Television, Theater, Records, Cinema, Books: Jul. 29, 1966

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Society is never geared To people who wear a beard.

THE PENNYWHISTLERS: Folksongs of Eastern Europe (Nonesuch). For those who like their folk music ethnic, a group of seven American girls offers a pastiche of infrequently heard items from the banks of the Danube: Bulgarian planting songs, Hungarian love lyrics, Croatian hymns. Many of them are sung a capella—sustained by the septet's own strong harmony.

CINEMA

HOW TO STEAL A MILLION. Ars graftia artis. Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in an elegant comedy about the joys of burgling and forging the old masters.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Edward Albee's drama about a venomous all-night orgy of truth and consequences on faculty row has reached the screen with every four-letter word intact. Elizabeth Taylor, playing bitch-wife to Richard Burton's hagridden husband, proves that there is talent on both sides of the family.

THE ENDLESS SUMMER. Two California surfers prowl the world in a studious documentary on the quest for the perfect wave.

A BIG HAND FOR THE LITTLE LADY. The full house includes Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward and a couple of other aces in a mock-heroic poker comedy.

THE NAKED PREY. Manhunting in Africa a long dark century ago, with resourceful Director-Star Cornel Wilde as the sole survivor of an ill-fated safari, who becomes fair game for savage warriors.

"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING." The best thing about this cold war comedy is Broadway's Alan Arkin, hilarious as a Red-roving Soviet sailor whose sub is beached on a tight little island off the New England coast.

AND NOW MIGUEL. A ten-year-old boy comes of age among New Mexican sheep ranchers in an intelligent juvenile film by the makers of Island of the Blue Dolphins and Misty.

LE BONHEUR. Writer-Director Agnès Varda translates the French word for happiness into an exquisite tale of infidelity.

BORN FREE. A lioness named Elsa is as winning on the screen as she was in Joy Adamson's celebrated animal biography.

MANDRAGOLA. In Director Alberto Lattuada's romp through a Renaissance classic, some bold types carry out Machiavellian plots against the virtue of a Florentine beauty (Rosanna Schiaffino).

DEAR JOHN. The subjects of this perceptive essay on sex in Sweden are a sailor and a girl who spend a weekend learning that there is more to their relationship than lust at first sight.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Well deserving of its Oscar, the best foreign film of the year owes much of its impact to Josef Króner and Ida Kamińska as a couple of harmless villagers who have to work out their own answers to the Jewish question—orrather, the Nazi question—in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

BOOKS

Best Reading

LYNDON B. JOHNSON AND THE WORLD, by Philip L. Geyelin. A perceptive, sometimes tartly irreverent account of how L.B.J. has fared in foreign affairs, by the Wall Street Journal's diplomatic correspondent.

LOVE'S BODY, by Norman O. Brown. As a follow-up to his Life Against Death, which has become an undergraduate's delight, University of Rochester Professor Brown offers further Freudian ruminations on his theory that mankind's greatest enemy is sexual repression.