Television: Mar. 19, 1965

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THE SOUND OF MUSIC. This Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical about the Trapp Family Singers who tied Austria after the Anschluss of 1938 has more sugar than spice, but a buoyant performance by Julie Andrews makes the show seem irresistibly gemütlich.

RED DESERT. Against a bleak industrial landscape near Ravenna, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, La Notte) explores the neurotic problems of a young wife (Monica Vitti) and, frame by frame, fills his first color film with precisely shaded insights and breathtaking beauty.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. Jack Lemmon wakes up married to a girl in a million (Italian Import Virna Lisi) and tries to choose between hearthside and homicide while his woman-hating manservant (Terry-Thomas) offers hilarious household hints.

NOTHING BUT A MAN. What it means to be born black in America is set forth with power and poignancy in a straightforward drama about Negro newlyweds (Abbey Lincoln, Ivan Dixon) struggling to find their place in the white man's world.

JOY HOUSE. Along the Riviera, Director René Clément (Purple Noon) masterminds a sometimes merry, sometimes scary chase involving a professional Romeo (Alain Delon) who is pursued by killers and by a high-spirited vamp (Jane Fonda) who prefers to take him alive.

MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. Tears, belly laughs and earthy morality are shrewdly blended by Director Vittorio De Sica, turning for his theme to the 20-year sex battle between a Neapolitan pastryman (Marcello Mastroianni) and a triumphant tart (Sophia Loren).

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. In this sad but sparkling French musical, Director Jacques Demy heaves a sigh for every sweet young thing who ever traded her first careless rapture for a bit of tangible security.

ZORBA THE GREEK. An uproarious Bacchanalian bash out of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, superbly acted by Anthony Quinn as the wild old goat whose life is a series of total disasters.

GOLDFINGER. To save the gold at Fort Knox, James Bond (Sean Connery) endures sex, sadism, and other line-of-duty disturbances—all the while impeccably tailored, of course.

SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. A throat-drying English thriller, built around Kim Stanley's subtly menacing performance as a deranged medium whose "voices" tell her to kidnap a child.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE GOLD OF THE RIVER SEA, by Charlton Ogburn. In the framework of an exciting adventure novel, Author Ogburn (The Marauders) shows himself to be a richly talented recorder of the beauty and savagery of the Amazon and the jungles of Brazil.

PRETTY TALES FOR TIRED PEOPLE, by Martha Gellhorn. The three stories are set in the weary world of Continental society, where people manipulate friends as well as cards to slake their boredom. In each story there is a loser, and in the collapse of his flimsy designs is the germ of a less frantic, more satisfying life.

THE NEGRO COWBOYS, by Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones. Despite endless writings about the Old West, scholarly historians and pulp novelists alike have ignored the fact that Negro cowboys rode in most of the drives from Texas to the cattle markets, and were respected, liked, and paid on a basis of wits and skill rather than color. An overdue addition to Americana.