Time Listings: Apr. 25, 1969

(2 of 4)

FORTY CARATS is a comedy of new marital modes and manners from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. It features a lovely Julie Harris as a middle-aged lady wooed and won by a 22-year-old lad.

HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen exhibits an outstanding command of technique as Frederick William Rolfe in this deft dramatization of Rolfe's novel of wish fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh.

Off Broadway

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. As a play, Russell McGrath's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel is less than successful, but Ming Cho Lee's set is elegant, Gerald Freedman's direction is deft, and the acting is full of flair.

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME is an evening of three slightly savage and humorous one-act plays by Novelist James Leo Herlihy performed ably by the Theater Company of Boston.

ADAPTATION-NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed by Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged as a TV contest. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco in a splendid performance as an overaged potential draftee.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a warm, loving tribute to Lorraine Hansberry, put together from her own writings and presented by an able, interracial cast.

DAMES AT SEA. A delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s with an enthusiastic and gifted minicast of six, including Bernadette Peters as Ruby, who taps her way to stardom in one day.

CINEMA

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS is a slick adaptation of Philip Roth's novella about being young, in love and Jewish. Director Larry Peerce is a canny craftsman, and if his film is a little too glossy, most of his actors—especially newcomer Ali MacGraw—perform with warm and endearing conviction.

STOLEN KISSES. In his newest and gentlest film, François Truffaut creates a poignant memory of adolescence, beginning with the eagerness and delight of youth and ending with the promise of melancholy maturity.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Marlon Brando is back in top form as a hipster-criminal in this thriller directed by Hubert Cornfield, who uses a story about kidnaping as an excuse to conduct a surreal seminar on the poetics of violence.

THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU. This is the one to take the family to see on the next rainy Saturday afternoon. Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg battle bad guys all across, and sometimes above Europe in an unceasing repertory of derring-do that will keep the kids enthralled and their parents amused.

I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW). If it were not for the sex scenes, this film probably would never have been imported. The rather conventional story of a confused adolescent girl in Sweden is interminable and unenlightened; like the much publicized sex scenes themselves, it is finally and fatally passionless.

THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's somewhat flawed novel with care and dedication. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm are all transcendent in their roles.

THE STALKING MOON pits canny Frontier Scout Gregory Peck against an ingenious Indian bent on a bloody and horrible revenge. The outcome is standard, but Director Robert Mulligan manages a couple of good chills along the way.