Time Listings: CINEMA

From Hollywood

Home Before Dark. Jean Simmons suffers nobly as a wife returning from a dark night of the mind, and Dan O’Herlihy is excellent as the husband who does not understand the situation.

The Last Hurrah. No resemblance to persons living or dead is intended, but patrons will be permitted to recall Boston’s ex-Mayor Jim Curley who died last week at 83. With Spencer Tracy, being as lovable as any crooked politician in the history of the game.

Damn Yankees. A hot time in the old 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. It sounds unlikely, but the story of a meek, ingenious Polish refugee (Danny Kaye) and a blustering anti-Semitic Polish officer (Curt Jürgens) is the funniest thing out of Hollywood this year.

The Defiant Ones. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, as escaped convicts bound by a length of chain, in Stanley Kramer’s biting argument for brotherhood.

From Abroad

The Seventh Seal (Swedish). The photography is lovely, the form obscure (a medieval morality play), and only those who react to the highly exotic will find the film unreservedly tasty.

Father Panchali (Indian). A down-and-out Indian family, as seen through the exquisitely accurate eyes of Director Savajit Ray.

TELEVISION

Wed., Nov. 19 Pursuit (CBS, 8-9 p.m.).* Daphne du Maurier’s Kiss Me Again, Stranger, in which an Air Force lieutenant hunts the murderer of his slain buddy, may warm viewers simply by the heat of its cast.

Among the living bodies: Jeff Hunter, Myron McCormick, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Beth Hughes and Mort Sahl.

U.S. Steel Hour (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The Irish Rebellion once again, in an insur rection that has been refought more often than the Punic Wars; with Barry Sulli van, Geraldine Brooks.

Thurs., Nov. 20 Hallmark Hall of Fame (NBC, 9-10:30 p.m.). Kiss Me Kate, Cole Porter’s triumphant reworking of Young Will’s Taming of the Shrew; with Alfred Drake and Pa tricia Morison from the original Broad way cast, plus Julie Wilson, Bill Hayes and Harvey Lembeck to add a few grace notes. Color.

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.).

Geraldine Page and Sterling Hayden in a dramatic version of Faulkner’s Old Man adapted for TV by another pretty fair country writer, Horton (The Trip to Bountiful) Foote.

Fri., Nov. 21 The Bob Hope Show (NBC, 8-9 p.m.).

Bob, the old eclectic, pulls together the odd threesome of Betty Grable, Wally Cox and Gloria Swanson, and if anyone has the savvy to make it look harmonious, it’s Hope.

Sun., Nov. 23

Johns Hopkins File 7 (ABC, 11:30-12 noon). A beep about radar, by a couple of university research men, that sounds out everything from foggy airplane landings to stellar explosions to speeding tickets.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). “Perón and Evita” get a well-deserved once-over in a film-clip history; musical score by Darius Milhaud.

Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). The So-Called Human Race, a walleyed, satirical look at psychiatry by George Panetta, whose credentials include an off-Broadway comedy called Comic Strip that nail-tough Critic Walter Kerr dismissed as “perfect.”

Stars of Jazz (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Lizzie Miles at 63 can still belt them into submission with a few strokes, and Joe Yukl’s sextet is in attendance to perform a gentler kind of operation on Royal Garden Bines and Basin Street Blues.

Tues., Nov. 25

Shirley Temple Storybook (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Eli Wallach in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.

THEATER

On Broadway

The Pleasure of His Company. A suave drawing-room comedy about a middle-aged playboy who teaches his daughter how to sow some wild oats before settling down to the oatmeal of marriage. Cyril Ritchard, Cornelia Otis Skinner.

A Touch of the Poet. One of Eugene O’Neill’s favorite themes—man’s addiction to illusion—reappears in a sprawling but powerful tale of a boozing innkeeper and his crumbling pose as a fine gentleman. With Eric Portman, Helen Hayes.

The Music Man. With Robert Preston starring in Meredith Willson’s jamboree, it seems like the Fourth of July all season.

My Fair Lady. Bernard Shaw, once a bone-crushing music critic, might just possibly have approved this musicomedy masterpiece fashioned from his Pygmalion.

The Visit. A rich witch offers to buy the life of a man who once wronged her —for a mere billion dollars. This surrealist, symbol-clogged but fascinating fable may be Alfred Lunt’s and Lynn Fontanne’s last visit to Broadway.

Two for the Seesaw. The story that might lurk behind a couple of want ads (Apartments, Furnished), showing the emotional wants, woes and laughs of a couple of cliff dwellers in Manhattan.

On Tour

My Fair Lady, in CHICAGO, and Music Man, in SAN FRANCISCO, reflect almost all the glories of the Broadway originals (see above).

Look Back in Anger. A choleric young man at war with the world makes for uneven but fairly arresting theater. In RICHMOND and WILMINGTON.

Ballets: U.S.A. The American scene as expressed in dance form by Choreographer Jerome Robbins. In PITTSBURGH.

Hamlet, Twelfth Night & Henry V. New vigor from the Old Vic. In MADISON and DETROIT.

Auntie Mame. The Mame’s the same —that is, wonderfully wacky and intermittently funny—whether played by Constance Bennett in CHICAGO, Eve Arden in SAN FRANCISCO or Sylvia Sidney in LINCOLN, TOPEKA, Sioux CITY and OMAHA.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley. One of the 20th century’s brightest gloomologers decides that fact has already caught up with his 1932 horror fiction, what with subliminal commercials, wholesale tranquilization, and the threat of much too well-bred man crowding himself off his own planet.

My Years With Churchill, by Norman McGowan. The author’s finest hour was to serve as Sir Winston’s valet, and he recalls it with engaging anecdotal charm.

Leyte, by Samuel Eliot Morison. One of history’s decisive naval engagements masterfully recreated.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote. Holly Golightly, a kind of cornpone geisha, weaves her willful way among Manhattan’s towers in a ribald and strangely touching story.

Mistress to an Age, by J. Christopher Herold. A topnotch biography of Mme. de Stael, who was equally at home in the drawing rooms, council rooms and bedrooms of Revolutionary France.

Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery. Prickly Monty needles friend and foe in this highly personal autobiography.

Child of Our Time, by Michel del Castillo. The tortured cry of one innocent child raised over the holocaust of Europe’s concentration camps.

Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. The novel that clinched the Nobel Prize for Russia’s greatest living man of letters, since forced by the Soviet’s brain-distrusters to reject the award.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Brilliant, hilarious and horrifying, the book is a shocker, but also a memorable work of fictional art.

Best Sellers 1. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (1) 2. Lolita, Nabokov (2) 3. Around the World with Auntie Mame, Dennis (3) 4. Women and Thomas Harrow, Marquand (4) 5. The Best of Everything, Jaffe (5) 6. Anatomy of Murder, Traver (6) 7. Exodus, Uris 8. The Mountain Is Young, Han Suyin (9) 9. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (7) 10. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Capote (10) NONFICTION 1. Only in America, Golden (1) 2. Aku-Aku, Heyerdahl (2) 3. The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery 4. Inside Russia Today, Gunther (6) 5. On My Own, Roosevelt (4) 6. The Affluent Society, Galbraith (7) 7. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Boyington (8) 8. The Insolent Chariots, Keats (10) 9. The New Testament in Modern English, translated by Phillips (3) 10. The Great Chicago Fire, Cromie (Numbers in parentheses indicate last week’s position.)

*All times E.S.T.