Cinema: Feb. 3, 1961

(2 of 3)

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Ireland: The Tear and the Smile," the second of a two-program report, with guests ranging from Actress Siobhan McKenna to Writer Sean O'Faolain and Designer Sybil Connolly.

Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). The Mediterranean is the prize in "Hinge of Fate."

Mon., Feb. 6

Close-Up! (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "X-Pilot," the story of Test Pilot Scott Crossfield and the rocket-powered X-15.

THEATER

On Broadway

Midseason on Broadway finds an unfavorable balance of dramatic trade, with the two most provocative original plays and the liveliest musicals all imported. Rhinoceros, a farcical-satirical assault on conformity by France's perky avant-gardist Eugene Ionesco, is somewhat obvious and farfetched but also exhilarating—particularly when Star Zero Mostel virtually turns himself into a rhinoceros onstage. A Taste of Honey, a first play by Britain's young (19 at the time) Shelagh Delaney, is an unhistrionic, earthy drama about a desperately lonely girl. And the musical Irma La Douce, French to its very bedposts, boasts Broadway's most charming chippy, Elizabeth Seal.

The domestic dramas include two adaptations from novels, All the Way Home, which transmits much of the poetry and power of James Agee's A Death in the Family, and Advise and Consent, a brisk and tense political melodrama taken from the Allen Drury bestseller. Also of note: Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, a lively comedy-lecture on marital success that is forced more often than forceful.

Among the musicals, Camelot compensates for a weak book with its opulent sets, some fine Lerner-Loewe tunes and Star Richard Burton. Do Re Mi, a Runyonesque piece about jukebox racketeering, is nearly salvaged by the inspired antics of Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker.

And two of the season's most small-scale and sprawling efforts are also its sprightliest—Show Girl, a zingy satirical revue in which Carol Channing takes on show business, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a freewheeling and hilarious look at all the world.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. A novelist (The High and the Mighty) and oldtime airline pilot, the author tells eloquently about the attrition of confidence, caused by too many close scrapes and too many dead comrades, that persuaded him to give up piloting.

The Future of Mankind, by Karl Jaspers. The prose of an author who is both a German and an existentialist is bound to be somewhat murky, but Jaspers advances powerful arguments against both easy despair and easy optimism about the human condition.

Raditzer, by Peter Matthiessen. Writing with an incisiveness that recalls Conrad, Novelist Matthiessen tells a harsh tale of a parasite and a host—the one a whining Army goldbricker, the other a strong and decent man who is subtly chivied into becoming the sniveler's protector.

The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead. In a highly readable history the author sketches—sometimes too sketchily—the exploits of the remarkable Victorians, including Stanley, Livingstone, Gordon and Kitchener, who traced and pacified the upper reaches of the Nile.