Television: Jul. 24, 1964

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(Mercury). The Smothers Brothers sing straight and well on occasion, but their mission in life is their antic spoofing of the folk scene, which appeals especially to teenagers. Their latest is not as funny as Think Ethnic!, where they expounded their own crazy version of John Henry and sang: "Black is the color of my love's true hair."

CINEMA

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. Under John Huston's shrewd direction, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Richard Burton unpack their troubles at a seedy Mexican hotel in a drama that stirs the senses, persuades the mind, and sometimes touches the heart.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl stumbles from the path of virtue into a nightmare of brutal Sicilian social codes in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which makes his wildly wicked Divorce—Italian Style seem an exercise in restraint.

A SHOT IN THE DARK. As Inspector Clouseau of the Sûreté, Peter Sellers pratfalls his way through a multiple murder case and proves beyond reasonable doubt that he is one of the funniest men alive.

ZULU. A brisk, bloody, eye-filling adventure inspired by the heroism of 130 British soldiers who fought off 4,000 Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift, Natal, in 1879.

MAFIOSO. Sicily again, with Alberto Sordi caught in the insidious toils of the Mafia while Director Alberto Lattuada serves up some small but gloriously garlicky slices of provincial life.

THAT MAN FROM RIO. French Director Philippe de Broca's wacky parody of Hollywood adventure movies propels Jean-Paul Belmondo through a series of wonderfully absurd dangers, smack into the arms of a drugged damsel in distress.

NOTHING BUT THE BEST. In this stylish British comedy, a lowly clerk, Alan Bates, rises in the Establishment by coolly perfecting a program of lies, theft, courtship and homicide.

THE ORGANIZER. In this vivid, timelessly beautiful account of a 19th century textile strike in Turin, Marcello Mastroianni fascinatingly portrays the early labor leader as a kind of holy hoodlum.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE FAR FIELD, by Theodore Roethke.

These poems, written in the last seven years before Roethke died of a heart attack, are beautiful in themselves and provide for him an astonishingly true memorial. All the themes of which he was a master reappear—the greenhouse, the root, the plant and a troubled reaching toward God.

TO AN EARLY GRAVE, by Wallace Markfield. On a kind of comic Volkswagen odyssey through Brooklyn, four Greenwich Village intellectuals search for the funeral of a compatriot and discover themselves: pathetic, rather pretentious fellows who at heart prefer the cult of Humphrey Bogart to the cult of the Partisan Review.

TWO NOVELS, by Brigid Brophy. An Oxford classics don, Novelist Brophy is best known for her savage book reviews in English periodicals. In these two new lightly plotted and wickedly brilliant novellas about a New Year's Eve amorous adventure, and the about-face of a Lesbian schoolmistress, she shows the elegant artifices and tricks of style of a latter-day Ronald Firbank.

THE SCARPERER, by Brendan Behan. To "scarper" in Gaelic is to escape, and Behan runs off with some Dublin weirdos glorifying their past and dreaming their future. This short novel is vintage Behan (1953).