Peter Sellers is twice as funny as anyone else currently on view, not entirely because his films arrive here two at a time. The latest batch: The Millionairess, Shaw's old joke rejiggered, with Sellers as the Oriental medic and Sophia Loren as the moneypot who tries to tempt him; and Two-Way Stretch, in which the comedian plays a jowly brigand whose plot to steal -L-2,000,000 is goofily thickened because he is already in the nick for another job.
Facts of Life. A quick, slick, slyly satirical comedy of middle-class manners and middle-aged morals, played to perfection by Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.
Circle of Deception. An engrossing World War II spy piece with a twist--the nation commits treason against the citizen.
Where the Boys Are. A featherweight but fun-filled look at the springtime Florida Flip of the book-bashed, sun-starved North American undergraduate.
Other notable current attractions: Ballad of a Soldier, Make Mine Mink, The Angry Silence and Tunes of Glory.
TELEVISION
Tues., Feb. 14
Expedition! (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.).* Film narrative of last year's underwater trip around the world by the submarine U.S.S. Triton.
NBC White Paper No. 3 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A study of "Panama--Danger Zone."
Wed., Feb. 15
The Bob Hope Sports Award Show (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Hope honors the outstanding athletes of 1960, using Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Julie London, Jane Wyman, Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield not as trophies but to help make the presentations.
Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Spy Next Door," a dramatization of Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S. Previously listed for broadcast on Feb. 1, but held back until now.
Thurs., Feb. 16
The Ford Show (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). For viewers with odd tastes, Tennessee Ernie has a go at Georges Bizet's Carmen. Color.
Close-Up! (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "The Children Were Watching," a candid film report on the first week of school integration in New Orleans.
Fri., Feb. 17
The Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A music and dance program taped in Disneyland, titled "The Sound of America." Color.
Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). Consistently a thorough job on one of the week's major news stories. With Walter Cronkite.
Sat., Feb. 18
Show of the Month (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). "The Lincoln Murder Case" follows the argument set out by Theodore Roscoe in his book The Web of Conspiracy, which put the finger on War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton as a master plotter who hired John Wilkes Booth to assassinate the President.
The Nation's Future (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Debate topic: "Is Fluoridation of Public Drinking Water Desirable?"
Sun., Feb. 19
Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). An aerial circus partly narrated by Flying Ace "Pappy" Boyington, in which acrobats skip about on the wings of planes in flight, board a flying aircraft from a moving car, and tell all about it while falling through the air some 6,000 ft. before pulling the parachute ripcord.
The Great Challenge (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). On the first of a new panel series, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Historian Arnold Toynbee, Economist Paul Samuelson and Foreign Affairs Expert Henry Kissinger discuss "The World Strategy of the U.S. As a Great Power."
Winston Churchill--The Valiant Years (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). ABC's superb series, based on Churchill's war memoirs, moves to the story of the early Japanese victories in the Pacific war. Richard Burton speaks Churchill's words.
THEATER
On Broadway
In a season in which even Tennessee Williams could come up with nothing more stimulating than his superficial comedy-lecture on marital success, Period of Adjustment, top honors fall to the imports. Among them: Rhinoceros, a farce-satire by Avant-Gardist Eugene Ionesco; A Taste of Honey, a sort of earthy British lonely-hearts story; and the wonderfully pert French musical Irma La Douce.
The best of the home-grown dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home, and Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama. As for the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi survives only through the shenanigans of Stars Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. Which leaves two of the year's least pretentious works but also its zingiest --Carol Channing's satirical revue, Show Girl, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
Off Broadway
There are a few signs of life now, but so far this season, things have been nearly as disappointing off Broadway as on. There are two interesting original works, Michael Shurtleff's Call Me By My Rightful Name, a fresh, modest piece about a triangle of misfits, and Edward Albee's one-acter, The American Dream, a somber and surrealistic situation comedy deploring the loss of values in U.S. life. Albee is also represented in a downtown double bill of disenchantment that includes his The Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
Other holdovers: the Brecht-Weill-Blitzstein Threepenny Opera, heading toward its 2,300th performance; The Connection, a now famed pad full of Method hipsters seeking to prove that the opiate of the people is heroin; and Little Mary Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kerny, Frimlous past. Among worthy revivals, there is a superlative production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, a welcome reprise of Epitaph for George Dillon, by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton, and one sleeper, The Octoroon, a reasonably lively, reasonably funny-by-now melodrama of pre-Civil War days.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Skyline, by Gene Fowler. The 1920s again, this time described by Old Newspaperman Fowler, who tells what bliss it was in that sweet dawn to be a Hearst managing editor, concerned only with the news value of James J. Walker and monkey glands.
First Family, by Christopher Davis. A skilled novelist examines a picked-over theme--what happens when Negroes move in next door. His conclusions are thoughtfully arrived at, and not very optimistic.
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. Ill, edited by Leonard W. Labaree. The collected clutter of this astonishing man may occupy 40 volumes, but this one obviously is a prize; it contains his most important studies on electricity and Verses on the Virginia Capitol Fire, a witty parody on the fulsome prose of an 18th century Governor prying more money out of his legislature.
The Queen's Necklace, by Frances Mossiker. In a clever crosscutting of 18th century memoirs and trial briefs, most of them entertainingly libelous, the author tells about the famed and still-unsolved theft of Marie Antoinette's 2,800-carat necklace.
The Ice in the Bedroom, by P. G. Wodehouse. Yet another out-of-plumb castle in the air, designed by the old master--this one inhabited by a tiddly young aristocrat named Freddy Widgeon, and besieged by a villain named Oofy Prosser.
A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms, by Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz. With scholarship and scholars' wit, the authors offer all one cares to know and possibly a bit more about Anacreontic, Transferred Epithets, Inscape, Parnassianism, Pastorals, Passion Plays or Pastiche.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Advise and Consent, Drury (2)*
2. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (3)
3. Hawaii, Michener (1)
4. Sermons and Soda-Water, O'Hara (4)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (5)
6. Decision at Delphi, Maclnnes (7)
7. The Lovely Ambition, Chase (10)
8. The Dean's Watch, Goudge (6)
9. Pomp and Circumstance, Coward (9)
10. Shadows on the Grass, Dinesen (8)
NONFICTION
1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1)
2. Who Killed Society? Amory (3)
3. The Snake Has All the Lines, Kerr (4)
4. The Waste Makers, Packard (2)
5. The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (7)
6. The White Nile, Moorehead
7. The Politics of Upheaval, Schlesinger (9)
8. The Dry and Lawless Years, Lyle
9. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy
10. Born Free, Adamson (5)
* All times E.S.T.
* Position on last week's list.
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