The Roof (Italian). The ablest of Italy's neorealists, Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, prescribe a bitter pill--the hard facts of life in a housing shortage--but sugar-coat it with a shining story of young love.
Count Your Blessings. A pleasant little comedy about a modern Penelope (Deborah Kerr) and her absentee husband. With Maurice Chevalier.
Room at the Top. An 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.
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.
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
Wed., May 27 Kraft Music Hall (NBC, 9-9:30 p.m.).
TV's persistent attempt to revive vaudeville, with a veteran vaudevillian, June Havoc, and visiting British TV Comic Dave King. Color.
Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m. ) . One of the few live dramas left on TV tackles a real-life problem: the use and misuse of hypnosis in dentistry and medicine.
Thurs., May 28 Playhouse 90 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.).
Playwright Rod Serling switches from big business (Patterns) to big labor in The Rank and File, a look at a Senate investi gation of labor racketeering. With Van Heflin, Luther Adler and Carl Benton Reid.
Fri., May 29 Walt Disney Presents (ABC, 8-9 p.m.).
Unabashed shilling for Walt's upcoming picture, Darby O'Gill and the Little Men.
But with that Hollywood Irishman Pat O'Brien to help, / Captured the King of the Leprechauns, Walt's encounter with a County Kerry shanachie (storyteller), should be a good green hour.
Sat., May 30 The Perry Como Show (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). With Comedian Andy Griffith, Singer Betty Johnson and Ed ("Kookie") Byrnes, the jive-talking wonderboy of Tin Pan Alley. Color.
Sun., May 31
Bishop Pike (ABC, 12 noon-12:30 p.m.). This time the bishop brings on his daughter Cathy (age 16) to tell teen-agers What to Do With Your Life.
The Eternal Light (NBC, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). A tour of the Holy Land narrated by Ralph Bellamy.
The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). With those loud nightclub champs, Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Color.
Mon., June 1
Bold Journey (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Five amateurs and one pro at the breakneck business of mountain climbing. This time it is the 1952 French assault on Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, highest (22,270 ft.) peak in the Western Hemisphere.
Tues., June 2
Summer on Ice (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A tardy farewell to winter. Tab Hunter, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Randall join the cast of Ice Capades in an out-of-season spin on skates.
THEATER
On Broadway
A Raisin in the Sun. A South Side Chicago Negro family comes touchingly alive in the hands of a superb cast.
Redhead. A theatrical thoroughbred (Gwen Verdon) carries this plow-jockey musical into the winner's circle.
J.B. About a modern, grey-flannel Job reduced to sackcloth. Poet Archibald MacLeish's language and logic are on the cloudy side, but the evening is radiant with theatrical excitement.
La Plume de Ma Tante. A crew of madcap Frenchmen have built a better laugh-trap and theatergoers are beating a path to its box-office door.
The Flower Drum Song. R. & H. skimped on the ingredients this time, but the entertainment is still flavorsome.
A Touch of the Poet. The late Eugene O'Neill casting a theatrical illusion of life around the idea that life is illusion.
The Pleasure of His Company. An overage playboy, Cyril Ritchard, decides that his daughter and her 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! Premature old age descends nightly on Actor Hal Hoibrook, 34, as he brilliantly re-creates the wit and the wisdom of the great humorist as a platform lecturer of 70.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler. Anti-Communist Koestler takes a new tack, provides an animated lecture on the cosmologists who changed men's view of the heavens, including Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.
The Straw Man, by Jean Giono. All the world's a stage, and all men either players or played upon, in this operatic tale of revolt in 19th century Italy.
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 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 Mithridates.
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 writes movingly of the anatomy of courage.
Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell. Political huggermugger in Alexandria, saltily told by a gifted writer.
The Notion of Sin, by Robert McLaughlin. Some odd fish on view in 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. The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick (3) 3. Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak (2) 4. Dear and Glorious Physician, Caldwell (5) 5. Lolita, Nabokov (4) 6. Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, Gallico (6) 7. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence (7) 8. From the Terrace, O'Hara (8) 9. The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, Taylor 10. The Hourglass, Gilbert NONFICTION 1. Mine Enemy Grows Older, King (1) 2. Only in America, Golden (2) 3. The Status Seekers, Packard (4) 4. How I Turned $1,000 Into $1,000,000 in Real Estate, Nickerson (5) 5. Elizabeth the Great, Jenkins (10) 6. 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, Boone (9) 7. My Brother Was an Only Child, Douglas (7) 8. What We Must Know About Communism, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet ( 3 ) 9. Brotherhood of Evil, Sondern (6) 10. Eat Well and Stay Well, Ancel and Margaret Keys (8)
* All times E.D.T. -Position on last week's list.
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