Television: Nov. 3, 1967

(3 of 4)

STEPHEN D. is Irish Playwright Hugh Leonard's attempt to dramatize James Joyce's autobiographical tale of Stephen Dedalus. While the richly lyrical Joycean prose pleases the ear, the play is a series of vignettes that fails to bring to life the Artist as a Young Man who vows to "forge the conscience of my race" in "silence, exile and cunning." While Stephen Joyce (no kin) gives a competent performance as the writer-hero, Stephen remains dead, alas.

ClNEMA

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Director John Schlesinger and Scenarist Frederic Raphael, who collaborated on Darling, now join in bringing Thomas Hardy's Victorian novel vividly to the screen—with the help of solid performances by Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp.

ELVIRA MADIGAN. This elegiac pastorale, directed by Sweden's Bo Widerberg, based on the true story of a cavalry officer's hopeless love affair with a circus tightrope walker, is spare and elegant, with outstanding sensitivity of texture, color and light.

FINNEGANS WAKE. American Producer-Director-Scenarist Mary Ellen Bute, 60, has made a brave effort to translate James Joyce's monumental work, and does remarkably well within the confines of 94 minutes.

OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE. This splendid, moody film takes place in a penumbral pile of Victorian architecture in a London suburb, where seven orphaned children cover up the death of their mother and try to maintain their old life with a mixture of love of one another and fear of the outside world.

THE TIGER MAKES OUT. From the brittle material of his off-Broadway play, The Tiger, Murray Schisgal has fashioned a cinematic cornucopia filled with enough laughs to supply an entire season of TV comedies.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, by Mikhail Bulgakov. Satan saunters through Moscow in this manic farce, which, after 25 years of suppression, has again seen light in Russia and received two new translations in the U.S.

CAUGHT IN THAT MUSIC, by Seymour Epstein. A distinguished novel set in New York City in the years just before World War II. The hero may stun today's war protesters: to become a "whole man," he enlists in the U.S. Army.

THE MANOR, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A popular Yiddish storyteller proves that he also has the insights of a major novelist in this tragicomedy about the changes that wrench a Polish-Jewish family in the late 1800s.

THE SLOW NATIVES, by Thea Astley. An Australian family of intellectuals tests its illusions against a philistine society; told by a satirist who may be her country's best woman novelist since Christina Stead.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. A chilling and brilliant exploration of the mind and life of the mad, messianic Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion in 1831.

THE PYRAMID, by William Golding. In this ostensibly simple tale of a bright lad who sacrifices principles to scale the ladder of the British class system, Golding explores his favorite theme—all men inherit the evil of their ancestry.

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION, by Will and Ariel Durant. This final volume of their 38-year labor to record man's progress across the span of 20 civilizations proves once again that the Durants are unique historians.