CINEMA

Mutiny on the Bounty. MGM's $18.5 million reconstruction of The Bounty goes bounding along at a great rate for two hours, but all at once the story springs a leak and sinks beneath contempt. Marlon Brando is a sight too cute as Fletcher Christian, but even in disaster Trevor Howard makes a superlative curmudgeon of Captain Bligh.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Bette Davis and Joan Crawford come back big as a couple of hilarious old horrors in the year's most gorgeously gory bit of grand guignol.

Gypsy. In this stripsnorter of a show adapted from the Broadway musical abstracted from Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, Rosalind Russell is marvelous as a stage mother whose daughter can't act but is pretty good at takeoffs.

Il Grido. A mournful little movie, made in 1957, in which Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni first fumbled with the material he later handled so powerfully in L'Avventura.

Billy Budd. Herman Melville's didactic tale has been transformed into a vivid, frightening, deeply affecting film, and for this the credit belongs principally to Britain's Peter Ustinov, who directed the picture, helped write the script, and plays one of the leading roles.

Long Day's Journey into Night. Eugene O'Neill's play, one of the greatest of the century, describes his own family in terms of a serpent that eats its own tail, each member eating and being eaten at the same time. Principals are Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell.

Divorce--Italian Style. This wickedly hilarious lesson in how to break up a marriage in divorceless Italy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a Sicilian smoothie who sheds his unwanted wife in the only way the law seems to allow: he provides her with a lover, catches them together, shoots her dead. But then . . .

TELEVISION

Wed., Nov. 28

Naked City (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).*Guest Stars Richard Basehart and Robert Walker Jr. turn a sidewalk prank into tragedy in "Dust Devil on a Quiet Street."

Thurs., Nov. 29

Bob Hope Show (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). An hour of music and patter, including a Hope-ful sketch called "Bird Brain of Alcatraz," with Guests Jack Benny, Ethel Merman and Bobby Darin.

Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "The Hands of Danofrio," an original drama about a piece of sculpture and an art dealer's determined search for its creator.

Alfred Hitchcock (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Hugh O'Brian and Gena Rowlands share their terror in "Ride the Nightmare."

Fri., Nov. 30

Shakespeare: Soul of an Age (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Sirs Michael Redgrave and Ralph Richardson narrate excerpts from a dozen Shakespeare plays while the camera roves the original settings (the Tower of London, the Forest of Arden, Hampton Court, etc.). Color.

The World of Jacqueline Kennedy (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). A look at the First Lady's public and private lives, with comments on both from Pierre Salinger, Oleg Cassini, Margaret Mead and the late Eleanor Roosevelt.

Sat.. Dec. 1

Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). For the five-to-elevens. Celeste Holm reads poems. Bud Freeman plays music, and the Ritts Puppets demonstrate math, all focusing on the aspects of color. Color.

N.C.A.A. Football (CBS, 1:15 p.m. to finish). From Philadelphia, Army v. Navy.

Sun., Dec. 2

The Eternal Light (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Mark Van Doren and Maurice Samuel discuss "The Bible and the Theater."

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Laval: Portrait of a Traitor," Lael Wertenbaker's biography of the man behind France's surrender to the Nazis.

Mon.. Dec. 3

Leonard Bernstein and the N.Y. Philharmonic (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "The Creative Performer" features Pianist Glenn Gould, Soprano Eileen Farrell, and Igor Stravinsky conducting excerpts from The Firebird.

David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). A three-part commentary on 1) television in East and West Berlin. 2) Cesar, a contemporary artist who crushes automobiles into small cubes, and 3) the enormous fan-magazine popularity of the John F. Kennedys. Color.

Tues., Dec. 4

Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "Report on the Dominican Republic," a summary of post-Trujillo conditions and a preview of the coming presidential election.

THEATER

On Broadway

Beyond the Fringe. Four monstrously clever and wildly amusing young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge gleefully smash the ikons of any and all Establishments, from Shakespeare to nuclear defense. The head pixy, Dr. Jonathan Miller, is a rubber-faced, rubber-jointed comic wonder.

Tchin-Tchin is a strange and oddly affecting play in which an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman are thrown into each other's company because their respective spouses are having an affair. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn touch the playgoer's nerve ends, crazybones, and heart strings with deceptive ease and authority.

Mr. President, with Robert Ryan in the title role and Nanette Fabray as First Lady, is a taste-exempt musical that is bulging with more than $2,600,000 in advance-ticket-sale swag. The patrons of its 385 theater parties (largely benefit affairs) may redefine play going for charity as "painful giving."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, examines the sterility of a marriage, and of modern U.S. life, with cold fury. The playgoer may doubt whether he has been shown the human heart, but he will know that he has seen human entrails. As the warring couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen give performances of indelible brilliance.

The Affair has been expertly adapted from C. P. Snow's novel, and revolves around the issue of justice toward an ideological enemy. A predominantly British cast evokes the donnish flavor of a university common room turned courtroom.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O'Hara. Back in his Gibbsville, Pa., stamping grounds again and once more at the top of his form, the old master lays bare in short stories the mores and morals of the nice and the not-so-nice.

The Anatomy of Britain, by Anthony Sampson. A precise and skilled journalist takes his native land apart from Mayfair to Muddling-Through, and is far from reassured by what he finds.

Tale for the Mirror, by Hortense Calisher. Masterful anecdotes of human hope, and foibles for our time, set in Exurbia-on-Hudson, written by a subtle and stylish mistress of the short story.

Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. Life with a great impressionist painter and a charmingly quirky parent, fondly recollected by his gifted son.

A Dancer in Darkness, by David Stacton. Seventeenth century Playwright John Webster's ill-fated heroine, the Duchess of Malfi, is chillfully done in, this time in silky, horrifying prose.

Black Cargoes, by Daniel P. Mannix. The breathtakingly brutal history of how some 15 million Africans were transported to the New World--the more telling because quietly told.

The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. The first complete edition of one of England's greatest wits reveals depths of wisdom in a man so often caricatured as a fop.

The Vizier's Elephant and Devil's Yard, by Ivo Andric. In four short novels a Yugoslav Nobel prizewinner treats with some new and old varieties of human tyranny.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. A Shade of Difference, Drury (1, last week)

2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2)

3. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (6)

4. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (4)

5. Ship of Fools, Porter (3)

6. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (5)

7. The Thin Red Line, Jones (8)

8. The Prize, Wallace (7)

9. The Passion Flower Hotel, Erskine

10. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (9)

NONFICTION

1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

2. Silent Spring, Carson (2)

3. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (5)

4. The Rothschilds, Morton (3)

5. My Life in Court, Nizer (4)

6. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (7)

7. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (6)

8. Letters From the Earth, Twain (9)

9. Final Verdict, St. Johns (8)

10. Who's in Charge Here?, Gardner (10)

*All times are E.S.T.

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