The Guns of Navarone. A superior cut of Hollywood baloney of these-poor-devils-don't-have-a-chance variety, starring Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn.
Eve Wants to Sleep (in Polish). A zany cops-and-robbers farce whose cops are Keystone and whose badmen are clearly friends of Mack the Knife.
The Young Savages. Savage gang warfare in the tenement-glutted asphalt jungle, in which the street punks fare far better than the plot-laden squares.
L'Avventura (in Italian). An interminable but fascinating study of the intolerable boredom that grips contemporary Rome's empty-souled profligates.
La Dolce Vita (in Italian). Federico Fellini's masterly travelogue through modern Rome's back alleys of spiritual depravity and sexual excess.
THEATER
Straw Hat
Ogunquit, Me., Playhouse: Celeste Holm takes Invitation to a March way off Broadway.
Beverly, Mass., North Shore Music Theater: Comedienne Carol Channing as the Show Girl.
Dennis, Mass., Cape Playhouse: Faye Emerson and Reginald Gardiner in The Pleasure of His Company.
Framingham, Mass., Carousel Theater: Kathryn Grayson waltzing through The Merry Widow.
Stockbridge, Mass., Berkshire Playhouse: Gloria Swanson in a new play by Malcolm Wells, Between Seasons.
Warwick, R.I., Warwick Musical Theater: Where's Charley?, starring Shelley Berman.
Wallingford, Conn., Oakdale Musical Theater: Take Me Along, starring Dan Dailey and Alice Ghostley.
Westport, Conn., Westport Country Playhouse: a double bill--Viveca Lindfors, Betty Field and Rita Gam in Strindberg's Miss Julie, coupled with Edward Albee's off-Broadway hit, The Zoo Story.
Stratford, Conn., American Shakespeare Festival: As You Like It, with Kim Hunter, is now rotating with Macbeth, which stars Jessica Tandy and Pat Hingle.
Nyack, N.Y., Tappan Zee Playhouse: A Majority of One, with Molly Picon and Martyn Green.
Jones Beach, Long Island, N.Y., Marine Theater: The musical extravaganza this year is Paradise Island, a more or less original fantasy produced by Guy Lombardo and starring Elaine Malbin, Arthur Treacher and William Gaxton.
East Hampton, N.Y., John Drew Theater: a new play, Walk Alone Together, by Patricia Joudry.
New York City, Central Park: The New York Shakespeare Festival gets a shaky start in temporary quarters with Much Ado About Nothing.
Clinton, N. J., Hunterdon Hills Playhouse: Under the Yum-Yum Tree, with Red Buttons.
Millburn, N.J., Paper Mill Playhouse: Hans Conried and Cornelia Otis Skinner in The Pleasure of His Company.
Lambertville, N. J., Music Circus: Alan Mowbray in Tenderloin.
Mountainhome, Pa., Pocono Playhouse: David Wayne starring in Send Me No Flowers.
New Hope, Pa., Bucks County Playhouse: The Interpreter, a new play by Eric Rudd, starring Richard Kiley and Fred Clark.
Moylan, Pa., Hedgerow Theater: Manhattan's off-Broadway Circle in the Square has moved to the Main Line for the summer, is currently doing Shaw's Misalliance.
Cincinnati, Ohio, Playhouse in the Park: Chekhov's The Sea Gull.
Columbus, Ohio, Kenley Players, Veterans Memorial Building: Zsa Zsa Gabor in Blithe Spirit.
Grand Ledge, Mich., The Ledges Playhouse: Goodbye Again, with Wendell Corey.
Hinsdale, Ill., Salt Creek Playhouse: The Marriage-Go-Round, with Larry Parks and Betty Garrett.
Highland Park, Ill., Chicago Music Theater: Tony Bennett in Guys and Dolls.
Dallas, Texas, State Fair Music Hall: Destry Rides Again, with Tom Poston and Yvonne de Carlo.
Pasadena, Calif., Pasadena Playhouse: Joe E. Brown as Father of the Bride.
Seattle, Wash., Aqua Theater: Oklahoma! with John Raitt, Pamela Britton.
Stratford, Ont, Stratford Festival: Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Henry VIII and Love's Labour's Lost are alternating with Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Tyrone Guthrie.
BOOKS
Best Reading
For summer catching-up with the season to date:
A spate of animal books is available for grownups as well as children, including Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell, and A Zoo in My Luggage, by Gerald Durrell, and those who are really taking summer seriously can dust off their copies of Winnie Hie Pu (there is a boom on 50-c- Latin pocket dictionaries).
It is also a good season for history: The French Revolution, by Georges Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier, The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas, and Russia and the West, by George Kennan (Bobby Kennedy is boning up with the last one), are all excellent. My Father, Lloyd George is a fine study of Britain's World War I Prime Minister by his son but, generally, autobiography was better served than biography. Frank O'Connor's An Only Child tells of his childhood in Cork slums and is written as gracefully as any book this year. In Nobody Knows My Name, Negro Author James Baldwin describes the end of his self-imposed exile and return to the U.S., and discusses some prevailing delusions on the color question.
The theater buff will find nothing original worth seeing, let alone reading, from the 1961 season so far, but Robert Lowell has published a masterful translation of Racine's Phaedra in accompaniment with a lively version of Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro by Jacques Barzun. The most interesting poetry also comes from an unexpected source: the works of Greek Poets George Seferis and C. P. Cavafy urvive translation and present the modern Greek's ruptured but overpowering ense of the past.
Humor has not fared well. Two usually reliable sources, James Thurber and Peter de Vries, both turned out disappointing nooks. The new P.G. Wodehouse, The Ice in the Bedroom, will delight his large claque. The reader who wants real wit may prefer G.B. Shaw's Letters to a Young Actress, in which the crotchety master tried without success to turn out a real-life Galatea from unpromising material. But the greatest sources of laughter so far this year are unintended by the authors and can be found easily by carting off the heaviest of the bestselling fiction.
The best novel comes from a reliable master of suspense and self-searching, Graham Greene. His brilliant book, A Burnt-Out Case, is one of an ever increasing number of fine novels focusing on Africa. Among the others: The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey, At Fever Pitch. by David Caute, and Shadows in the Grass, in which Isak Dinesen looks back on her pioneer life in the Kenya bush. Two fine first novels come, as usual, from the South: The Movie-Goer, by Walker Percy, and The Morning and the Evening, by Joan Williams. Robert McLaughlin provides an absorbing study of a troubled Middle Eastern country, The Walls of Heaven; Peter Matthiessen uses an old Navy tub as a setting for a fine study of conflicting ideals and temperaments in Raditzer.
There are at least three good adventure books, which cover a wide range: Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest Gann, on flying; The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead, on exploring the upper Nile; and Abandoned, by A.L. Todd, about an early trip to the perilous Arctic. Mystery buffs will find few clues worth following, but they can take some comfort from Sybille Bedford's Faces of Justice, which judges the judicial processes of European countries.
Best Sellers
( SQRT previously included in TIME'S choice of Best Reading)
FICTION
1. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (1)*
SQRT 2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (2)
3. Mila 18, Uris (6)
SQRT 4. A Burnt-Out Case, Greene (3)
5. Hawaii, Michener (9)
SQRT 6. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (4)
7. The Carpetbaggers, Robbins (7)
8. A Shooting Star, Stegner (8)
9. Mothers and Daughters, Hunter
SQRT 10. Winnie Ille Pu, Milne (5)
NONFICTION
SQRT 1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1) 2. A Nation of Sheep, Lederer (3) SQRT 3. The New English Bible (2) SQRT 4. Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell (4) SQRT 5. Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennan (5) 6. My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, Parks (6) 7. Sketches from Life, Acheson (9) 8. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Hauser (8) 9. Firsthand Report, Adams 10. The City in History, Mumford
* Position on last week's list.
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