TELEVISION
Wednesday, February 26 CHRONICLE (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* A tour of Manhattan's 75-year-old theatrical institution, the Players Club, with Howard Lindsay, Dennis King, Jason Robards Jr. and Marc Connelly.
Friday, February 28 THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). A satirical topical revue that has found occasional teeth after a disappointingly gummy premiere.
CAROL AND COMPANY (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Carol Burnett and Robert Preston in a musical variety special.
Saturday, February 29 THE SAGA OF WESTERN MAN--1898 (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Third in a series of four specials centering on important years in history, this one about the winning of the West, the Spanish-American War, and Teddy Roosevelt.
BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). "Meal Ticket," Budd (What Makes Sammy Run?} Schulberg's first TV script.
Sunday, March 1 DISCOVERY (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Second part of a visit to Moscow, including children's ballet classes, the Obratsov puppets, Popov the clown, and performing animals.
ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Howard K. Smith interviews Senator Margaret Chase Smith on her candidacy for the presidency.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "The Agony of Austria," a recounting of the 1938 Anschluss, featuring an interview with Kurt von Schuschnigg, who was Austrian Chancellor when the Nazis annexed the country, now is a professor at St. Louis University.
BRITAIN: THE CHANGING GUARD (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A news special on the revolution in Britain's class structure.
Tuesday, March 3 OUR MAN IN WASHINGTON (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). David Brinkley's view of "high-society foreign policy," with film clips of J.F.K.. Jackie Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Earl Warren, Bobby Kennedy and others.
THEATER
On Broadway
RUGANTINO, an Italian-language musical with English titles suspended over the stage, is a pleasant Broadway novelty. Its bawdry is innocent, its humor earthy, its girls look blessedly like girls, and its picaresque hero is forever outwitting himself.
AFTER THE FALL. In a play dexterously staged by Elia Kazan to represent the ebb and flow of events in memory, Playwright Arthur Miller examines the women who (he believes) have done him wrong and the wrongs he did them. The play's closeness to Miller's life belongs more properly to exhibitionism than to art, and it is naggingly self-absorbed in the importance of being Arthur.
DYLAN. In his final years, Dylan Thomas mourned in drink the distance between himself and the height of his poetic powers. Sir Alec Guinness is just the actor to show the humor, insight and inner pain of the sinking man.
HELLO, DOLLY! Bold, brassy, breezy Matchmaker Carol Channing winks her way into and out of any plot twist in a handsome musical that dances along exuberantly on the toes of the Gower Champion chorus.
NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS. How to be a charmingly roguish phony is demonstrated by a zany TV writer-producer (Robert Preston) who spouts triple-tongued, two-timing dialogue.
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Before the rice is out of their clothes, Newlyweds Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford are into neighbor, in-law and apartment tangles that are joyously unraveled by love, tiffs and laughter.
LUTHER. Outraged by clerical abuses and tormented by physical pain, Luther had the strength to struggle with both. In this dramatic portrait, the imagery of his physical infirmities matches the force of his purpose.
Off Broadway
THE LOVER, by Harold Pinter, and PLAY, by Samuel Beckett. Pinter's couple let themselves go in uninhibited make-believe adultery, while Beckett's trio drone on bitingly and briefly about their adulterous affair.
THE TROJAN WOMEN. Vanquished and about to be enslaved, the Trojan women eloquently vent their passions, creating a desolating sense of the agony of war and the immutability of man's fate.
IN WHITE AMERICA. A documentary that illuminates today's upheaval in race relations, detailing Negro-white discord from cotton picker and master to civil rights leader and U.S. President.
CINEMA
THE SILENCE. The aberrations of two strange sisters dominate Ingmar Bergman's stark, savage, but cold-blooded drama in which both mind and body struggle to find meaning.
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. Peter Sellers and George C. Scott in Director Stanley Kubrick's morbidly funny satire on the subject of nuclear war.
SUNDAY IN NEW YORK. The ways of maids and men-about-Manhattan have been explored before, but Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson nip through this will-she-or-won't-she farce with contagious exuberance.
THE FIANCE'S. From the simple tale of a long-engaged couple enduring a painful separation, Italian Director Ermanno Olmi has created a minor cinema classic.
THE GUEST. On film, Harold Pinter's The Caretaker retains much of the eerie fascination it generated onstage. Donald Pleasence repeats his matchless performance as the raving old derelict whose war with existence may or may not be Everyman's.
POINT OF ORDER. A superior documentary, extracted from TV coverage of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, vividly depicts the fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
TO BED OR NOT TO BED. Alberto Sordi plays an Italian fur merchant testing some hopelessly romantic notions about sowing one's oats in Stockholm.
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER. A Macy's salesgirl (Natalie Wood) hazards a fling with a sometime musician (Steve McQueen), and this tough-minded little comedy takes it from there, neatly improvising on a humdrum theme.
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. U.S. Director Adolfas Mekas moves the new cinema a step forward in this promising first feature --an unpredictable melange of pratfalls, parody and surrealistic farce.
BOOKS
Best Reading
An unusual batch of fine literary comedies: ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN, by Kingsley Amis. A rich, arrogant British libertine comes to an Eastern university town to renew his affair with a faculty wife, is thwarted and discomfited at every turn by the colonials he scorns.
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL, by John Cheever. In chronicling the calamitous entry of the genteel Wapshot family into the 20th century's mobile society, Novelist Cheever again displays his unique perspective on contemporary American life.
REUBEN, REUBEN, by Peter De Vries.
This satire of suburbia has a serious message: the commuter's jargon with its self-analysis and narcissism is not just a cultivated mannerism but a disease.
A FINE MADNESS, by Elliott Baker. A lighthearted novel about Samson Shillitoe, a poet, souse and womanizer with a talent for anarchy.
THE GOLDEN FRUITS, by Nathalie Sarraute. The publication of an important new book gives Novelist Sarraute the occasion for a witty dissection of cultural toadies and intellectual conformity.
Also two notable items of history: HITLER: A STUDY IN TYRANNY, by Alan Bullock. Historian Bullock has revised his ten-year-old biography to include new evidence of the tyrant's megalomania. It is still the standard by which other studies of Hitler are to be measured.
COOPER'S CREEK, by Alan Moorehead. The author provides his native Australia with a singularly bitter national myth-- the story of two explorers, Burke and Wills, who in 1861 became the first to cross their continent from south to north, and discovered an unsalvageable desert.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Group, McCarthy (1 last week) 2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, LeCarre (2) 3. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (4) 4. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (6) 5. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (5) 6. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (3) 7. Caravans, Michener (7) 8. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Fleming (10) 9. Take Heed of Loving Me, Vining 10. The Living Reed, Buck (8)
NONFICTION
1. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (1) 2. My Years with General Motors, Sloan (6) 3. Mandate for Change, Eisenhower (2) 4. Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy (4) 5. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky (3) 6. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris (7) 7. Rascal, North (5) 8. William Shakespeare, Rowse 9. Every Night, Josephine, Susann (8) 10. The American Way of Death, Mitford (9)
*All times E.S.T.
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