Time Listings: Jan. 4, 1963

The Year's Ten Best

From its year-long guide to what's going in books, theater, cinema, records and television, TIME takes a backward look at 1962's ten best in each field.

CINEMA

David and Lisa. The most deeply moving U.S. movie of 1962: a dramatized case history, made by cinema beginners for less than $200,000, that sensitively describes the problems of a schizophrenic girl (Janet Margolin) and an obsessive-compulsive boy (Keir Dullea).

Divorce—Italian Style. Director Pietro Germi and Actor Marcello Mastroianni, in the year's most hilarious comedy of bad manners, slyly rattle one of the mustier skeletons in their country's closet—the antiquated Italian divorce law.

Last Year at Marienbad. The French New Wave, which has saltily subsided, nevertheless flung up the intellectual sensation of the year, a tour de force of cubistic cinema in which Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) dismantles reality and reassembles it in a monstrous maze whose exit is its entrance.

Lawrence of Arabia. The only spectacle released in 1962 that is truly spectacular: a film biography of the peculiar guerrilla genius who led the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I.

Yojimbo. Japan's Akira Kurosawa, the greatest living master of cinema, bloodily castigates modern man; but he disguises the satire as a great big noisy eastern western, and he manages to make the carnage seem horrendously comic.

Through a Glass Darkly. A wise and warm and frightening picture in which Ingmar Bergman tells the story of a young woman (Harriet Andersson) who looks through a crack in the wall that limits reason from unreason and on the other side sees God—an enormous spider.

Billy Budd. The allegorical classic by Melville has been made into a somber drama in which good and evil meet with a clash of symbols and then founder in the green indifference of the sea.

Long Day's Journey into Night. Director Sidney Lumet and an imposing cast (Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Stockwell) have transformed a great play by Eugene O'Neill into a good film: a study of spiritual wretchedness.

Lonely Are the Brave. Man as God made him and a world God never made meet in mortal battle in this simple, painful story of a cowboy (Kirk Douglas) who tangles with 20th century civilization.

A Taste of Honey. The hit play by Shelagh Delaney, Britain's angry young ma'am, has been made into the year's best British movie: a grim-gay, witty-gritty tale about a mill-town miss (Rita Tushingham) who grows up the hard way.

TELEVISION 1 Series

Naked City (ABC), in its fourth season, is as good as ever, a skillfully written, cool and objective anthology of stories about New York, filmed in the streets.

I'm Dickens . . . He's Fenster (ABC) is the best new TV comedy in several years, about a couple of construction carpenters with sawed-off brains and a certain finesse at slapstick.

The Jetsons (ABC), an animated cartoon series by Hanna and Barbera, is about a family that lives in the distant future and survives on show business's most solid fuel: corn.