Television

Wednesday, December 25

TODAY (NBC, 7-9 a.m.)* An all-musical program of 16th century works performed by the New York Pro Musica Renaissance Band.

NBC OPERA (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). All-new production of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, an NBC Christmas staple since 1951. Color.

Thursday, December 26

KRAFT SUSPENSE THEATER (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A professional gambler teams up with a Texas millionaire in a scientific attempt to break the bank at a Las Vegas casino. Jack Kelly and Pat Hingle guest-star. Color.

Saturday, December 28

ABC's WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The Davis Cup tennis championship from Adelaide, Australia.

Sunday, December 29

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 5-5:30 p.m.). Sky diving and parachuting from Fort Bragg, N.C.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily.

WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Dumbo, popular cartoon about the big-eared baby elephant who ends the jeers by learning to fly. Color.

PROJECTION '64 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). NBC correspondents around the world review the events of 1963 and forecast those of 1964. Color.

Monday, December 30

MONDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Kiss Me Kate, starring Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel. Color.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STARS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). A look at the social, economic and political life of the nation's movie capital.

EAST SIDE/WEST SIDE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Carol Rossen portrays a prostitute found unfit to care for her child in a repeat of this series' best episode.

Wednesday, January 1

YEARS OF CRISIS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). CBS correspondents survey the major news events of the past year.

THEATER

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE. Brawny Colleen Dewhurst is matched with Michael Dunn, a prancing, saturnine dwarf, in Edward Albee's enigmatic adaptation of Carson McCuller's novella. The play retains some of the moody ambiguity of the original, but lacks more than a fragmentary stage life of its own.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, by Neil Simon. Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford break from a wedding march into a scrappy farrago of newlywed problems. Director Mike Nichols paces the contest to leave the audience a few breaths between laughs.

THE PRIVATE EAR and THE PUBLIC EYE are two sharply observed but compassionate one-act comedies -- about a bashful boy who finds that his chosen Venus is just another dumb blonde, and a brash detective who chews macaroons and Brazil nuts and sweetly seasons a marriage that is stewing in acrid juices.

CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING resounds to marching boots at a peacetime R.A.F. training base, but what Playwright Wesker sets out to trample--with bright, biting argument and laughter--is the British class system.

THE REHEARSAL rehearses a young and innocent governess for the later cruelties of life. Playwright Anouilh orchestrates a seduction scene--the play's best--with brasses of bravado, violins of pity, and flutes of tenderness.

LUTHER. Playwright John Osborne looks back in anger at the people and practices that outraged Martin Luther. In the surging power of Albert Finney's portrayal, the playgoer senses the force that shaped the Reformation.

Off Broadway

THE ESTABLISHMENT. The Establishment company, a hip group of anti-p.r. men, demolish sacrosanct images and egos with laughing precision, and gambol satirically on what is nearly In or almost Out.

CINEMA

HIGH AND LOW. Without a samurai in sight, Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa sets the screen crackling with excitement as his camera trails a vicious kidnaper through the Yokohama underworld.

CHARADE. This parlor prank can't decide whether to be a farce, a sophisticated comedy, or an out-and-out thriller. But Gary Grant is in top form, Audrey Hepburn is in gowns by Givenchy, and murder most foul is in full color.

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. Up in Vermont, three madcap characters are put through their paces by Director Adolfas Mekas, an East Village cinemaniac who pokes fiendish fun at every moviemaker from D. W. Griffith to Antonioni.

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY. Walt Disney's appealing package of holiday fauna contains a bull terrier, a Labrador retriever and a Siamese cat, all letting the fur fly on a 250-mile trek through the Canadian wilds.

NIGHT TIDE. Man against myth is the theme of Writer-Director Curtis Harrington's promising first feature, an eerie tale of a young U.S. sailor who nearly succumbs to the siren song of a Venice, Calif., mermaid.

BILLY LIAR. Another visit to a bleak industrial city somewhere in England. But Tom Courtenay is hilarious as a working-class Walter Mitty full of fascistic dreams, and Julie Christie as his beatnik girl friend is a bit of all right too.

KNIFE IN THE WATER. Polish Director Roman Polanski maintains a suspenseful pace, putting two men and one woman aboard a sailboat that appears to be mostly sex-driven.

THE CARDINAL. In Director Otto Preminger's hands, the 1950 bestseller about a poor priest from Boston who becomes a papal prince often seems fairly preposterous despite a smooth performance by Tom Tryon, a racy one by Romy Schneider, and a sensational one by Director-turned-Actor John Huston.

TOM JONES. The funniest movie in many a year. Henry Fielding's bawdy classic about vice in 18th century England has been pinched and patted into shape by Director Tony Richardson, with able assistance from Stars Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith.

BOOKS

Best Reading

"WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch is the best of the new Russian novelists who have won recognition in the post-Stalin "thaw." These are two short novels about fringe members of Soviet society: the man who still believes in Das Kapital and the poor old peasant woman who has endured both czars and commissars.

A SINGULAR MAN, by J. P. Donleavy. The author again mines the stuff that dreams are made of: this one about the richest, handsomest, most irresistible American--who is, of course, also an accomplished necrophiliac with great taste in tombs.

THE HAT ON THE BED, by John O'Hara. A literary wonder: the author's fourth collection of short stories in as many years, and they are excellent.

THE ELEPHANT, by Slawomir Mrozek. A lion refuses to eat Christians, a Polish matron keeps a live revolutionary caged in her living room, civil servants begin to fly like eagles over Warsaw in the fantasy world of a brilliant young Polish satirist.

THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, by Joan Aiken. Children may have to wait until their parents finish reading this sly and delightful melodrama in which ravening wolves are the least of the Victorian villains that beset the two young heroines.

DOROTHY AND RED, by Vincent Sheean. Dorothy Thompson dreamed of an ideal "creative marriage" and tried to find it with Novelist Sinclair Lewis. Vincent Sheean watched the dream turn to nightmare; his comments on Dorothy's letters and diaries help explain how it happened.

THE FABULOUS LIFE OF DIEGO RIVERA, by Bertram Wolfe. Rivera confounded capitalists and Communists alike with his preposterous stories and visionary murals, but Biographer Wolfe wisely takes the artist's exuberant imagination as the surest cue to the man and his work.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Group, McCarthy (1 last week)

2. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (2)

3. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (3)

4. The Three Sirens, Wallace (6)

5. The Living Reed, Buck (5)

6. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, Godden (7)

7. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Fleming (8)

8. Caravans, Michener (4)

9. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (9)

10. Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet

NONFICTION

1. The American Way of Death, Mitford (1)

2. Mandate for Change, Eisenhower (2)

3. Rascal, North (3)

4. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky

5. Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy (4)

6. My Darling Clementine, Fishman (6)

7. I Owe Russia $1,200, Hope (8)

8. The Education of American Teachers, Conant

9. Dorothy and Red, Sheean (5)

10. The Pooh Perplex, Crews

* All times E.S.T.

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