From Hollywood

CINEMA

The Last Hurrah. The Good Government League should be outraged by this Crook's Tour of old-style machine politics, as conducted by Spencer Tracy in the guise of lovable, larcenous Frank Skeffington.

Damn Yankees. A hot time in the old home town tonight, as a couple of devil's advocates, Ray Walston and Dancer Gwen Verdon, get involved with the Washington Senators.

Me and the Colonel. Consistently funny and often touching is this lesson in lifemanship taught by a meek, ingenious Polish refugee (Danny Kaye). His unwilling pupil: a blustering, medieval-minded Polish officer (Curt Jurgens).

From Abroad

The Horse's Mouth (British). Alec Guinness is hilarious as a mildewed Michelangelo. But the cinemadaption of Joyce Gary's magnificent novel of rant does not come straight from, seems rather to whicker out of the side of, the horse's mouth.

Inspector Maigret (French). Jean Gabin fits Georges Simenon's famous flatfoot like an old shoe, and Director Jean Delannoy has not spared the polish.

My Uncle (French). Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot's Holiday), who is probably the cinema's most gifted present practitioner of the sight gag, has produced a satire on the mechanization of modern living that is always pretty witty, although in moviemaking terms it is sometimes tatty Tati.

TELEVISION

Wed., Dec. 10

Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).* Neither fact nor fiction, but a compromise of drama and documentary about an incident (TIME, Dec. 9, 1957) at the Glenwood (Iowa) State School for the mentally retarded. The drama turns around the shocking discovery that an inmate is at least as bright and emotionally steady as a TV producer.

Thurs., Dec. 11

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). A play about Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, during which Al Capone's men drew a murderous bead on Bugs Moran and succeeded only in killing seven other guys.

The Ford Show (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). An experiment in avant-garde orchestration, with the razorback rhythms of Tennessee Ernie as counterpoint to the Elgaresque swells of Charles Laughton.

Fri., Dec. 12

Invitational Bowling (NBC, 10 p.m.-ad infinitum). The finals of the world series of bowling, broadcast live from the Chicago Coliseum.

Sat., Dec. 13

Young People's Concerts (CBS, 12-1 p.m.). Conductor Leonard Bernstein, undisputed champion of the music-appreciation game, leads the New York Philharmonic through snatches of Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius, Gershwin, explaining all the while the musical chromosomes at work when a symphony is in the fetal stage.

Sun., Dec. 14

Johns Hopkins File (ABC, 11:30-12 a.m.). A relaxed look at the origins of such yuletide customs as the carol, the tree, the card, backed up by the 60-voice Johns Hopkins Glee Club.

Conquest (CBS, 5-6 p.m.) Eric Sevareid narrates a documentary on nature exploding big and exploding small: volcanoes on the one hand, cancer on the other.

Amahl and the Night Visitors (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Gian Carlo Menotti's opera about the lame shepherd boy who pledges his crutch to the infant Jesus has been a yearly joy since 1951 and may well be one in 2051; with Kirk Jordan as Amahl, Rosemary Kuhlman as his mother.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). The Hungarian revolt can still chill the most frost-resistant marrow. Most of the film used in this program has never been shown before.

Jack Benny (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). The old boy on his merry way, giving his usual lesson in the art of comedy.

The Steve Allen Show (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Guest (on film) Ingrid Bergman is all sweetness and Guest Jonathan Winters one of the weirdest, wittiest lights shining; Allen himself splits the difference. Color.

Keep Talking (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Everybody runs the four-minute mile in the speediest, funniest TV parlor game of them all; with Joey Bishop, Paul Winchell, Pat Carroll v. Morey Amsterdam, Danny Dayton, Nina Foch.

Mon., Dec. 15

The Voice of Firestone (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). "Salute to Tchaikovsky." The selections are crumb-sized but tasty.

THEATER

On Broadway

The Pleasure of His Company. Cyril Ritchard as a playboy who never grew up, in an exceedingly well-furnished drawing-room comedy. Among the more appealing furniture: Cornelia Otis Skinner.

A Touch of the Poet. Eugene O'Neill is as long-winded as ever, but it's a powerful wind that blows a lot of good in this tale of a boozing innkeeper and his crumbling illusions. With Eric Portman, Helen Hayes, Kim Stanley.

The Music Man. Santa Claus himself could not wish for more booming jollity.

My Fair Lady. Still the fairest of them all.

Two for the Seesaw. Romantic ping-pong between two emotional D.P.s in Manhattan, with a final score of love-nothing.

On Tour

My Fair Lady in CHICAGO, Music Man in SAN FRANCISCO, Two for the Seesaw in ST. Louis are reasonable facsimiles of the Broadway originals (see above).

Look Back in Anger. An uneven but fairly arresting comedy of ill manners. In BOSTON.

Auntie Mame. Too late for Halloween and too early for New Year's Eve, but the Madwoman of Beekman Place raises hell anyway, Constance Bennett in CHICAGO, Eve Arden in SAN FRANCISCO and Sylvia Sidney in HUNTINGTON, W. VA.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar. Only a very bold poet would have dared to pick up where Homer left off. Greece's late Nikos Kazantzakis did it in a vast, soaring poem in which high adventure, brutality and erotic appetites are finally subordinated to a search for self-knowledge and God.

The Visitors, by Mary McMinnies. Funny things happen to the diplomatic set in this not-too-fictional Iron Curtain country, with full value wrung out of every absurdity that Western folly and a heavy-handed dictatorship can help to generate.

The Prospects Are Pleasing, by Honor Tracy. Ireland and Irish eccentrics are taken for a bumpy ride in a novel that clearly kids just about every posture peculiar to the country that James Joyce called "Errorland."

Henry Adams: The Middle Years, by Ernest Samuels. Boston's testy Brahmin found life pretty pleasant in those charmed years when his Eve--Marian ("Clover") Hooper--was in charge of the education of Henry Adams.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote. Hardly anyone could resist the ribald appeal of Holly Golightly, one of fiction's most endearing bad little good girls.

Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery. In this big, incisive, good-humored account, Monty is sometimes not much nicer to his friends and allies than he was to his wartime enemies.

Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia's greatest living poet won the Nobel Prize with this big novel that is both a hymn to life and an indictment of the Russian Revolution. Not considered Best Reading in his homeland (see BOOKS).

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. A comedy of horrors and a nightmare of the mind dressed up in brilliant writing.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (1)

2. Lolita, Nabokov (2)

3. Around the World with Auntie Mame, Dennis (5)

4. Women and Thomas Harrow, Marquand (3)

5. Exodus, Uris (8)

6. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (4)

7. Anatomy of Murder, Traver (6)

8. Angelique, Golon (7)

9. Victorine, Keyes (9)

10. The Best of Everything, Jaffe

NONFICTION

1. Only in America, Golden (1)

2. Aku-Aku, Heyerdahl (2)

3. The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery (3)

4. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Boyington (5)

5. The New Testament in Modern English, translated by Phillips (6)

6. The Three Edwards, Costain

7. Wedemeyer Reports!

8. On My Own, Roosevelt

9. Chicago: A Pictorial History, Kogan and Wendt (9)

10. The Great Chicago Fire, Cromie

(Numbers in parentheses indicate last week's position.)

*All times in E.S.T.

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