From Hollywood
Damn Yankees. Gwen Verdon, as the nimblest dancer in this or other worlds, and Ray Walston, as a button-down Beelzebub, in a bouncy remake of the Broadway musical.
Me and the Colonel. Danny Kaye, in one of his funniest films, as a gentle, indestructible Polish refugee outwitting and outrunning the Wehrmacht.
The Defiant Ones. Stanley Kramer's black and white drama about a Southern chain-gang escape, with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.
The Reluctant Debutante. Rex Harrison and wife Kay Kendall in a wonderfully lighthearted peek at Mayfair manners and amorals.
Indiscreet. Gary Grant dispensing yachts and yacht-ta-ta to Ingrid Bergman in a funny, freewheeling version of Broadway's Kind Sir.
From Abroad
Boot Polish (Indian). Two quicksilver Indian kids named Baby Naaz and Rattan Kumar, as slum orphans in Bombay, pour out such a torrent of acting virtuosity that a slender fable becomes touched with the glow of a minor masterpiece.
The Case of Dr. Laurent (French). Frankly polemic, frankly physiological, this story of a rural doctor hipped on natural childbirth can claim the virtues of warmth and humor even before the moving, utterly candid final scene; with Jean Gabin, Nicole Courcel.
La Parisienne (French). Brigitte Bardot, leaning voluptuously on the sure comic talents of Charles Boyer and Henri Vidal, finally makes a film that is as funny as it is fleshy.
TELEVISION
Wed., Oct. 8 High Adventure with Lowell Thomas (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). The old vagabond reporter takes his color cameras north on the trail of the Alaskan gold rush, from placer mining on Porcupine Creek to Jazz Singer Hattie in Juneau's Red Dog Saloon.
Kraft Music Hall (NBC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Milton Berle is back with a new variety show (in color). Surely something old, maybe something new, certainly something borrowed, and, if he can get away with it, something a little blue.
Thurs., Oct. 9 Behind Closed Doors (NBC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, U.S.N. (ret.), deputy chief of Naval Intelligence during World War II, masterminds this reasonably authentic slant on American counterespionage.
Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.).
Jackie Gleason and Betsy Palmer bring back The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan's wonderfully wacky glimpse of life and love in a San Francisco Embarcadero saloon.
Fri., Oct. 10
77 Sunset Strip (ABC, 9:30-11 p.m.). Girl on the Run, a new detective series, has a main character no more novel than an ex-OSS officer. But with Marion (See Here Private . . .) Hargrove to write the script, the show has its moments.
Sun., Oct. 12
Small World (CBS. 6-6:30 p.m.). Edward (See It Now) Murrow begins his new series, an effort to bring the globe's great characters into the world's living rooms. The first show's cast: Jawaharlal Nehru, Aldous Huxley, Thomas E. Dewey.
Swiss Family Robinson (NBC, 6:30-7 p.m.). Johann Wyss's fine old classic brings the marooned Robinsons back to life, with Walter Pidgeon and Laraine Day.
Mon., Oct. 13
Hallmark Hall of Fame (NBC, 9:30-11 p.m.). Broadway's wonderful waif, Julie Harris, in Johnny Belinda, the trying tale of a lovely deaf mute involved with both love and murder (in color).
Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). For the centennial year of the famous miracle at Lourdes, Pier Angeli plays 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and was later canonized.
Tues., Oct. 14
The Bob Hope Buick Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Old ski nose returns, assisted by an equally great clown, France's Fernandel.
THEATER
On Broadway The Music Man, now Broadway's hottest ticket, is a triumph of Meredith Willson's one-man showmanship (book, lyrics, music) and an exuberant romp for Robert Preston as the itinerant con-man who invades an Iowa town and conjures up a fine, corn-fed band.
My Fair Lady, with Edward Mulhare and Sally Ann Howes, is still the fairest of them all.
The Visit brings the Lunts back to Broadway in an existentialist fable of a woman's vengeful hate and a whole community's greed.
West Side Story has Director-Choreographer Jerome Robbins teaching some talented delinquents to dance out the tensions of the Manhattan slums to music by Leonard Bernstein.
Two for the Seesaw balances a downhearted Omaha lawyer, looking for a divorce, with a Bronx-to-Bohemia hoyden, in a funny, moving glimpse of offbeat New York life; with Dana Andrews and Anne Bancroft.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, by William (Bus Stop) Inge, is both poignant and funny as it reveals the secret fears of a small-town family in the 1920s; with Teresa Wright, Pat Hingle and Eileen Heckart.
On Tour
Auntie Mame, the cyclonic stage version of Novelist Patrick Dennis' bookful of lunacy, is playing San Francisco with brassy Eve Arden, Alabama and Tennessee with tiny but dynamic Sylvia Sidney, and Chicago with Constance Bennett, who is nearly as good as the original production's Rosalind Russell.
Look Back in Anger brings Detroit the work of Britain's Angry Young Man, Playwright John Osborne.
The Music Man, in Dallas, maintains its racy air, although Cinemactor Forrest
Tucker cannot quite match the brash enthusiasm of Robert Preston.
Can-Can, Cole Porter's Parisian romp, kicks up its heels in Detroit, with Genevieve, the "Miss Innocence" of the Jack Paar TV show.
BOOKS
The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. A slashing though all too simon-simple polemic, in the guise of fiction, about the men and women who have taken up the white man's burden for the U.S. in Southeast Asia.
Women and Thomas Harrow, by John P. Marquand. Marquand may have harrowed the ashes of middle-class success and marriage once too often, but a considerable literary glow remains.
A World of Strangers, by Nadine Gordimer. South Africa's finest novelist writes of her homeland's direst hour.
Marlborough's Duchess, by Louis Kronenberger. A jewel box of a biography of the incomparable Sarah Churchill, wife to the hero of Blenheim, ancestress of Sir Winston.
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia's greatest living poet affirms in Russia's greatest novel since the Revolution that not even Communism can destroy his people's hopes and humanity.
The Once and Future King, by T. H. White. Good King Arthur's golden knights joust again in this loving and witty retelling of the old tale.
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, by John Cheever. A master of the short story looks through the cracked picture windows at the anxieties of upper suburbia.
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. This superb novel shuttles between the lyrical, the hilarious and the horrifying to tell of a middle-aging emigre's love for a "nymphet," with highly ironic variations on the theme of American innocence and European corruption.
Bestsellers
FICTION
1. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 2. Around the World with Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis
3. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
4. Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver
5. The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe
6. The Enemy Camp, Jerome Weidman
7. Women and Thomas Harrow, John P. Marquand
8. The King Must Die, Mary Renault
9. Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, C. S. Forester 10. The Bramble Bush, Charles Mergendahl
NONFICTION
1. Only in America, Harry Golden 2. Aku-Aku, Thor Heyerdahl
3. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington 4. Inside Russia Today, John Gunther
5. The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
6. Eisenhower: Captive Hero, Marquis Childs
7. War and Peace in the Space Age, Lieut. General James M. Gavin
8. Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Jean Kerr
9. The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J. B. Phillips
10. The Insolent Chariots, John Keats
* All times E.D.T.
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