CINEMA: Time Listings, Nov. 3, 1958

From Hollywood

The Last Hurrah. That old Gael Spencer Tracy gets a chance to make something out of the blarney that is built into the familiar figure of Frank Skeffington, rogue-hero of the popular 1956 bestseller. Result: a politico who is a combination of Robin Hood and Mother Machree. Sure and if he steals, ’tis only from the rich.

Damn Yankees. A devilishly good Hollywood remake of the Broadway musical about baseball and Beelzebub, with Dancer Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston.

Me and the Colonel. Danny Kaye’s warmest and one of his funniest, about a gentle, ingenious refugee escaping one jump ahead (and occasionally one jump behind) the Nazi invasion of France.

The Defiant Ones. Two escaped convicts (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier) loathe each other, but since they are bound together at the wrist by a chain, they eventually learn a brutal, moving lesson about brotherhood.

The Reluctant Debutante. Rex Harrison and wife Kay Kendall romping through Mayfair, as pixy a pair as ever made pix.

From Abroad

Father Panchali (Indian). Director Satyajit Ray has produced the first cinematic masterpiece ever made in India: a stirring vision of life in Mother Asia.

The Case of Dr. Laurent (French). A baby is born on-camera in the final scene, but far earlier than that, Jean Gabin, as a kindly rural doctor, and Nicole Courcel, as his first natural-childbirth convert, have given the film warm, memorable appeal.

TELEVISION

Wed., Oct. 29

Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.)* The House of Flying Objects is based on the strange happenings in the house of James M. Herrmann of Seaford, L.I., where eight months ago lamps, bottles and furniture apparently flew through the air with the greatest of ease (TIME, March 17). The script leaves the solution to the mystery right up in the air along with all the household effects.

Thurs., Oct. 30

Leave It to Beaver (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Little Jerry Mathers as the resident scalawag in the most appealing of the family comedies since Henry Aldrich.

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Germany’s famed Maria Schell (TIME, Dec. 30) makes her American TV debut in Word from a Sealed-Off Box, a play about four prisoners in Nazi-occupied Holland; the story is from the book The Walls Came Tumbling Down, by Henriette Roosenburg. Also in the cast: Jean Pierre Aumont, Betsy von Furstenberg.

Fri., Oct. 31

77 Sunset Strip (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Roger Smith as Detective Jeff Spencer boasts a keener private eye than most.

Sun., Nov. 2

File 7 (ABC, 11:30-12 noon). A quiz show with not one penny at stake; Johns Hopkins Assistant Professor Dr. Eliezer Naddor, an expert in the occult occupation of solving puzzles, will run four university students through some seemingly impossible riddles, then explain where and how they goofed.

Kaleidoscope (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Première of an ambitious news show that attempts to look at everything under the moon—and probably a few things on it. The opening program, with Chet Huntley as narrator, deals with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have escaped from East to West Germany.

The Chevy Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A one-shot program with Sid Caesar and Art Carney, two of TV’s most appealing irregulars.

Mon., Nov. 3

Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Eli Wallach, a method actor who took the trouble to learn acting as well as method, as a crusading Puerto Rican lawyer in New York.

Tues., Nov. 4

Election Coverage. All networks, 9 p.m.

THEATER

On Broadway

A Touch of the Poet. Eugene O’Neill’s giant strength and giant sprawl, in a long-ago tale of a boozing innkeeper—well-played by Eric Portman—and his shattered pose of being a fine gentleman. With Helen Hayes, Kim Stanley.

The Music Man. Robert Preston, brilliant in Meredith Willson’s one-man musicomedy job that has all the jubilant oldtime energy of a small-town jamboree.

My Fair Lady. Worth fighting to get into, whether for the first or second time.

The Visit. The Lunts enhancing a fascinating continental theater piece concerned with a rich woman’s vengeful hate and a community that succumbs to greed.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. William Inge’s 19201sh family chronicle, alternating parlor comedy with dark tensions; sometimes vivid, sometimes merely facile.

Two for the Seesaw. Uneven but amusing and touching two-character tale of a split-level, ghost-ridden love affair.

Look Homeward, Angel. Ketti Frings’s Pulitzer Prize and Critics Award winner, less bulky and autobiographical than Thomas Wolfe’s parent novel and more the portrait of a memorable family, at once riveted and riven.

On Tour

Auntie Mame. Patrick Dennis’ wonderfully wacky old bawd is fracturing TEXAS (Sylvia Sydney), CHICAGO (Constance Bennett),SAN FRANCISCO (Eve Arden).

My Fair Lady proves triumphantly that Shaw can be transplanted into musicomedy land, and ASCOT to CHICAGO.

Look Back in Anger. That angry young man, John Osborne, this week growls in PITTSBURGH.

The Music Man. Seventy-six trombones and four times as many laughs in SAN FRANCISCO.

Ballets: U.S.A. is showing DETROIT that when Jerome Robbins takes a sharp choreographic look at the street life of Manhattan, his reporting rings true for slum life in any city in America.

Henry V and Hamlet, played with flawless, zestful art by London’s Old Vic Company, are giving ST. Louis a new slant on Shakespeare.

Two for the Seesaw with two fine players, Ruth Roman and Jeffrey Lynn in CLEVELAND.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. A mousy vacuum-cleaner salesman doubles as a British secret agent in this thriller. Reasonably entertaining, although suspense no longer blossoms as it once did under the Greene thumb.

Child of Our Time, by Michel del Castillo. A childhood in Europe’s concentration camps recalled with heart-rending in tensity by a boy who lived through it.

The Klondike Fever, by Pierre Berton. There are more nuggets in this book than most of the sourdoughs took from the Yukon.

95 Poems, by e.e. cummings. Age (64) has not withered the lyrical high jinks of the U.S.’s poetic dean of lower-case letters.

In Flanders Fields, by Leon Wolff. An absorbing account of one of the bloodiest bungles of World War I.

The Secret, by Alba de Cespedes. A sensitive glimpse into the soul of a middle-aged Italian woman, whose problems and dreams do not appear so very different from those of her American sisters.

Women and Thomas Harrow, by John P. Marquand. Once again beyond the Point of No Return, this time on a lifelong journey between Broadway and New England.

Marlborough’s Duchess, by Louis Kronenberger. A polished biography of an un cut gem of a woman, Sir Winston’s ancestress, Sarah Churchill, who helped make the 18th century glitter.

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia’s greatest living poet has written Russia’s greatest novel since the Revolution.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. A brilliantly written novel, lyrical, hilarious and horrifying, about a middle-aging émigré’s love for a “nymphet.”

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Lolita, Nabokov (1)

2. Around the World with Auntie Mame, Dennis (2)

3. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (3)

4. Women and Thomas Harrow, Marquand (5)

5. The Best of Everything, Jaffe (7)

6. Anatomy of a Murder, Traver (4)

7. The Enemy Camp, Weidman (6)

8. The Bramble Bush, Mergendahl (10)

9. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (8)

10. The Day on Fire, Ullman

NONFICTION

1. Only in America, Golden (1)

2. Aku-Aku, Heyerdahl (2)

3. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Boyington (3)

4. On My Own, Roosevelt (6)

5. The Insolent Chariots, Keats (8)

6. The Affluent Society, Galbraith (4)

7. Kids Say the Darndest Things! Linkletter (7)

8. Abandon Ship! Newcomb

9. Inside Russia Today, Gunther (5)

10. The New Testament in Modern English, translated by Phillips (9)

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

* All times E.S.T.