Television: Aug. 8, 1969

(3 of 4)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight exchanges his Texas desolation for an even more loveless scene—Manhattan, where he meets Dustin Hoffman, another loner. Their vaulting performances bring to life one of the most unlikely and melancholy love stories in the history of the American cinema.

THE FOOL KILLER and THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET. In The Fool Killer, a runaway twelve-year-old orphan comes to the beginning of maturity through a series of picaresque adventures. The call to action in The Boys of Paul Street is a dispute over the last vacant lot in town. Both films are tragicomedies that are focused on —and for—youth.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Director Larry Peerce has produced some rare moments of social criticism in this film, but he frequently slips into burlesque. Nevertheless, Richard Benjamin and AH MacGraw save the show with skillful performances.

POPI. The plight of the poor is told with humor and bite in this surprisingly successful comedy. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower with three jobs, struggling to get his children out of a New York ghetto.

THE LOVES OF ISADORA is distinguished only by Vanessa Redgrave's graceful and majestic performance. The truncated scenario is essentially true to events but essentially false to Isadora, who made them happen.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. Whether following the poetic figure of Eugene McCarthy into the night or documenting Richard Nixon's electronic conquest of the nation, White is just as persistent as he was in his account of the two previous presidential races. However, his protagonist lacks the kind of flamboyance that fires up White's romantic mind, and as a result a gray pall hangs over much of the book.

H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES, by Lovat Dickson. Wells sold the masses on the future and the Utopia that science would bring, but Dickson's biography shows that inside the complacent optimist a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.

ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. This collection of newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches by the brilliant Russian-Jewish writer purged by Stalin demonstrates the individuality that was both Isaac Babel's genius and his death warrant.

THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel in her Children of Violence series, the author takes her heroine, Martha Quest, from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.

SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT, by John A. Williams. In this novel, set in 1973, a normally reasonable Negro civil rights leader hires a gunman to avenge the death of an unarmed black boy shot by a white New York City policeman. The result evokes the tragedy of a sleepwalking society that can be awakened only by violence.

WHO TOOK THE GOLD AWAY, by John Leggett. Told with marvelous class and considerable spit and polish, this old-school novel recounts the tale of two Yale class mates who alternately befriend and betray each other well into middle age.