CINEMA

Count Your Blessings. A pleasant little comedy about a modern Penelope (Deborah Kerr) and her absentee husband, including some lectures about Gallic marriage delivered by the indestructible Maurice Chevalier.

Room at the Top. A curiously old-fashioned plot about social climbing, recalling Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in a modern welfare-state setting. Based on a book by John Braine, one of Britain's angry young novelists, the picture sometimes verges on caricature and cliche, but it remains one of the best British movies in years.

Alias Jesse James. Bob Hope as the world's worst insurance agent who sells a policy to a man with a mighty low life expectancy.

Compulsion. The Leopold-Loeb case recreated in a taut, adult melodrama.

The Diary of Anne Frank. One of Hollywood's masterpieces.

Some Like It Hot. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis hilariously impersonating a couple of girls and Marilyn Monroe triumphantly impersonating herself.

The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner's novel turned into a sort of magnolia-strewn Jane Eyre; excellent acting by Joanne Woodward Yul Brynner and Margaret Leighton.

Aparajito (Indian). This sequel to Father Panchali by brilliant Director Satyajit Ray movingly describes an Indian family's sorrowful, hopeful encounter with modern times.

TELEVISION

Thurs., May 21 The Lawless Years (NBC, 8-8:30 p.m.)* For those who like their shoot-'em-ups on foot instead of horseback. Some noisy nostalgia for the hard, big-city hoods of the '20s and an even harder real-life cop: Barney Ruditsky, a detective who has long since deserted New York's finest for the green-backed life of a private peeper.

Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Out of the Dust, a tough story about the Old West by the late Lynn (Green Grow the Lilacs) Riggs, gives Charles Bickford, Uta Hagen and Wayne Morris a workout in jealousy, greed and patricide.

Sat., May 23 The Jack Benny Hour (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Visitors include Julie (My Fair Lady) Andrews and Phil (Sergeant Bilko) Silvers.

Sun., May 24 Space -- Man's Last Frontier (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). The peacetime uses of space-flight research. An inspection tour of a manned missile, conducted by the producers of Omnibus at the new Avco Research Cen ter in Wilmington, Mass.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). For those who failed to get the word the first time, a second run of Riot in East Berlin, pieced together from mem orable smuggled films.

Mon., May 25 Bold Journey (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). A deep-diving visit to wrecked ships that have littered the ocean floor off France's south coast from as far back as 200 BC.

Voice of Firestone (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). From Rossini to Romberg, with Rise Stevens, Heidi Krall, Brian Sullivan, Jerome Hines and the Akron Symphony Orchestra--a sentimental journey for all those who mourn the Voice's imminent silencing.

Du Pont Show of the Month (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Billy Budd, Herman Melville's moving tale of a shipboard murder trial, with Jason Robards Jr., James Donald and Roddy McDowall.

Tues., May 26

Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Wyatt gets so sick of trying to dry-clean Dodge City that he is tempted to turn in his marshal's star.

THEATER

On Broadway

A Raisin in the Sun. A South Side Chicago Negro family comes eloquently and touchingly alive in the hands of a superb cast. Winner of this season's New York Drama Critics Circle award.

A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. This talented pair has a ball doing movie parodies, songs, dances and clever patter. They know their stuff; they wrote it.

Redhead. A million-dollar baby (Gwen Verdon) in a five-and-ten-cent storehouse of musical comedy gewgaws.

J.B. Poet Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer-prizewinning play about Job in the guise of a modern American businessman. The language and the logic are a trifle threadbare, but the evening is richly cloaked in theatrical excitement.

La Plume de Ma Tante. Two dozen Frenchmen can't be wrong in this mad and merry revue.

Flower Drum Song. Not top-drawer Rodgers & Hammerstein, but even their second and third drawers have a lot to offer.

A Touch of the Poet. The late Eugene O'Neill weaves a spell of sorts out of his favorite notion--illusions are the staff of life.

The Pleasure of His Company. An engaging overage playboy, Cyril Ritchard, decides that his pert daughter and her pedestrian fiance do not qualify for a marriage of true minds, and he promptly supplies the impediments.

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! The reports of Mark Twain's death have been greatly exaggerated. The great humorist is delightfully alive as a platform lecturer of 70. The brilliant lookalike: Actor Hal Hoi-brook, 34.

BOOKS

Best Reading

War Memoirs, by Charles de Gaulle. The author does not hesitate to take a hero's role or to name his villains in the second volume (1942-44) of his brilliantly written memoirs.

Du Barry, by Stanley Loomis. A biography of the girl who learned the social and sinful graces in the Paris underworld, became the last mistress of Louis XV.

Time Walked, by Vera Panova. An apolitical but warmly Russian account of the tides in the life of a six-year-old boy.

Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth. Six stories about social D.P.s--Jews trying to "pass," or at least belong, in the Gentile world.

The House of Intellect, by Jacques Barzun. A thin, well-read line of intellectual heroes, says Columbia University's Barzun, must hold the past against artiness, scientism and coddled incompetents.

King of Pontus, by Alfred Duggan. A rousing account of nine-lived old Warrior-King Mithradates, who vowed to unbuild Rome if it took all his days.

Points of View, by Somerset Maugham. The party is old, but the guests still sit entranced by a master conversationalist.

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton's foolish-heroic Antarctic expedition re-created in well-modulated prose.

The Marauders, by Charlton Ogburn Jr. A veteran of Merrill's Marauders recalls the grim Burma days of World War II and writes movingly of the anatomy of courage.

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

Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell. Political huggermugger in the back alleys of Alexandria, saltily told by a gifted writer (other books in a projected tetralogy: Justine, Balthazar).

The Notion of Sin, by Robert Mc-Laughlin. Some odd fish on view on a well-conducted tour through Manhattan's gin-filled aquariums.

Spinster, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. A New Zealand schoolmarm with a gift for teaching and for life, described in an exceptionally good first novel.

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

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Exodus, Uris (1)* 2. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (3) 3. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (2) 4. Lolita, Nabokov (4) 5. Dear and Glorious Physician, Caldwell (5) 6. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, Gallico (8) 7. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence (7) 8. From the Terrace, O'Hara (6) 9. Pioneer, Go Home! Powell 10. The Rape of the Fair Country, Cordell

NONFICTION

1 Mine Enemy Grows Older, King ( 1 ) 2. Only in America, Golden (2) 3. What We Must Know About Communism, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet (3) 4. The Status Seekers, Packard 5. How I Turned $1,000 into $1,000,000 in Real Estate, Nickerson (6) 6. Brotherhood of Evil, Sondern 7. My Brother Was an Only Child, Douglas (7) 8. Eat Well and Stay Well, Ancel and Margaret Keys 9. 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, Boone (4) 10. Elizabeth the Great, Jenkins (5)

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

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