The cameras rolled and Cinemorsel Gina Lollobrigida, playing in Solomon and Sheba on location in Madrid, recoiled prettily from the evil one with a dagger. The 'assassination attempt flopped all right. Lunging at his quarry, Actor Luis Santana bumped into a blazing brazier, and raced howling across the set, his cloak a flaming torch. Gina was horror-struck; Santana, soon doused, with only minor burns, was badly shaken. Director King Vidor? The cameras had caught the scene, and he decided to rescript slightly for that touch of burning realism.

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, long a showcase for avant-garde painting and sculpture, slapped a court complaint on outspoken A. & P. Millionheir Huntington Hartford, who once wrote of the modern artist: "Engrossed with evil, [he] has wandered off to some streamlined inferno in which he has burned in effigy the normal people of the earth." Purpose of the complaint: to enjoin Hartford from dubbing his proposed $2,000,000 museum on Columbus Circle "The Gallery of Modern Art."

Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, his upper lip never stiffer than in the glare of BBC-TV lights, mourned the backfire of some backstab aimed in his memoirs (TIME, Nov. 24) at Dwight Eisenhower: "I sent him a copy of my book. The result was silence. I sent him a Christmas card with a very warm greeting, much warmer than to anyone else. Again there was only silence. I am awfully sad if I have lost the friendship of that great and good man."

American Red Cross President Alfred M. Gruenther, a four-star Army general at his retirement in 1956 after 38 years of commissioned service, smiled a thin smile in Omaha when reminded of the familiar G.I. gripe that officers have better luck than ordinary soldiers in dating Red Cross lasses on military duty overseas. Said Realist Gruenther, tersely: "They did, they do and they will."

The plight of a distressed lady brings out -sometimes -the gallant in men, and rarely better than in Ghana. When the pet ostrich of chic Madame Claude de Guirin-gaud, wife of France's ambassador, disappeared, who should come hurrying to the rescue? None other than Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah himself. Hearing a missing-bird bulletin over the state radio station, Nkrumah forthwith phoned the chief of police in Accra to get his head out of the sand. Dragnet-quick result: the chief found his quarry in his own garden, triumphantly reported to the P.M., who triumphantly eased Madame's distress.

In Rio de Janeiro, the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, 68, recently retired after twelve years as Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., consecrated his son, the Rev. Edmund Knox Sherrill, 33, seven years a priest, as bishop of the Episcopal Missionary District of Central Brazil.

Summoning up remembrance of gay things past, officials of the mellow (founded in 1768) London publishing firm of John Murray, Ltd., unlocked for a TIME reporter a keepsake secured from a best-selling client of long ago, the amorous, glamorous 19th century poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Inside a musty tin box were dozens of tiny parchment packages, each inscribed with the name and date of a comely comrade, each containing a specimen of the lady's locks. Handsomest of the hairlooms was a lustrous, 2 1/2 ft. pony tail, still scented with the aroma of pomade, which had been snipped from a Spanish sefiorita. But by far the most intriguing was one packet holding a single fair ringlet, with the bemused memo in Byron's faded scrawl: "Whose this was I don't recollect, but it is of 1812."

The mobile air compressor towed by a dump truck suddenly broke loose, lurched across the Long Island Expressway, crunched into the side of a grey 1959 Cadillac. Only passenger to escape injury: longtime (1948-57) Dodger Catcher Roy Campanella, his thickset body still crippled from an auto accident a year ago (TIME, Feb. 10, 1958). Said Roy, shaken by the mishap: "If I hadn't been strapped in, I'd have gone through the windshield."

"I have more peace of mind than I've ever known," exulted jade-eyed Cinemactress Gene Tierney last fall, serene after eight months of psychiatric care at Kansas' famed Menninger Clinic (TIME, Sept. 29). Last week 20th Century-Fox sadly announced that Actress Tierney would not be able to report next month for work on what was to be her first picture since 1955's The Left Hand of God. Of her own volition, she had re-entered the clinic for further treatment.

Caught in his shorts by a Swedish photographer, portly Jazzman Louis Armstrong, his anger largely mock, responded with a Marquess of Queensberry pose most likely to invite a snappy right cross. Later, somewhat more warmly garbed, Satchmo grabbed horn and handkerchief, strutted from his dressing room to wow 3,000 cats in frosty (45DEG below zero), far-off Umea (pop. 17,000) with a rafter-ringing set of fine old stomping tunes.

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