From Hollywood

The Horse's Mouth. The wine of genius mixed with just plain sewage in an uneven but arresting version of Joyce Gary's memorable novel about a lovable monomaniac painter, with Alec Guinness as star and adapter.

The Last Hurrah. Spencer Tracy as the curly-headed machine politician (James Michael Curley, that is) who ran Boston in blarney and shamrock oil.

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 Juergens).

From Abroad

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 movie-making terms, it is sometimes tatty Tati.

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.

TELEVISION

Wed. Dec. 3

Pursuit (CBS, 8-9 p.m.).* John Cassavetes and E. G. Marshall, as a couple of Internal Revenue sleuths examining the double-entry bookkeeping of greedy Industrialist Conrad Nagel.

Jerry Lewis Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Lewis, whose main virtue since his split with Sidekick Dean Martin has been persistence, tries again, this time with Scat Cat Guest Sammy Davis Jr.

Thurs., Dec. 4

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). All kinds of traumatic competition in a summer camp, as four of the kiddies, egged on by vicariously ambitious parents, gouge in the clinches, vying for end-of-season laurels.

Fri., Dec. 5

The Phil Silvers Show (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). Master Sergeant Bilko is not the perfect con man he was in the beginning, when Nat Hiken supplied the word, but the good sergeant is still more beguiling than lost; his scheme this time involves selling the McGuire sisters separately to three different producers.

Walt Disney Presents (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Disney casting an aseptic eye on the outbreak of the American Revolution, Johnny Tremain, Paul Revere and all that jazz.

Sat., Dec. 6

High Adventure (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Wildebeest bound, elephants lumber, hippopotamuses wallow, and Lowell Thomas clambers up Central Africa's Mountains of the Moon. Color.

Sun., Dec. 7

Johns Hopkins File 7 (ABC, 11:30-12 a.m.). A bit early in the day for shards, but Archaeology Professor Gus Van Beek finds a wide assortment of clues to ancient religions and history in his weathered pottery.

Bishop Pike (ABC, 12-12:30 p.m.). California's most celebrated recent immigrant in a talk, with a couple of guests, on the subject of child adoption.

Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Peter Ustinov double-teaming the opposition as writer and star (Rabble-Rouser Georges Danton) of a play about the French Revolution.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). The second half of a two-part documentary on dope addiction focuses on the attempts made to help one young monkey carrier kick the habit.

The Chevy Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Dinah Shore takes the evening off, so Sid Caesar takes on about everything else.

Tues. Dec. 9

The Gift of the Magi (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Richard (Damn Yankees) Adler has written the songs for this version of O. Henry's sentimental classic; with Sally Ann Howes, currently Broadway's My Fair Lady, and Hollywood's Gordon MacRae.

THEATER

On Broadway

La Plume de Ma Tante. A mad, charming, Gallic revue that uses bad English when it has to, but more often the international language of leers and leaps, pratfalls and double takes.

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. 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.

Ballets U.S.A. Brilliantly danced Americana as conceived by top Choreographer Jerome Robbins. In CHICAGO.

Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Henry V. To see or not to see Old Vic is a question easily answered: the company, now in MONTREAL, is superb.

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 LAFAYETTE and BLOOMINGTON.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Visitors, by Mary McMinnies. It may not be true that foreigners are funny, that men are silly, and that dictatorships are absurd, but Novelist McMinnies makes it seem so in this tale of diplomatic hanky-panky behind the Iron Curtain.

The Volcanoes Above Us, by Norman Lewis. The unquiet sport of baiting Quiet Americans gains another fictional recruit as Author Lewis uses a Guatemalan setting to deliver a scurrilous poke at Uncle Sam below the banana belt.

The Prospects Are Pleasing, by Honor Tracy. "Errorland" is what James Joyce called Ireland, and so does Honor Tracy in this clever fictional spoof.

Henry Adams: The Middle Years, by Ernest Samuels. When Adams still had his Eve (Marian "Clover" Hooper), and the world was as sweet as this sourish Boston Brahmin ever found it.

Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley. Fact has caught up with his 1932 horror fiction, argues Huxley, and he, for one, is reappalled.

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

Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote. Holly Golightly, fiction's most captivating bad little good girl since Sally ("I Am a Camera") Bowles, makes her ribald, touching and irresistible debut.

Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery. Monty drops the sword for the pen with no visible discomfort except to those he writes about.

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. A brilliantly written comedy of horrors.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (1)

2. Lolita, Nabokov (2)

3. Women and Thomas Harrow Marquand (4)

4. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (5)

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

6. Anatomy of Murder, Traver (6)

7. Angelique, Colon (7)

8. Exodus, Uris (10)

9. Victorine, Keyes

10. The Rainbow and the Rose, Shute

NONFICTION

1. Only in America, Golden (1)

2. Aku-Aku, Heyerdahl (2)

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

4. The Affluent Society, Galbraith (7)

5. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Boyington. (4)

6. The New Testament in Modern English, translated by Phillips (8)

7. Kids Say the Darndest Things!

Linkletter (9)

8. The Proud Possessors, Saarinen

9. Chicago: A Pictorial History,

Kogan and Wendt

10. Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Kerr

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

* All times E.S.T.

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