TELEVISION

Thursday, September 3 KRAFT SUSPENSE THEATER (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Repeat of an excellent drama about four irresponsible college students who refuse to take the blame when their car kills a pedestrian. Robert Ryan and Phyllis Avery star as parents of one student. Color.

Friday, September 4 SUMMER OLYMPICS TRIALS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Wrestling from the World's Fair Singer Bowl; and diving from Astoria, L.I.

BURKE'S LAW (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Swedish Maid Zsa Zsa Gabor is Detective Amos Burke's prime suspect in tonight's episode of this tongue-in-cheek murder series. Others in the cast are Lizabeth Scott, Paul Lynde and John Saxon.

Saturday, September 5 ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). First national telecast of the Hambletonian, the Kentucky Derby of trotting, now in its 39th year and worth $150,000 in prize money. Also, Japanese baseball championships.

NBC SPORTS SPECIAL (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). Bud Palmer hosts a preview of the N.C.A.A. football season.

Sunday, September 6 DISCOVERY (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). This excellent show for older children starts its fall season with a look at some of the artists and scientists who have made the most significant contributions to man's development.

ISSUES & ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Guest is Walter Carey, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Monday, September 7 VACATION PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). An hour of comedy sketches, improvisations and musical numbers with Comedian Orson Bean, four young actors called the Beanbaggers, and the Serendipity Singers.

Tuesday, September 8 HOLLYWOOD: THE GREAT STARS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A nostalgic look at Hollywood's legendary figures, narrated by Henry Fonda. Included are scenes with Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, John Garfield. Repeat.

RECORDS

Opera

PUCCINI: LA BOHEME (2 LPs; Angel).

As Mimi, which she has sung at La Scala, Mirella Freni, 29, an Italian lyric soprano of talent and beauty, can hold her own with Tebaldi, De los Angeles and Moffo. Her voice is easy and focused, but her particular strength as the little seamstress is her touching youthfulness. Tenor Ni colai Gedda is equally melodious and moving as her lover. Thomas Schippers conducts the Rome Opera House Orches tra and Chorus impetuously but artfully.

BIZET: CARMEN (3 LPs; RCA Victor).

At the beginning, Soprano Leontyne Price sounds outsized, more like Lilith than a simple gypsy, but the opera soon rises to her voltage. Tenor Franco Corelli manages a convincing disintegration as Don Jose, and Baritone Robert Merrill's Escamillo exudes male vanity. Mirella Freni makes a sweet-voiced Micaela. Conductor Herbert von Karajan colors the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra sensuously, generally keeping the tempos down and the temperature up; the smugglers' quintet reaches a high pitch of excitement.

Every man, of course, must choose his own Carmen. While Price's voice has an earthy authority and musky beauty, her sexiness, is somehow impersonal and incantatory. Victoria de los Angeles (with Sir Thomas Beecham, on Angel) is more vivacious and brilliant. Scheduled soon to make her recorded debut in the role: Maria Callas.

FRIEDRICH SCHORR (Angel) was opera's greatest Heldenbariton in the years between the World Wars, and the richness and purity of his voice, with its exact, intelligent phrasing, have seldom been surpassed. These excerpts from Die Meistersinger, in which he sings his greatest role, Hans Sachs, include also the voices of Lauritz Melchior and Elisabeth Schumann. The original recordings were issued between 1928 and 1932, but they sound fresh-minted in this reissue.

SMETANA: THE BARTERED BRIDE (3 LPs: Angel) combines peasant gaiety with the darker Slavic yearnings echoed in Smetana's celebrated orchestral piece, The Moldau. This is the best Bride yet recorded, but by being sung in German it loses the dumpling-rich, explosive sound of Czech. As the marriage broker, Wagnerian Basso Frick is excellent, though he may not quite match the traditional Czech performers in humor or beery profundity. Equally fine are the rest of the cast, including Tenor Karl-Ernst Mercker, who as the half-witted half brother has the thankless task of singing several arias with a stammer. German-born Rudolf Kempe manages the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra with such authentic fire that he sounds like a natural-born Bohemian.

CINEMA

GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. She seemed too good to be true in A Taste of Honey; and in her second picture, Liverpool's Rita Tushingham, 22, seems even better than that: a girl who both acts like an angel and looks like a star. Peter Finch plays her middle-aged lover and plays him well, but Rita's dazzling presence turns Finch to sparrow.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. A treat for the Beatle generation. The holler boys' first film is fresh, fast and funny, and it may moderate the adult notion that a Beatle is something to be greeted with DDT.

HARAKIRI. A gory, sometimes tedious, sometimes beautiful dramatic treatise on an old Japanese custom: ritual suicide.

THAT MAN FROM RIO. This picture from France, a wild and wacky travesty of what passes for adventure in the average film thriller, stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and is directed with way-out wit by Philippe (The Fire-Day Lover) de Broca.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. In John Huston's version of Tennessee Williams' play, several unlikely characters (portrayed with talent by Richard Burton and with competence by Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner) turn up in the patio of a not-very-grand hotel in Mexico and talk, talk, talk about their peculiar problems.

LOS TARANTOS. A dance drama from Spain that tells the story of a gypsy Romeo and Juliet.

ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS. For the children: the touching tale of an Indian girl (Celia Kaye) who lives alone on an island off California.

A SHOT IN THE DARK. Sellers of the Surete sets a new style in sleuthing: let the murderer get away but make sure the audience dies laughing.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. Director Pietro Germi, who made Divorce--Italian Style the most ferociously funny film of the decade, tells another story of life and love in a small Sicilian town. But this time there is less fun and more ferocity.

ZULU. A bloody good show based on a historical incident that occurred in 1879: the siege of a British outpost by 4,000 African tribesmen.

THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN, as played by the unstoppable Debbie Reynolds, keeps this big and brassy movie version of the Broadway musical charging right along.

NOTHING BUT THE BEST. A lower-crust clerk (Alan Bates) hires an upper-crust crumb to teach him the niceties of Establishment snobbery in this cheeky, stylish, often superlative British satire.

THE ORGANIZER. Director Mario Moni-celli's drama about a 19th century strike in Turin has warmth, humor, stunning photography, and a superb performance by Marcello Mastroianni as a sort of Socialist Savonarola.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE (1940-1946). A moving chronicle of one man's fighting faith in France in its blackest hour. Le Grand Charles, as the '60s think of him, was grimly aware of the price of total commitment, and far more accurately than Roosevelt and Churchill, he gauged the realities of the postwar world.

THE VALLEY OF BONES, by Anthony Powell. Though it is the first book in Part II of a twelve-volume series, this dryly witty novel about England between the wars is not as labyrinthine as it sounds. Readers who awakened late to Powell's masterful work can now follow the characters chronologically. The earlier books made Marienbad of time; from now on they will follow it.

THE GAY PLACE, by William Brammer. Hardly noticed when it was first published in 1961, this first novel by a sometime aide to Lyndon Johnson has become a top-selling paperback and a political conversation piece. Deservedly, for despite fictional camouflage it is an adroitly written roman a clef about L.B.J. in the days when he was ringmaster of the U.S. Senate.

THE SCOTCH, by John Galbraith. In this memoir of his childhood in a frugal Scotch community in Ontario, the author of The Affluent Society documents the tightwad society. It is a diverting study of the Scotch and an intriguing, ironic insight into the formative influences that made Economist Galbraith an evangelist of big spending.

THE OYSTERS OF LOCMARIAQUER, by Eleanor Clark. All about the care and feeding of the world's best oysters, and the Bretons who attend them. With love and encyclopedic knowledge of Ostrea edulis, the author has written a nourishing and succulent book that can be safely read before the R months begin.

EUGENE ONEGIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. Novelist-Scholar Nabokov has rendered Alexander Pushkin's highly romantic 19th century novel-in-verse with greater accuracy and range of meaning than any previous translation. By contrast, his volumes of notes show Nabokov as an obsessive genius of the species that he kidded so guilefully in his novel Pale Fire.

CORNELIUS SHIELDS ON SAILING. Corny's own philosophy for winning races is also a frank memoir of the man, who at 70 is the champion U.S. skipper.

THE SIEGE OF HARLEM, by Warren Miller. In this book's fantasy plot, Harlem grows tired of riots and declares itself an independent nation. Miller, who lived there for five years, proves his skill both as satirist and Harlemologist.

THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN, by Louis Auchincloss. A better chronicler of Massachusetts' elite Groton School and its wise, eccentric founder, Endicott Peabody, could hardly be hoped for. In this intricate, fascinating chronicle of "Dr. Prescott" of "Justin," Author Auchincloss finally fulfills his longtime promise of major distinction as a novelist.

TWO NOVELS, by Brigid Brophy. In these elegant and wickedly brilliant novellas about a masquerade ball and a lesbian schoolmistress, Brigid Brophy shows subtlety of both thought and style.

THE FAR FIELD, by Theodore Roethke. A posthumous selection of the poems Roethke wrote during the last seven years of his life celebrates movingly and prophetically "the last pure stretch of joy, the dire dimension of a final thing."

JULIAN, by Gore Vidal. A voluminous, fascinating, well-researched historical novel, yet it remains oddly dispassionate and at one remove from the vibrant and youthful Roman Emperor whose turbulent 18-month reign marked the last conflict in the Western world between Hellenism and early Christianity.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (3 last week) 2. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (1.) 3. Armageddon, Uris (2) 4. Julian, Vidal (4) 5. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (5) 6. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (6) 7. This Rough Magic, Stewart 8. The 480, Burdick (7) 9. The Spire, Golding (9) 10. You Only Live Twice, Fleming

NONFICTION 1. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (1) 2. Harlow, Shulman (3) 3. The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross (2) 4. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (4) 5. Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver (9) 6. Four Days, U.P.I. and American Heritage (5) 7. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (8) 8. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (6) 9. Crisis in Black and White, Silberman (7) 10. A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, Bishop

*-All times E.D.T.

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