Word: alec
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Ross, by British Playwright Terence (Separate Tables) Rattigan, opened last week with Alec Guinness as Lawrence of Arabia. A complex, 16-scene production, the play reaches brilliantly, perhaps too slickly, into its legendary hero's mind, illuminating but never completely resolving the essential enigma: Was Lawrence the spectacular hero who inspired and led the Arabs in their World War I revolt against the Turks, or was he a lying, unstable charlatan...
...joining the R.A.F. as an ordinary airman (his later and more famous pseudonym was Shaw). Playwright Rattigan's account begins in the barracks, uses a series of flashbacks to go at the hero's question: "Oh, Ross. How did I become you?" As Guinness of Arabia, Sir Alec is at his subtle, suggestive best, and even the physical resemblance is striking. In his radicalism, there is more than a hint of the showoff; in his sophistication, a climber's cunning; in his humility, the prima donna's beady eye. Frightened of latent homosexuality, he shrinks from...
...well as ratings. The two major dramatic shows, CBS Playhouse 90 and NBC Sunday Showcase, are being crossed off the schedule for next season, as well as the muchballyhooed $15 million NBC Ford Star-time, which did some good drama (e.g., Ingrid Bergman in The Turn of the Screw, Alec Guinness in The Wicked Scheme of Jebal Deekes), but otherwise ran up an awesome string of flops. Many of the less ambitious series fared no better. A total of 55 shows will not return to the air next season, ranging from Love and Marriage to Bat Masterson, from Desilu Playhouse...
...three other people in a farce called The Mouse That Roared (TIME, Nov. 9). Last week, as two of his latest pictures were released simultaneously in the U.S., Sellers stood suddenly revealed as a major comic imagination, easily the most brilliant ironic actor the British have produced since Alec Guinness-whose influence he gratefully acknowledges and emphatically transcends. As U.S. critics cheered, a British cinemagnate burbled: "It looks as if we've got a Sellers market in America...
...Havana. Alec Guinness and Noel Coward mix farcical comedy with political satire in the film version of Graham Greene's novel...