ON BROADWAY
Merrill's Marauders. In its underkeyed account of jungle fighting and jungle horror, this semi-documentary film signs with honor the ordeal of 3,000 U.S. volunteers fighting behind Japanese lines in Burma.
The Miracle Worker. Anne Bancroft as Teacher Sullivan and Patty Duke as the child Helen Keller re-create their Broadway roles in what is possibly the most moving double performance ever recorded on film.
A Taste of Honey. Playwright Shelagh Delaney's story of a wise child in the Lancashire slums who knows her own mother and is determined to know herself. Rita Tushingham makes the heroine a kind of Oliver Twist in a maternity dress.
Jules and Jim. Director Francois Truffaut's story of three young people in Paris is so spontaneous, sincere, generous, naive and natural that a spectator who sits down to watch it feeling old and dry may rise up feeling young and green.
The Counterfeit Traitor. An expert spy thriller about an Allied agent in Sweden during World War II.
Five Finger Exercise probes the hurts in a blighted family that has risen from rags to wretchedness.
Sweet Bird of Youth. This sleazy affair between a Hollywood beach bum (Paul Newman) and an aging cinemama (Geraldine Page) makes a good movie melodrama out of a tiresome Tennessee Williams play.
TELEVISION
Wed.. June 13 Howard K. Smith: News & Comment (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).-- Summary of the week's most important items, with analysis.
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Brinkley focuses on the mental problems of Manhattan dwellers. Color.
Thurs., June 14 Accent (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Descendants of the earliest American Negro slaves, now living on the Georgia Sea Islands, are studied. John Ciardi is host, guest is Folk Musicologist Alan Lomax.
Golden Showcase (CBS, 9-10 p.m.).
World premiere of Igor Stravinsky's dance drama Noah and the Flood, choreographed by George Balanchine, starring Laurence Harvey, Sebastian Cabot, Elsa Lanchester and the New York City Ballet.
Fri., June 15 Germany: Fathers and Sons (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). An examination of the "barrier of silence" between Germans who lived under Hitler and the younger generation who have grown up since the fall of the Third Reich.
Sun., June 17 Directions '62 (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). A tour through the starkly modern Dominican monastery, La Tourette, which was designed by Le Corbusier.
Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).
Lee Marvin stars in a science-fiction fantasy based on an H. G. Wells short story about a prospector who is swept by an avalanche into a hidden valley inhabited by a race of eyeless people. Color.
Mon., June 18
I've Got a Secret (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). This durable regular celebrates its tenth anniversary on the air.
THEATER
On Broadway
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This musical marriage of vaudeville and burlesque has been gamily adapted from Plautus; the girls owe their best lines to nature; and Zero Mostel is master of the hilarious revels.
A Thousand Clowns, by Herb Gardner. Playwriting about nonconformism is the conformist thing to do these days. Fortunately, Herb Gardner brings verve, humor, and a freshly observant eye to the subject, and his cast, headed by Jason Robards Jr., could scarcely be improved upon.
The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams. Four people work out their tormented destinies on a Mexican veranda in this New York Drama Critics Circle prize play. For sustained dramatic power, tension and beauty, the second-act scenes between Margaret Leighton and Patrick O'Neal are unequaled on the current Broadway stage.
A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. This New York Drama Critics Circle prize foreign play focuses on a man who would rather lose his life than his soul. Paul Scofield seems to body forth all the virtues of Sir Thomas More.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying slyly paints a mustache on the corporate image. Robert Morse powers this musical with his ebullient portrayal of an Org Man rocketing to the top.
Off Broadway
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad,
by Arthur Kopit. An evening of surrealistic foolery on the topic of why Mom is a witch. Goofy, oomphy Barbara Harris is the Lolita of off-Broadway.
RECORDS
Verdi: Ai'da (Leontyne Price, Rita Gorr, Jon Vickers, Robert Merrill, Giorgio Tozzi; Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus, Georg Solti conducting; RCA Victor, 3 LPs). Soprano Price is the special glory of this excellent recording: her A'ida is moving in torment and tigerish in passion, and her voice is consistently amazing--loose, luminous and capable of cleaving with unwavering accuracy through the massed choral and orchestral sound.
Richard Strauss: Enoch Arden (Glenn Gould, pianist, and Claude Rains, reader; Columbia). The piano score Strauss wrote, at 26, for Tennyson's lavendered lines was little more than a parody--unconscious but fascinating--of the descriptive programmatic style the composer later brought to his symphonic poems. Gould and Rains perform the "Melodrama for Piano" with appropriate bravura.
William Sydeman: Seven Movements for Septet (Composers Recordings). An nvigorating, consistently intriguing chamber work that in the course of its many moods proceeds, by its composer's testimony, "from anger to near hysteria" while iurveying a gaudy world of sound few listeners will ever have encountered.
Composer Sydeman, 34, has an ear for perky rhythms and a flair for arresting ideas that stamp him as one of the most talented of U.S. newcomers.
Schumann: Carnaval (Benno Moisei-witsch, piano; Decca). One of the great practitioners of the grand style of piano playing releases all the passion and song in a composer he knows well.
Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Martha Lipton, mezzo-soprano; the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting; Columbia, 2 LPs). As fine an interpretation as Mahler's mammoth, six-movement "musical poem" is likely to get. The choral and orchestral effects are never blurred or muddied, and Bernstein's reading is radiant--a beautifully scaled celebration of the music's moods.
Mendelssohn: Trio in D Minor (Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano; Alexander Schneider, violin; Pablo Casals, cello; Columbia). A recording of the Nov. 13, 1961 White House concert that honored Pablo Casals. The performance, as expected, was worthy of the occasion. Casals' uncanny control, and the unfaltering warmth of his tone, will be the envy of cellists one-half the master's 85 years.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Reivers, by William Faulkner. In a marvelously comic book, the sage of Yoknapatawpha County matches Mark Twain as a teller of tall stories, laces his narrative with agreeable anecdote.
Saint Francis, by Nikos Kazantzakis. The late great Greek novelist restores agony of soul to a saint too often portrayed as sickly sweet.
An Unofficial Rose, by Iris Murdoch. The romantic lower depths of Britain's upper classes intricately explored by an artful philosopher-novelist.
The Wax Boom, by George Mandel. A complex, absorbing narrative about a hard-driven infantry company in combat.
Patriotic Gore, by Edmund Wilson. A searching study of Northern and Southern writers as they reacted to the brutalities of the Civil War.
Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. A brilliant, uncompromising portrait of human folly afloat and ashore.
Best Sellers FICTION 1. Ship of Fools, Porter (1, last week) 2. Franny and Zooey, Salinger (2)
3. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stone (3)
4. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (7)
5. The Bull from the Sea, Renault (4)
6. The Fox in the Attic, Hughes (5)
7. A Prologue to Love, Caldwell (6)
8. Devil Water, Seton (8)
9. Island, Huxley
10. The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming
NONFICTION
1. The Rothschilds, Morton (1)
2. My Life in Court, Nizer (3)
3. Calories Don't Count, Taller (2)
4. In the Clearing, Frost (6)
5. Six Crises, Nixon (5)
6. The Guns of August, Tuchman (4)
7. O'Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb (10)
8. Scott Fitzgerald, Turnbull (8)
9. The New English Bible (9)
10. Conversations with Stalin, Djilas
-All times E.D.T.
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