L'Avventura (in Italian). A tale of men suffering from the soul-sickness of despair, the film is a nightmarish masterpiece of tedium, a parable of purgation.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.' A natural revolutionary turns against society's bonds, keeps fighting against them in the best British film since Room at the Top. With a rising star, Albert Finney.
A Raisin in the Sun. Tenement realism about family life in Chicago's black belt bursts out in a writhing, vital mess.
Shadows. Earnest amateurs improvise an imperfect but powerful work of folk art in a tawdry New York setting.
Love and the Frenchwoman (in French). An Old Wave anthology, artificial but amusing.
The Hoodlum Priest. Violent, probing story of a priest and a condemned man.
The Absent-Minded Professor. Walt Disney's wacky science-fiction farce about Neddie the Nut and his fabulous flubber.
Breathless (in French). Formless, flashing cinematic cubism, based on the existentialist tenet that life is just one damn thing after another.
Other notable current movies: Ballad of a Soldier, Make Mine Mink, The League of Gentlemen, Question 7.
TELEVISION
Thurs., April 13 The Purex Special for Women (NBC,
4-5 p.m.).-"Change of Life," a dramatized documentary dealing with women's fears common at the menopause.
CBS Reports (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Carl Sandburg at Gettysburg" presents the poet-historian evoking the great battle.
Silents Please (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Following the recent NBC memoir, Will Rogers takes another bow in a filmed biography.
Fri., April 14
The Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). "The Younger Generation" exhibits new stars, including Singers Harve Presnell, Ron Husmann, Eileen Rodgers, the Chad Mitchell folk-singing trio and Violinist Jaime Laredo. Color.
Bell & Howell Close-Up! (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). In "I Remember," a survivor of eight Nazi concentration camps, now living in the U.S., revisits Europe and comments on the Eichmann trial.
Sun., April 16
Accent (CBS, 12:30-12:55 p.m.). Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein and U.S. Historian Henry Steele Commager discuss Civil War strategy.
Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). "The Western Hemisphere--1971," an examination of the Western Hemisphere's prospects a decade from today. Calypso Singer Lord Invader provides an entertainment framework.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Sweden: Trouble in Paradise," second part of a two-part series dealing with the country's social problems.
General Electric Theater (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). "The Joke's On Me," a drama about a destructive nightclub comic.
*All times E.S.T.
The Jack Benny Program (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). With Peter Lawford, Diana Dors.
NBC White Paper No. 5 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A modern hospital's problems.
Mon., April 17 33rd Annual Oscar Awards (ABC, 10:30 p.m.). Again, Bob Hope is M.C.
Tues., April 18
Expedition! (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.). Account of an expedition to Orinoco River, retracing the historic journey of Naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
Cry Vengeance! (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Drama about the last days of a Sicilian bandit. With Ben Gazzara, Sal Mineo.
THEATER
On Broadway
Big Fish, Little Fish. An honest but occasionally thin comedy about success and failure stars Jason Robards Jr. as a once promising editor who is the big fish to a school of has-beens and never-weres.
Mary, Mary. Jean Kerr's wit neatly jabs mankind and womankind.
Come Blow Your Horn. A highly amusing family battle.
Irma La Douce. Elizabeth Seal is the tenderest tart in this pert musical.
Advise and Consent. A tense melodrama--contrived but exciting--about the rough-and-tumble of Washington politics.
Rhinoceros. lonesco's lone nonconformist (Eli Wallach) stalwartly resists joining the herd, even when his best friends (notably Zero Mostel) desert him.
Camelot. Dazzling if unfocused, the Lerner-Loewe musical is notable for its sets, its songs and Richard Burton.
All the Way Home. A luminous study of a young husband's death, in a world--Knoxville, Tenn. of 1915--where a man's life was still bounded by several generations of his own family.
An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Broadway's funniest.
Off Broadway
Among the better bets: Call Me by My Rightful Name, a fresh piece about a triangle of misfits; Under Milk Wood, a welcome reprise of the Dylan Thomas work; The American Dream, Edward Albee's surrealistic situation comedy; Albee's The Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, on a double bill of disenchantment; and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical, The Threepenny Opera, the longest-running play in New York.
On Tour
Becket. In Jean Anouilh's version of the Thomas Becket story, Sir Laurence Olivier, who played Becket on Broadway, has switched to the role of Henry II, and the play emerges as livelier theater. Washington until April 15, Detroit April 17-22.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The New English Bible. A translation of the New Testament from the original Greek by a committee of British scholars and stylists whose aim was to make the Scripture intelligible to moderns who find much of the 17th century King James version unintelligible. Inevitably flatter and occasionally banal, it is nevertheless smooth and lucid, casts new light on many an obscure passage.
The French Revolution, by Georges Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier. A spirited tabloid of the Terror culled from some 50,000 eyewitness accounts. It seems that the heirs of the French Enlightenment behaved at times like Mau Mau.
An Only Child, by Frank O'Connor. Born in a Cork slum, the author writes with cheerful clarity of his pitiable boyhood and his fey, gallant mother.
The S-Man, by Mark Caine. In the clever guise of a self-help manual, this British book aims a good Swiftian kick at the cultists of success.
Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell. Mijbil the Otter did many things he hadn't oughter, and most of them were hilarious.
Seven Plays, by Bertolt Brecht. Roguish laughter, a cynic's sneer, tears of compassion, and a lacerated concern with the spectacle of man selling his fellow man keep exciting, if contradictory, company in the works of this remarkable playwright.
A Burnt-Out Case, by Graham Greene. In arrested leprosy, Greene has found his latest symbol for his favorite theme--the played-out soul too desiccated to feel anything except a numbing horror at the absence of feeling.
The Watchman, by Davis Grubb. A new horror story by the writer who darkened The Night of the Hunter.
Midcentury, by John Dos Passes. The U.S.A. montage of headlines, newsreels and capsule biographies is here applied to a new villain, big labor.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus. How much the world lost in the untimely death of this great Frenchman is all too apparent in these lucid and luminous essays.
Best Sellers
( SQRT previously included in TIME'S choice of Best Reading) 1. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (3)-2. Advise and Consent, Drury (2) 3. Hawaii, Michener (1) 4. A Burnt-Out Case, Greene (5) 5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (4) 6. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (6) 7. Midcentury, Dos Passos (7) 8. Winnie Ille Pu, Milne (10) 9. China Court, Godden (9) 10. Decision at Delphi, Maclnnes / 1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1) ,/ 2. The New English Bible (2) 3. Fate Is the Hunter, Gann (3) ,/ 4. Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell (5) 5. Who Killed Society? Amory (4) 6. My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, Parks f 7. Skyline, Fowler (7) 8. The Waste Makers, Packard (6) > 9. The White Nile, Moorehead 10. Japanese Inn, Statler
*Position on last week's list.
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