Bells Are Ringing. A so-so book and middling music do not keep Judy Holliday from turning this $3,000,000 Hollywood rerun of her 1956 Broadway hit into one of the year's liveliest, wittiest cinemusicals.
The Apartment. Writer-Director Billy Wilder tells of a sweet-natured schnook (brilliantly played by Jack Lemmon) who shoots up the corporate ladder by turning his apartment into a glad pad for his bosses and their girls, in an excellent movie that mixes comedy, pathos and a tough sense of irony about life. With Shirley MacLaine as fetching as ever, and Fred MacMurray as toothy.
Dreams (Swedish). In the second installment of Director Ingmar Bergman's lewdly hilarious trilogy (the others: A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night), the war between the sexes rages in full fury, with the female proving, to Bergman's obvious delight, the far more cunning and vigorous specimen.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (French). Love redeems even the horror of acres of charred and moaning humanity in this New Wave movie that rises with atomic power and breaks with poetic beauty.
The Battle of the Sexes. James Thurber's The Catbird Seat is transposed into a grand piece of sustained nonsense, starring British Funnyman Peter Sellers as the bookkeeper with a double-entry personality.
I'm All Right, Jack. Sellers again, this time as a union shop steward who will make a speech at the drop of an aitch, in a film that takes a cracking good satirical look at labor-management relations in England and the share-fare state which makes the impossible improbably funny.
TELEVISION
Wed., June 22 Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).* A New York schoolteacher goes to jail for drug addiction, helps rehabilitate himself and many fellow prisoners by setting' up a school within the prison.
Thurs., June 23 Presidential Mission (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Ike in the Orient.
The Untouchables (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). In its melodramatic, semi-documentary fashion, the program's present episode tells The George ("Bugs") Moran Story--how gangsters first shot their way into labor unions. With Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, Guest Lloyd Nolan as Bugs.
The Secret World of Eddie Hodges (10-11 p.m.). An hour of musical fantasy, starring Child Actor Eddie Hodges as a daydreaming, hero-worshiping youngster more or less like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Guests: Bert Lahr, Boris Karlof
Sat., June 25
John Gunther's High Road (ABC, 8-8:30 p.m.). Jack the Tripper is off to Greece, cutting his film clips to contrast the ancient and the modern.
NBC News Special (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). A summary of Ike's trip. *All time E.D.T.
Sun., June 26
Johns Hopkins File 7 (ABC, 12-12:30 p.m.). Mencken at Large examines the life and influence of Baltimore's great literary guerrilla.
College News Conference (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Guest: Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
Frontiers of Faith (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). The panel wonders: "Are the Churches Talking Gibberish?"
Presidential Mission (ABC, 3:30-4 p.m.). More on Ike in the Far East.
Mon., June 27
Coke Time (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). The hippest, hottest (not necessarily the pleasantest) young voices now coming out of echo chambers are collected by Host Pat Boone--Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Edd ("Kookie") Byrnes, et al.
Tues., June 28
The Garry Moore Show (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). With Allen Funt's Candid Camera.
THEATER
On Broadway
Toys in the Attic. Lillian Hellman's melodrama about the doomed conspiracy of three women to regain their control over an engaging leech (Jason Robards Jr.).
The Miracle Worker. An occasionally makeshift but unforgettable portrayal of Helen Keller's search for insight as a substitute for sight, with remarkable acting by Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.
The Tenth Man. Stumbling into sentimentality, Playwright Paddy Chayefsky nevertheless manages sensitively to sketch the story of a troubled young couple who employ the superstitions of the past as a help in facing the realities of the present.
Bye Bye Birdie. Shrieking, ranting, rock-'n'-rolling teen-agers turn this musical about an Elvis Presleyish crooner into an infectiously lively party.
Fiorello! Director George Abbott's pace and pep keep New York's razzle dazzling, and the Little Flower too interesting to wilt.
West Side Story. Gang warfare in the slums of Manhattan still moves along in a lively revival, thanks to Shakespeare's inspiration and some remarkably fancy-footed rumbles.
Off Broadway
The Prodigal. One of the best plays seen in Manhattan in many seasons reaches with temerity into the house of Atreus for its central figures: Orestes, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus. The dress is Argive; the address is modern.
The Balcony. French Playwright Jean Genet sets this monument of dramatic mockery in a brothel, almost proves his point that there are two main classes of people on earth: whores and their clients.
Ernest in Love. Lee Pockriss' engaging music grafts smoothly onto Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
Little Mary Sunshine. The biggest off-Broadway success since The Threepenny Opera parodies the sugar-glazed operettas of yesteryear's Kerns and Frimls.
The American Savoyards. A different, excellently done Gilbert & Sullivan operetta each week. This week: Trial By Jury and The Sorcerer.
BOOKS
Best Reading Daughters and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford. This sprightly chronicle of the madcap Mitford family (one of the six daughters was generally regarded as Hitler's girl; another became the wife of a Fascist; the author herself married a Leftist nephew of Winston Churchill) reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel, revealing a class in trouble with history and with itself.
Saint-Exupery, by Marcel Migeo. The flamboyant French airman who wrote Wind, Sand and Stars and The Little Prince is worth reading about in this biography by an old comrade, even though the book is flawed by grandiloquence.
Born Free, by Joy Adamson. The author gives a fascinating solution to one of the century's least urgent problems--how to bring up a lion as a pet.
The Saviors of God, by Nikos Kazantzakis. In this strange little book of aphorisms, Greece's late great man of letters struggles toward spiritual consolation, returns to the pagan and Greek credo that "man is the measure of all things."
Homage to Clio, by W. H. Auden. This collection of recent poems is the work of the self-revised, settled Auden, but there are glimpses of the poet's old, dazzling cleverness.
Through Streets Broad and Narrow, by Gabriel Fielding. In this exciting new volume of a projected tetralogy (previous novels: Brotherly Love and In the Time of Greenbloom), the young English hero finds that he is not prepared for life and love in Ireland, loses his sure footing among the slippery coves of Dublin.
The Wayward Comrade and the Commissars, by Yurii Olesha. The fiction pieces in this paperback collection, written before the author's recantation in 1932, oppose Communism, are crammed with unexpected turns of humor and fantasy.
Food for Centaurs, by Robert Graves. The poet achieves his aim--to capture the sound of his own voice talking--in a collection of stories, poems and essays.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. Advise and Consent, Drury (1)*
2. The Leopard, Di Lampedusa (3)
3. Hawaii, Michener (2)
4. The Constant Image, Davenport (5)
5. The Lincoln Lords, Hawley (7)
6. A Distant Trumpet, Horgan (8)
7. Trustee from the Toolroom, Shute (4)
8. The Affair, Snow (10)
9. Ourselves to Know, O'Hara (6)
10. The View from the Fortieth Floor, White (9)
NONFICTION
1. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, King (1)
2. Folk Medicine, Jarvis (2)
3. Born Free, Adamson (5)
4. I Kid You Not, Paar (4)
5. The Enemy Within, Kennedy (6)
6. The Law and the Profits, Parkinson (3)
7. The Night They Burned the Mountain, Dooley (8)
8. Act One, Hart (7)
9. Mr. Citizen, Truman
10. That Certain Something, Francis
*Position on last week's list.
*All times E.D.T.
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