAR AS HISTORY, by Louis J. Halle. A clear, compelling tracery of U.S. and Russian maneuvers from 1945 to 1962, by a former State Department aide who effectively peels away the participants' emotions to reveal one of history's most significant conflicts.
A HALL OF MIRRORS, by Robert Stone. A first novelist writing about low life in New Orleans shows a particular gift for well-developed characters and dialogue.
NEW AMERICAN REVIEW: NUMBER 1. New American Library. Fiction by Philip Roth, criticism by Stanley Kauffmann and poetry by Louise Glück highlight Volume. No. 1 of this lively and commendable attempt to revive what is best described as the paperback-book magazine.
GOG, by Andrew Sinclair. A facile British historian mounts a time machine and takes a wild ride through history in this formidable fable about an amnesiac who makes a pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London in quest of himself.
DUBLIN: A PORTRAIT, by V.S. Pritchett, with photographs by Evelyn Hofer. Poetic photography adds luster to a distinguished prose picture of Dublin's streets and people.