Time Listings: Time Listings, may 11, 1959

Room at the Top (British). The career and comeuppance of a young Englishman on the make, based on John Braine’s bestselling novel. One of Britain’s best pictures in years.

Compulsion. Despite some debatable philosophy and psychiatry, Meyer Levin’s casebook on the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder makes taut, adult melodrama.

Alias Jesse James. A Bob Hope farce funny enough even for those who have given up Hope.

The Diary of Anne Frank. Tighter than the book, more fluid than the play, a film masterpiece about the 13-year-old German Jewish girl who survived two years of hiding in occupied Holland, but who survived a concentration camp only in her diary. With Newcomer Millie Perkins, brillantly directed by George Stevens.

Some Like It Hot. Humor triumphs over vulgarity in this uproarious farce starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as a couple of guys dressed up as dolls and Marilyn Monroe as a doll who needs no dressing up at all.

The Mistress (Japanese). A simple and moving restatement of a timeless truth: that even for a “fallen woman,” the soul is free.

Aparajito (Indian). The brilliant second part (the first was Pather Panchali) of a trilogy, made by Director Satyajit Ray, telling the story of India’s social revolution in terms of one family’s sorrows and beatitudes.

TELEVISION

Wed., May 6 The United States Stee! Hour (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).* Betsy Palmer and Richard Greene huddling next to a cozy yarn, taken from one of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales, about a beautiful widow, a virtuous preacher and a ring of brandy smugglers.

The Emmy Awards (NBC, 10-11:30 p.m.). The TV world’s own Oscars, handed out by some celebrated well-wishers, including Vice President Nixon.

Thurs., May 7

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Stiff upper lips in the hospital ward, as displayed by Inger Stevens, Mary Astor, Victor Jory and Mildred Dunnock.

Laugh Line (NBC, 9-9:30 p.m.). This audience-participation panel show may be only a baby pram of a program, but when the stars are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the vehicle is of small importance.

Fri., May 8

Why Berlin? (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Chet Huntley as narrator of a film about the beleaguered city’s postwar history.

Sat., May 9

The Perry Como Show (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). With Dancer Carol Haney, a highly nutritious broth of a girl.

Sun., May 10

Johns Hopkins File 7 (ABC, 12:30-1 p.m.). “Four for the Show,” a nicely blended history of the barber-shop quartet.

Wisdom (NBC, 4-4:30 p.m.). Guest: Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor emeritus of Manhattan’s Riverside Church.

Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Cyril Ritchard in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). Second part of a two-session look at Winston Churchill, “Man of the Century.”

Mon., May 11

Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A timely item in a drama series that so far has been a sharp disappointment. Current entry: a play with Lee Marvin and E. G. Marshall about the first men in space.

Tues., May 12

The Rifleman (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Chuck Conners in the warmest and one of the most exciting of the horse operas.

THEATER

On Broadway

A Raisin in the Sun. The New York Drama Critics prize play about the hopes and fears, tears and laughter of a South Side Chicago Negro family. Uncommonly honest, touching, warm.

A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. This talented pair has a ball doing movie parodies, songs, dances and patter.

Redhead. Gwen Verdon is loaded with talent and gallantly spends it all to keep this ne’er-do-well musical solvent.

J.B. Poet Archibald MacLeish has reconstructed the tribulations of Job as they might be inflicted on a modern American businessman.

La Plume de Ma Tante. This madcap French revue is guaranteed to tickle the funny bone of everybody’s tante.

The Flower Drum Song. R. & H. have left their genius out of this musical, but Pat Suzuki and Miyoshi Umeki are worth the price of omissions.

A Touch of the Poet. The late Eugene O’Neill makes a powerful if somewhat windy case for his favorite belief—illusions make and unmake men.

The Pleasure of His Company. As an overage playboy, Cyril Ritchard is the most delightfully outrageous father who ever stopped his daughter’s wedding music.

My Fair Lady cribs from Shaw, West Side Story cribs from Shakespeare, and The Music Man cribs from a silo of Iowa corn, making these three musicals grand larceny and great entertainment.

Off Broadway

Mark Twain Tonight! Actor Hal Holbrook, 34, makes Samuel Clemens, 70, live again for two hours in a brilliant and delightful display of recaptured Americana.

On Tour

My Fair Lady in ST. Louis, Two for the Seesaw in Los ANGELES, and The Music Man in CHICAGO do justice to the Broadway originals.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The House of Intellect, by Jacques Barzun. Intellectual Panjandrum Barzun rallies his peers to rout the termites of egalitarianism, mass education, artiness, science worship and similar pests that are destroying, as he sees it, the pillars of logic, authority, discipline and learning.

King of Pontus, by Alfred Duggan. Captivating history about Mithradates, who at 21 locked up his mother, killed his brother, married his sister, mounted the throne of Pontus, and spent the next 48 years of his life giving the Roman Empire trouble.

Points of View, by W. Somerset Maugham. Five essays in the tone of a master yarner chatting over ancient brandy.

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s foolish-heroic Antarctic expedition of 1915 re-created in well-modulated prose.

The Marauders, by Charlton Ogburn Jr. The author, a World War II veteran of Merrill’s Marauders, recalls the savage Burmese actions with sharp description and incisive reflection.

By the North Gate, by Gwyn Griffin. A taut little novel that shows Britons at an outlying African desert post trying unsuccessfully to stand up under the white man’s burden.

The King’s War: 1641-1647, by C. V. Wedgwood. A vivid, scholarly account of Cavalier v. Roundhead.

Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell. Life, love and politics in Alexandria, as described by an exciting writer (earlier books in a projected tetralogy: Justine, Balthazar).

The Notion of Sin, by Robert McLaughlin. A well-observed crowd of martini drinkers on the rocks in Manhattan.

Spinster, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Memorable portrait of a wonderfully bizarre New Zealand schoolmarm with a passion for life and teaching.

Borstal Boy, by Brendan Behan. The old-reform-school tie flashily worn by an unreformed and gifted Irish writer.

Unarmed in Paradise, by Ellen Marsh. A skillful, honest and haunting love story.

Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. The eternal validity of the moral struggle affirmed by a man who is living it.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (1 )* 2. Exodus, Uris (2) 3. Lolita, Nabokov (4)4. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (3) 5. Dear and Glorious Physician, Caldwell (6) 6. From the Terrace, O’Hara (7) 7. Mountolive, Durrell 8. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence 9. Trumbull Park, Brown 10. Four Stories, Undset NONFICTION 1. Mine Enemy Grows Older, King (1) 2. Only in America, Golden (2) 3. ‘Twixt Twelve and Twenty, Boone (5) 4. What We Must Know About Com munism, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet (3) 5. How I Turned $1,000 into $1,000,000 in Real Estate, Nickerson (7) 6. Elizabeth the Great, Jenkins (6) 7. Collision Course, Moscow (4) 8. My Brother Was an Only Child, Douglas 9. Nautilus 90 North, Anderson and Blair (8) 10. A Quite Remarkable Father, Howard

*All times E.D.T. *Position on last week’s list.