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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.

Circle of Deception. An ingenious spy thriller, set in pre-D-day France, that raises some subtle and uncomfortable questions of political morality.

Facts of Life. A satirical, sometimes wonderfully nutty comedy of manners--and the funniest U.S. film since The Apartment--casts Bob Hope as a middleclass, middle-aged philanderer fumbling after Lucille Ball, and perhaps after the meaning of marriage.

Where the Boys Are. A featherweight but fun-filled look at the springtime Florida Flip of the book-bashed, sun-starved North American undergraduate.

The Wackiest Ship in the Army. A run-of-the-main, sailor-suit farce that would have gone down with the script without the presence of brilliant Comedian Jack Lemmon.

Other notable current attractions: Ballad of a Soldier, Make Mine Mink, The Angry Silence and Tunes of Glory.

TELEVISION

Tues., Feb. 7

The Hallmark Hall of Fame (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* An adaptation of the Jean Anouilh comedy, Time Remembered, with Dame Edith Evans, in her American TV debut, and Christopher Plummer. Color.

Story of Love (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Jane Fonda in Somerset Maugham's A String of Beads. Color.

Thurs., Feb. 9

"Color Day, U.S.A."-- by NBC decree. From Continental Classroom (6-7 a.m. local time) to The Jack Paar Show (11:15 p.m.-l a.m., E.S.T.), a record 90% of the network's offerings will be in color.

The Purex Special for Women (NBC, 4-5 pm.). The fourth part of the enterprising series surveys the problem of "The Single Woman." Color.

Remember How Great (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). The Tin Pan Alley hits of the past three decades aired by Andy Williams, Connie Francis and Harry James, among others. Host: Jack Benny. Color.

Gunslinger (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Still wal lowing in the Old Frontier, TV premieres a series written by Charles Marquis War ren, creator of Gunsmoke and Rawhide.

Sat., Feb. 11

Professional Basketball (NBC, 2-4:30 p.m.). Cincinnati v. St. Louis.

The Nation's Future (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). "Should the Federal Government directly subsidize the arts?" Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith is pro, Harper's Managing Editor Russell Lynes con.

Sun. Feb. 12

Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). "Olympiad 1960" reviews both the winter and summer games.

The New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). An all-Copland program.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "The College Panic," a canvass of harassed admissions directors, nervous parents and students.

Walt Disney Presents (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Disney displays canines from around the world.

General Electric Theater (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). Ernest Borgnine and Zsa Zsa Gabor in Budd Schulberg's Hollywood piece, "The Legend That Walks Like a Man."

Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "Alone No More": Russia is invaded, Pearl Harbor blitzed.

Mon., Feb. 13

Family Classics (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). The Heiress, a TV adaptation of the stage adaptation of Henry James's novel, Washington Square. With Julie Harris.

THEATER

On Broadway

Midseason on Broadway finds an unfavorable balance of dramatic trade, with the two most provocative original plays and the liveliest musical all imported. They are Rhinoceros, a farce-satire by perky Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco; A Taste of Honey, a sort of earthy British lonely-hearts story; and the wonderfully pert French musical Irma La Douce. The domestic dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home; Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama; and Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, a lively but somehow disappointing comedy-lecture on marital success. Among the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi, a Runyonesque piece, is nearly salvaged by the antics of Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. And two of the season's smallest-scale efforts are also its sprightliest--Carol Channing's satirical revue, Show Girl, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

Off Broadway

There are new signs of life now, but so far this season, things have been nearly as disappointing off Broadway as on. There is one impressive original work, 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 after all; 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 and a welcome reprise of Epitaph for George Dillon by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton.

BOOKS

Best Reading 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 aristoclot 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.

Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. A novelist (The High and the Mighty) and oldtime airline pilot, the author tells eloquently about the attrition of confidence, caused by too many close scrapes and too many dead comrades, that persuaded him to give up piloting.

The Future of Mankind, by Karl Jaspers. The prose of an author who is both a German and an existentialist is bound to be somewhat murky, but Jaspers advances powerful arguments against both easy despair and easy optimism about the human condition.

Raditzer, by Peter Matthiessen. Writing with an incisiveness that recalls Conrad, Novelist Matthiessen tells a harsh tale of a parasite and a host--the one a whining Army goldbricker, the other a strong and decent man who is subtly chivied into becoming the sniveler's protector.

The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead.

A readable but perhaps too brief account of those redoubtable Victorians--Burton, Speke, Stanley, Livingstone, Gordon, Kitchener--who explored the upper reaches of the Nile, taking pestilence and polygamy as they found them.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Hawaii, Michener (2)* 2. Advise and Consent, Drury (1) 3. The Last of the Just, Schwarz-Bart (4) 4. Sermons and Soda-Water, O'Hara (3) 5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (5) 6. The Dean's Watch, Goudge (6) 7. Decision at Delphi, Maclnnes (7) 8. Shadows in the Grass, Dinesen 9. Pomp and Circumstance, Coward (9) 10. The Lovely Ambition, Chase (8)

NONFICTION

1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer (1) 2. The Waste Makers, Packard (2) 3. Who Killed Society? Amory (3) 4. The Snake Has All the Lines, Kerr (4) 5. Born Free, Adamson (5) 6. Vanity Fair, ed. by Amory and Bradlee (8) 7. The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (9) 8. Baruch: The Public Years (7) 9. The Politics of Upheaval, Schlesinger (6) 10. We Hold These Truths, Murray (10)

* All times E.S.T.

* Position on last week's list.

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