The Battle of the Sexes. Outguinnessing Guinness, in a transatlantic adaptation of James Thurber's The Catbird Seat, Britain's Peter Sellers is an Edinburgh bookkeeper ready to murder the 20th century's threat to his traditional way of life.
I'm All Right, Jack. Sellers again--as a union shop steward in a cracking good socio-political satire.
Come Back, Africa. Filmed in secret and crude in craftsmanship, Lionel (On the Bowery) Rogosin's candid-camera movie manages a fairminded, matter-of-fact look at a modern nightmare: the black depths of South African society.
The Fugitive Kind. A high-priced cast that includes Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Victor Jory and Joanne Woodward turns Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending into a Mississippi bayou, now and then happens on islands of poetry in a sea of mud.
Conspiracy of Hearts. Lilli Palmer is the mother superior of an Italian convent where Jewish children--escaped from a Nazi concentration camp--are sheltered. A movie of ulcer-perforating tension.
The Magician (Swedish). The magic of the 19th century Mesmer in the story, and of Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman on the other side of the camera, combine to make a film that is just about as hypnotic as it was meant to be.
TELEVISION
Thurs., May 5
The Ford Show (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.)*
Tennessee Ernie in H.M.S. Pinafore.
Fri., May 6 Princess Margaret's Wedding (ABC, 5-5:30 p.m.). Video tapes will be made with TV cameras along the processional route and in Westminster Abbey, then jet-flown from London. NBC's coverage will be shown in two parts, from 7:30-8:30 p.m., and earlier in the day (time to be an nounced). CBS will show its version from 11:15 until midnight.
The Art Carney Show (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). The versatile Carney is now a railroad employee ferrying freight-car barges (and strange cargo) across the Hudson River, in a script suggested by a Wolcott Gibbs short story. Color.
Sat., May 7
John Gunther's High Road (ABC, 8-8:30 p.m.). Restless Reporter Gunther examines life in Viet Nam, contrasting the Nationalist South with the Communist North.
Phil Silvers Special (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Slowest Gun in the West is a sort of 60-minute "Low Noon," with Silvers as Sheriff Fletcher Bissell III, Jack Benny as a desperado named Chicken Finsterwald.
World Wide 60 (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). An analysis of East and West Ger many after World War II.
Sun., May 8
Johns Hopkins File (ABC, 12-12:30 p.m.). The program goes back to the peace and solitude of Walden for an envious visit to Henry David Thoreau.
Campaign Roundup (ABC, 3:30-4 p.m.). Film reports and commentary on Kennedy and Humphrey in the final days before the May 10 West Virginia primary.
General Electric Theater (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). Oscar Winner Simone Signoret makes her first appearance in a dramatic TV show--as a widow bent on murder to avenge her husband's death.
Mon., May 9
Another Evening with Fred Astaire (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A repeat of the November show that was one of the season's best. Color.
Tues., May 10
Ford Startime (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Another of Tennessee Ernie's current raids on the classics, involving a Mark Twain parody--a sort of "Confederate Yam at King Arthur's Court." Color.
The Garry Moore Show (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Actor-Comedian Ed Wynn, Singer Patti Page.
THEATER
On Broadway
Bye Bye Birdie. A rock-n-roll call of teen-agers surrounding an Elvis Presleyish crooner named Conrad Birdie (Dick Gautier). As staged by Gower Champion, the fresh and sometimes frantic musical crashes through the evening with all the zip of a bowling ball on the loose.
Duel of Angels. Vivien Leigh is brilliant in Christopher Fry's adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's gloved, sheathed, cynically scented prose.
The Best Man. Tn the setting of a smoke-filled political convention, Playwright Gore Vidal shuffles his cardboard characters with topical dexterity, and much of the lively show's appeal lies in identifying the three biggest pieces of cardboard.
Toys in the Attic. A weak man suddenly gains the strength of money, to the distress of his wife and sisters, who preferred him weak. Lillian Hellman's play is excellently brought to life by Jason Robards Jr., Maureen Stapleton, Anne Revere.
The Tenth Man. The girl is obviously psychotic, but Playwright Paddy Chayevsky--in a strikingly original play set in a Long Island synagogue--suggests that she might be possessed by a dybbuk, an evil spirit that has all but vanished from currency in the age of Freud.
The Miracle Worker. This moving show --about the deaf-mute child Helen Keller --owes much to the unmatchable acting of Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.
Five-Finger Exercise. One of the Broadway season's few well-written plays is the work of British Playwright Peter Shaffer, who nearly kills an outsider by shoving him into the deadly crossfire of a devastatingly ordinary and unhappy family.
Off Broadway
Henry IV, Part II. The Phoenix Theater follows up its excellent production of Part I with an equally good treatment of the seldom performed Part II, graces the continued story of Falstaff and Prince Hal with dynamic staging and statured acting.
The Prodigal. Using the legend of Orestes, 24-year-old Playwright Jack Richardson makes a mocking, modern statement and turns what could have been a dry academic exercise into a deeply written, fully fleshed work of theater.
The Balcony. France's Jean Genet sees the world as one enormous whorehouse, and he sets about supporting the notion with ingenious, ironic invention.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The first and only novel by a Sicilian prince who died in 1957, this is a wry, moving, melancholy elegy to the last century's aristocratic life, and its hero is a major fictional creation.
A Distant Trumpet, by Paul Morgan. The Southwest comes vividly and impressively alive in this fictional reconstruction of the Indian wars.
The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley, by Gerald Carson. The biography of the greatest medical quack ever to barter colored water for cash tells a wild, but true, story in an appropriately cornball style.
The Kremlin, by David Douglas Duncan. History-haunted halls and cathedrals, diamonds and diadems, as seen through an eloquent Leica lens.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe. Well-done short stories of Britain's slum dwellers and their guerrilla warfare with society's overdogs.
The Dandy, by Ellen Moers. The impulse to pluperfection in male attire, scarcely visible in the age of the sack suit and Truman shirt, ran high from Beau Brummell's time to Max Beerbohm's, and the author charts it with sober care.
D'Annunzio: The Poet as Superman, by Anthony Rhodes. Italy's flamboyant warrior-poet is portrayed in an entertaining biography.
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. A first novel that is exceptionally well-written, and rarer still, thoroughly controlled, about a schoolboy's discovery of a knot of homicidal jealousy within himself.
Clea, by Lawrence Durrell. The febrile and exotic creatures with whom the author has peopled Alexandria are on view in the final volume of a vivid tetralogy.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Hawaii, Michener (1)*
2. Advise and Consent,Drury (2)
3. The Constant Image, Davenport (4)
4. The Lincoln Lords, Hawley (5)
5. Trustee from the Toolroom, Shute (7)
6. Ourselves to Know, O'Hara (3)
7. Kiss Kiss, Dahl (9)
8. Clea, Durrell (6)
9. Two Weeks in Another Town, Shaw (8)
10. The Devil's Advocate, West
NONFICTION
1. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, King (1)
2. The Enemy Within, Kennedy (5)
3. Folk Medicine, Jarvis (2)
4. The Law and the Profits, Parkinson (6)
5. Hollywood Rajah, Crowther
6. Grant Moves South, Catton (3)
7. Act One, Hart (4)
8. My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn
9. Meyer Berger's New York, Berger (7)
10. This Is My God, Wouk
* All times E.D.T.
* Position on last week's list.
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