Eclipse. The trouble with modern man, says Michelangelo Antonioni in most of his movies (L'Avventura, La Notte), is that he has gained the whole world and lost his own soul; the trouble with this picture, though it is certainly an effort of supreme style, is that Antonioni in his obsessive pessimism ignores an important fact of human life: a deep shadow can be cast only by a strong light.
David and Lisa, shot for less than $200,000 by a man and his wife (Director Frank and Scenarist Eleanor Perry) who had never made a movie before, tells the anguishing and tender story of two psychotic adolescents (Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin) who meet in the pit of madness and help each other to climb out.
Lawrence of Arabia. A handsome newcomer named Peter O'Toole is the star of this great big beautiful $10 million spectacle--produced by Sam Spiegel and directed by David Lean--that describes the amazing adventures of the guerrilla genius of World War I, but the customers will find themselves more fascinated by the infinite billowing sea of golden sand that covers Arabia Deserta.
Freud. Director John Huston has turned out an intense, intelligent cinemonograph on the early struggles of the papa of psychiatry. Montgomery Clift does fairly well as Freud, but sometimes looks more like a patient than a psychiatrist.
Electra. Director Cacoyannis has derived a beautiful and sometimes moving film from the play by Euripides.
Jumbo. Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye measure comic talents in this ponderous pachyderm of a picture--a $5,000,000 screen version of the 1935 Broadway musical. Jimmy wins by a nose.
Two for the Seesaw. Shirley MacLaine is pretty funny in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson's Broadway comedy. Robert Mitchum is not.
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
Wednesday, January 16 Russians: Self-Impressions (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* In dramatizations from the works of great Russian writers (Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Pasternak), a cast including Jo Van Fleet, Kim Hunter and Sam Wanamaker attempts to give insights into the Russian character.
The Bob Hope Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Highlights of Hope's Christmastime tour of military posts in the Pacific and the Far East.
Friday, January 18
Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The top news story of the week.
Saturday, January 19 Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). This week this excellent children's program has everything from a Finnish gymnastics team to a short history of American railroads, but particularly a reading of Rumpelstiltskin by Peter Ustinov.
Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Ski championships from Aspen, Colo.
Sunday, January 20 Washington Report (CBS, 12:30-1 p.m.). Survey of the outstanding developments of the week.
Wild Kingdom (NBC, 3:30-4 p.m.). An examination of the various ways in which wild animals protect themselves.
Wonderful World of Golf (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). Still another new series in TV's current rush to spend millions of jack on par, this one pits American pros against foreign pros; Gene Littler v. Scotland's Eric Brown at Scotland's Gleneagles course in the premiere.
Update (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). Robert Abernethy's news program for teenagers.
Meet the Press (NBC, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: General Lauris Norstad, retired SHAPE commander.
The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The great 1944 airdrop into Arnhem that was supposed to truncate the war but resulted in failure.
The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Guests: Mahalia Jackson, Franco Corelli, Jo Stafford.
Howard K. Smith (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Outspoken commentary on the news.
Monday, January 21 David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Strip mining in Pennsylvania.
Tuesday, January 22 Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A look at the University of Washington's College of Fisheries.
THEATER
Marcel Marceau is a stylish musician of motion, an exciting architect of empty space, an eloquent poet of silence. This matchless mime shares with the early Charlie Chaplin the knowledge that no matter how funny the pratfall, the heart is where the hurt is.
Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, gives birth to mirth by lending mirth to birth, as fatherhood closes in on a 60-year-old lumber merchant. Paul Ford plays the morose papa-to-be, and the only straight face in the house is his.
Little Me has the spit-and-polish shine of painstaking professionalism. Everyone connected with this musical merits kudos, but the most prodigious comic labors of the evening are performed by Sid Caesar as the septempartite suitor of Belle Poitrine, the All-America showgirl.
Beyond the Fringe offers four young English antiEstablishmentarians aiming blowgun darts of parody with poisonously amusing accuracy.
Tchin-Tchin owes more to Actors Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton than its script can quite repay. Trying to pick up the pieces of mutually shattered marriages, this sad-amusing absurdly incongruous pair find that the fragments are not worth keeping.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, is a jolting, mesmeric, wittily savage theatrical experience. In this brilliantly devised night of marital horrors, Arthur Hill is monstrously intelligent and Uta Hagen is a power-and sex-hungry witch.
Off Broadway
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter. In these two one-acters, Britain's most provocative dramatist puts his characters in an enigmatic rat's maze where they twist, turn and stumble, seeking each other and the truth with absurd and terrifying results.
A Man's a Man, by Bertolt Brecht. First produced in 1926, and excitingly performed in this Eric Bentley production, Man uncannily foreshadows the process of brainwashing, the loss of identity, and the kind of society where every man wears a mask to hide the face he hasn't got.
BOOKS
Best Reading
A Girl in Winter, by Philip Larkin. Layers of loneliness are peeled off with dexterity in this novel by one of England's finest poets.
The Sand Pebbles, by Richard McKenna. Writing his first novel at 49, an ex-Navy enlisted man tells how a ship's crew degenerates behind a fac,ade of spit and polish, then finds itself again.
Against the American Grain, by Dwight Macdonald. In a series of engaging essays, a razor-witted critic cuts an assortment of U.S. cultural pretensions down to size.
Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox, by Heinz Politzer. The most trenchant study to date of the strange writer in whose nightmarish parables of human alienation 20th century man has found a chilling portrait of himself.
The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, Vols. II and III of Henry James, by Leon Edel. A graceful and massive work (it will run to four volumes).
The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O'Hara. America's most celebrated short-story writer at work again in his old provincial stamping grounds--small-town New Jersey and Gibbsville, Pa.
Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. Fond impressions of life with the great impressionist by his gifted son.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2, last week)
2. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (1)
3. A Shade of Difference, Drury (3)
4. Genius, Dennis (4)
5. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (7)
6. The Cape Cod Lighter, O'Hara (6)
7. $100 Misunderstanding, Cover (9)
8. The Thin Red Line, Jones (10)
9. Ship of Fools, Porter (5)
10. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (8)
NONFICTION
1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2)
2. Silent Spring, Carson (3)
3. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (1)
4. My Life in Court, Nizer (4)
5. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (7)
6. The Points of My Compass, White (5)
7. The Rothschilds, Morton (9)
8. Letters from the Earth, Twain (8)
9. Final Verdict, St. Johns (6)
10. The Pyramid Climbers, Packard (10)
*All times E.S.T.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.