TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 4 CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). *New techniques and safety measures in oceanographic exploration, derived from the search for the wreck of the nuclear-powered submarine Thresher, which sank last April.

Friday, March 6

THE JACK PAAR SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests include Comic Jonathan Winters, Lord Mountbatten and Phil Cochran, World War II flying ace. Color.

Saturday, March 7

THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Dean Martin is host to Comics Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, and The Vienna Boys Choir.

Sunday, March 8

FACE THE NATION (CBS, 12:30-1 p.m.). Governor Nelson Rockefeller is interviewed in New Hampshire.

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). With Singer Florence Henderson and Dancer Juliet Prowse.

DU PONT SHOW OF THE WEEK (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A man whose son died in a German extermination camp hires an Englishman (John Mills) to hound a former Nazi (Curt Jurgens) when he leaves prison after serving 15 years for war crimes. Color.

Monday, March 9

BREAKING POINT (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Bradford Dillman as an internist who is suddenly blinded but still determined to pursue his career.

Tuesday, March 10

COMBAT (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Ronald Howard (son of Leslie) acts the part of a foolishly courageous British captain in World War II.

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY. NBC opens with Chet Huntley, David Brinkley et al. at 8:30-9 p.m. CBS coverage begins at 9:30-10 p.m., with Walter Cronkite as anchor man to a task force of 450. Late returns on ABC and NBC at 11:15, CBS at 11:30 and onward until the final results are known.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests include Soprano Birgit Nilsson, Dancers Gwen Verdon and Peter Gennaro, Singers Jack Jones and Susan Watson. Color.

THEATER

On Broadway ANY WEDNESDAY lodges an executive's sweetie in an executive suite as a tax and marriage dodge. As a kept waif, Sandy Dennis chug-a-lugs champagne from the bottle like Coke and cries through her smiles, leaving playgoers choked with laughter. Liquor may be quicker, as Ogden Nash once argued, but Sandy is dandy.

FOXY dogsleds Bert Lahr up to the 1890s Yukon, and from there on the evening is fool's gold, a bonanza of comic Lahrgesse.

AFTER THE FALL is a nightlong symposium on guilt and self-justification conducted by Arthur Miller in terms of his mother and wives, notably Marilyn Monroe. Elia Kazan's staging is electric, but Miller has not put enough distance between his suffering and his craft to fashion a play. Alternates, in repertory, with Marco Millions.

DYLAN. Whether Alec Guinness, as Dylan Thomas, spars with newsmen, spats with his wife or speaks in the soft darkness next to a sleeping child, he conveys the poet's warmth and wit--as well as his decline through sycophancy, self-indulgence and alcohol.

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.

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 monologize bitingly and briefly about their adulterous affair.

THE TROJAN WOMEN. This masterly revival of the Euripides classic has been directed by Michael Cacoyannis with brooding eloquence, cyclonic passion, and a sense of cruel inner hurt.

IN WHITE AMERICA thoughtfully and evocatively combines a series of dramatic readings to chronicle the Negro's legacy of pain, oppression and denial from the days of slavery to the present hour.

RECORDS

ARTUR RUBINSTEIN, who celebrated his 75th birthday last month, is a great connoisseur of life. Even his recordings evoke the aroma of fine cigars, the company of good friends, a glass of old port at bedtime. VLADIMIR HOROWITZ, who has not played in public since 1953, is more inscrutable. His humor is shy, his pathos and his beliefs are strong. Yet the two share a comradely distinction: they are the last of the great romantic pianists, and like Spanish-American War veterans, they live in an age that prizes them without necessarily knowing the grandeur of their tradition.

In his first recordings of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, three Debussy Preludes, Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 and two Etudes (Columbia), Horowitz plays with heart on sleeve, spinning out a range of emotion beyond his earlier reach. His rapport with Chopin and Debussy is especially strong, but he plays Beethoven with glee and understanding.

Rubinstein playing Mozart's Concerto No. 20 and Haydn's Andante and Variations in F Minor (RCA Victor) is only slightly less inspired. He brings a kind of melancholy serenity to Mozart and a flashing excitement to Haydn's study in manic-depressive music; in a single phrase, his mood shifts from joy to despair.

LEON FLEISHER (Epic) and SVIATOSLAV RICHTER (Angel) have both recorded Schubert's Wanderer Fantasia and Sonata in A Major, and the results are surprisingly equal. The music is right down Richter's alley, but Fleisher approaches it with ease and style and seems almost the peer of Russia's master pianist.

PABLO CASALS (RCA Victor), at 87, is still the world's nonpareil cellist, but those who care to hear how he played in his prime may find here twelve short works recorded in the '20s.

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. Inadvertent nuclear war is sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying in Stanley (Lolita) Kubrick's comedy of terrors.

SUNDAY IN NEW YORK. Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson add style to a frail charade detailing the decline and fall of a 22-year-old virgin who has found virtue unrewarding.

THE GUEST. A rare performance by Donald Pleasence, repeating his stage role, enhances this film version of Harold Pinter's offbeat, ambiguous The Caretaker.

THE FIANCES. Italian Director Ermanno Olmi (The Sound of Trumpets) turns his camera to a couple engaged so long that they scarcely remember why.

POINT OF ORDER. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Attorney Joseph Welch face off as adversaries in a vivid documentary taken from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.

THE EASY LIFE. One of the funniest-and saddest--Italian films in years offers Vittorio Gassman as a flashy Roman playboy whose jetaway pace spells disaster for a shy young law student.

BILLY LIAR. Working-class life in Britain inspires a social cipher (Tom Courtenay) to imagine a faster, funnier world where his own word is law.

TO BED OR NOT TO BED. A study of sexual mores in Sweden, conducted con brio by Alberto Sordi as a roving but forever disappointed Italian businessman.

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. U.S. Director Adolfas Mekas moves the new cinema a step forward in this promising, unpredictable melange of pratfalls, parody and surrealistic farce.

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.

TOM JONES. From Fielding's bawdy, boisterous 18th century classic, Director Tony Richardson has fashioned one of the best movies in many years.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE MARTYRED, by Richard Kim. In this somber, remorseless and beautifully controlled first novel, the author takes the Korean war as his setting and the presumed martyrdom of twelve Christian ministers as his theme. Modern sainthood, he finds, most often is achieved by men racked by doubt.

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 hilariously 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. A raffish, gifted poet, who very much resembles Dylan Thomas, visits suburbia, proves to be a catalyst in combination with sex and liquor. The partying and the pratfalls are followed by a vintage De Vries hangover of brooding second thoughts about modern life.

COOPER'S CREEK, by Alan Moorehead. The author again strikes out on unfamiliar terrain, this time telling the grim story of Burke and Wills, two 19th century Australian explorers, who first crossed their continent from south to north looking for rich prairies and finding an unsalvageable desert. They died on the way back.

HITLER: A STUDY IN TYRANNY, by Alan Bullock. Historian Bullock has revised his ten-year-old biography to include new evidence of the dictator's megalomania. It is still the best available study of Hitler.

A GOD AND HIS GIFTS, by 1. Compton-Burnett. The "god" in this acerbic novel is a memorable domestic tyrant whose crimes are limited to the people closely related to him.

A FINE MADNESS, by Elliott Baker. A lighthearted novel about Samson Shilli-toe, a poet, souse and womanizer who keeps the plot in motion with his talent for anarchy, his tropism for cops, and his tendency to rant at strangers.

THE GOLDEN FRUITS, by Nathalie Sarraute. This is a subtle novel about the publication of an important new novel, and Novelist Sarraute uses the occasion for a witty dissection of cultural toadies and intellectual conformity.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Group, McCarthy (1 last week)

2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carre (2)

3. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (3)

4. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (5)

5. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (4)

6. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (6)

7. The Living Reed, Buck (10)

8. Caravans, Michener (7)

9. The Fanatic, Levin

10. Take Heed of Loving Me, Vining (9)

NONFICTION

1. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (1)

2. My Years with General Motors, Sloan (2)

3. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris (6)

4. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage

5. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky (5)

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

7. Rascal, North (7)

8. Mandate for Change, Eisenhower (3)

9. William Shakespeare, Rowse (8) 10. The American Way of Death, Mitford (10)

*All times E.S.T.

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