Everybody Go Home. Alberto Sordi is fairly funny in a fairly funny comedy about Italy's armed farces during World War II.
The Reluctant Saint. Maximilian Schell attains new histrionic heights in the amusing, amazing story of San Giuseppe of Cupertino (1603-63), a saint who could literally fly.
Two for the Seesaw. Love comes to Gittel Moscowitz in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson's play about what happens when a blue-eyed Babbitt from Omaha meets a blackstocking in Greenwich Village.
The Long Absence. The old reliable Enoch Arden story, told with skill and significant variations by France's Henri Colpi.
Mutiny on the Bounty. MGM's $18.5 million reconstruction of The Bounty goes bounding along at a great rate for two hours, but all at once the story springs a leak and sinks beneath contempt. Marlon Brando is a sight too cute as Fletcher Christian, but even in disaster Trevor Howard makes a superlative curmudgeon of Captain Bligh.
Gypsy. Rosalind Russell is loud and funny in this stripping good show, from the Broadway musical abstracted from Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography.
Billy Budd. Herman Melville's didactic tale has been transformed by Peter Ustinov--who directed the picture, helped write the script, and plays one of the leading roles--into a vividly affecting film.
Long Day's Journey into Night. Eugene O'Neill's play, one of the greatest of the century, is brought to the screen without significant changes and with a better than competent cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell.
TELEVISION
Wed., Dec. 12 CBS Reports (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Two days before the Mariner II space probe passes within 21,000 miles of Venus, CBS probes the possible discoveries that its instruments could make.
The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). The Clampetts open fire on some of their Hollywood neighbors in the show that has topped the season's ratings.
Fri., Dec. 14 The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Films of Paar & family in Africa plus Guest Stars Jonathan Winters and Robert Merrill.
Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The top news story of the week.
Sat., Dec. 15 Football (CBS, 4:30 p.m. to end).
Cleveland Browns v. San Francisco Forty-Niners.
As Caesar Sees It (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.).
Having conquered unfamiliar Broadway in Little Me, great Caesar is having a rough go this fall in his own accustomed medium. This is his third of nine specials, hopefully the first good one.
Sun., Dec. 16
This Is NBC News (NBC, 4:30-5 p.m.). Synopsis of the top news stories of the week.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The story of two Russian divisions that defected during the Second World War and fought for the Nazis.
The Sunday Night Movie (ABC, 8-10 p.m.). Orson Welles and Gregory Peck in Moby Dick.
The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Guests: Singers Howard Keel and Patrice Munsel. Dancers Melissa Hayden and Jacques d'Amboise.
Howard K. Smith (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). News and comment, but mostly comment.
Mon., Dec. 17
David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Cuban rebels training in Florida and a look at the military dictatorship in Paraguay.
Tues., Dec. 18
Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A cartoon version of Dickens' story, featuring Jim Backus as Mr. Magoo and Ebenezer Scrooge.
Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A sweeping look at seven-year-old kids everywhere, from Japan to Texas, Italy to India, what they think, do, say and suffer.
THEATER
On Broadway
Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, is a one-gag, all-night laugh show about a chagrined man of 60 who finds himself facing the unexpected onslaught of second fatherhood. As the father-to-be, Paul Ford is an excruciatingly funny anatomy of melancholy, and Orson Bean, as his son-in-law, is a hilariously beguiling buffoon.
Little Me. In a one-man comic population explosion, Sid Caesar plays all seven men in the farcical musical-comedy saga of Belle Poitrine, the all-American show girl originally lampooned in Patrick Dennis' novel. For rampagingly frivolous fun, this is it.
Beyond the Fringe. Four monstrously clever and wildly amusing young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge gleefully smash the icons of any and all Establishments, from Shakespeare to nuclear defense.
Tchin-Tchin. Opposites, who are also rejects, attract each other in this sad, amusing, pathetic fable about an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman who try to be adult about their mutually adulterous spouses. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn give the two roles rare distinction.
Mr. President impeaches taste and demeans the considerable talents of Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray, but the public has given this musical an unparalleled vote of confidence with an advance ticket sale of over $2,600,000.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, examines the sterility of a marriage, and of modern U.S. life, with cold fury. As the warring couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen give performances of indelible brilliance.
The Affair has been expertly adapted from C. P. Snow's novel and revolves around the issue of justice toward an ideological enemy. A predominantly British cast evokes the donnish flavor of a university common room turned courtroom.
Off Broadway
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection,
by Harold Pinter. These two one-acters combine the comedy and menace of England's most powerfully provocative playwright. Alan Schneider's direction of a splendid cast seismographically records volcanic shifts of meaning.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, Vols. II and III of Henry James, by Leon Edel. Author Edel's vast work, which will run to four volumes and which promises to be the definitive biography of James, is written with a scholar's exhaustive combing of detail and a novelist's flair for mood and motive.
Two Stories and a Memory, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Excellent minor pieces by the Sicilian prince whose elegiac novel of nobility's erosion, The Leopard, was a bestseller two years ago. The author's memoir of the great houses he lived in as a child is particularly good.
The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O'Hara. The author writes better than ever of heels and down-at-the-heels in Gibbsville, Pa., and small-town New Jersey.
Tale for the Mirror, by Hortense Calisher. One of the rare mistresses of the short story in a three-star excursion to Exurbia-on-Hudson.
The Community of Scholars and Drawing the Line, by Paul Goodman. An uneven but provocative display of literary fireworks by a critic who finds U.S. colleges and cold war thinking otiose.
Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. The author, who as a boy sat for his father, the great Impressionist painter, now turns portraitist, and his biography is one of the most likable in years. ,
The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. This first complete collection reveals the thoughtful side of a man whose life often seemed dedicated to the unimportance of being earnest.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (3, last week)
2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2)
3. A Shade of Difference, Drury (1)
4. The Thin Red Line, Jones (7)
5. Ship of Fools, Porter (5)
6. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (6)
7. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (4)
8. The Passion Flower Hotel, Erskine (9)
9. Genius, Dennis
10. The Prize, Wallace (8)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2)
2. Silent Spring, Carson (1)
3. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (3)
4. My Life in Court, Nizer (5)
5. The Rothschilds, Morton (4)
6. Letters from the Earth, Twain (8)
7. Final Verdict, St. Johns (7)
8. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (6)
9. The Pyramid Climbers, Packard (9)
10. The Points of My Compass, White
* All times E.S.T.
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