TELEVISION
Wednesday, January 27
WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.).* Paramount's 1951 movie version of Sidney Kingsley's excellent play Detective Story, with Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker.
Thursday, January 28
HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 9:30-11 p.m.). Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in a television adaptation of Emmet Lavery's The Magnificent Yankee, a dramatization of the life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Saturday. January 30
ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The World Two-Man Bobsled Championships from St. Moritz and the International Surfing Championships from Makaha Beach, Hawaii.
Sunday, January 31
THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN (ABC, 5-6 p.m.). The first in a series of four specials on the world of hunting and fishing.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "The Nisei: The Pride and the Shame," a documentary on the Japanese Americans who were in internment camps in the U.S. during World War II while other Japanese Americans were fighting and dying in the armed services.
WORLD WAR 1 (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Daredevils and Dogfights," the beginnings of war in the air.
PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The story of Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave who crusaded publicly against slavery and prejudice before, during and after the Civil War.
FOR THE PEOPLE (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). William Shatner plays a prosecuting attorney in a new series that replaces one of the early-season CBS casualties. Premiere.
THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder's marvelous spoof about a Coca-Cola exec in West Berlin, featuring a virtuoso performance by James Cagney.
Monday, February 1
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Richard Haydn guest-stars as a mild-mannered threat to U.N.C.L.E.
Tuesday, February 2
THE RED SKELTON HOUR (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Francomime Marcel Marceau appears in four of his favorite sketches, and plays Pinocchio to Red Skelton's Geppetto as well.
THEATER
On Broadway PETERPAT, by Enid Rudd. In olden days, man fought Tyrannosaurus rex; nowadays he battles Tyrannosaurus regina--his wife.
With Dick Shawn and Joan Hackett deftly handling the key roles, this wry, observant comedy argues with cogency that marriage is funny as hell.
TINY ALICE. Mystification is the end result of Edward Albee's quasi-metaphysical suspense melodrama centering on the relationship between a lay brother (John Gielgud) and the richest woman in the world (Irene Worth). The burden of feeling rests on the language and a supremely competent cast.
HUGHIE. Jason Robards and Eugene O'Neill prove incomparable stage mates once again in this engrossing and poignant-study of a man's need for a false mirror wherein he may see himself as he is not.
POOR RICHARD. Alan Bates plays a lovable lush and a poet pursued--by his own doubts and remorse, plus a sweet honey-blonde. He conquers his qualms and loses to her winning ways in Jean Kerr's sporadically amusing comedy.
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. In Bill Manhoffs sly interpretation of the mating ritual, a saucy prostitute (Diana Sands) runs circles around a stuffy book clerk (Alan Alda). To his horror and the playgoer's amusement, he helps her trap him.
LUV. Mike Nichols, a matchless director of comedy, contributes mightily to Schisgal's lie-down-on-my-couch-and-let-me-tell-you-all-about-myself farce. EH Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin keep the humor quotient high.
Off Broadway WAR AND PEACE. The life force of a great novel surges through this APA at the Phoenix rendering of the Tolstoy classic. The tone and thematic intent of the work have been preserved, and the performances of Sydney Walker as old Prince Bolkonski and Rosemary Harris as Natasha are supremely good.
TARTUFFE. While Moliere has suffered a slight miscarriage of esthetic justice in this broad and bouncy Lincoln Center presentation of his biting and bitter comedy, the performance of Michael O'Sullivan in the title role is a splendidly surrealistic wedding of malice and humor.
BABES IN THE WOOD. Rick Besoyan's vaudevillian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is more akin to Minsky than Shakespeare. The humor is broad, the music is gay," the mood is light. The groundlings would have loved it.
THE SLAVE and THE TOILET caters to the white mentality that masochistically enjoys being reviled for injustice to Negroes. With painful intensity, LeRoi Jones dramatizes both naked hate and the interracial love that dare not speak its name.
RECORDS
Opera
BIZET: CARMEN (3 LPs; Angel). Three reigning sopranos have now recorded the rich mezzo role with distinction and distinct differences. The newest Carmen, Maria Callas, lacks the heavenly beauty of Victoria de los Angeles and the earthy sensuousness of Leontyne Price. She is a hellcat, the most devilish and ruthless gypsy of the three. With Nicolai Gedda as an earnest and poetic Don Jose, Callas leads a French cast of no great distinction, but Georges Pretre, conducting the orchestra of the Paris Opera, deserves the Legion d'honneur. He makes the light, bright passages sparkle with Gallic esprit, and is still able to sound the tocsins of destiny.
RICHARD STRAUSS: THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW (4 LPs; Deutsche Grammophon). The complex, symbol-studded story is about an empress who tries to buy the shadow of a poor dyer's wife. If she gives up her shadow, the symbol of fertility, the dyer's wife must forgo motherhood; the dilemma causes her unborn children to plead with her in one of the eeriest passages in all opera. The technically and emotionally harrowing soprano roles are marvelously sung by Ingrid Bjoner (the empress) and Inge Borkh (the dyer's wife) while Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is impressive as the saintly dyer. Recorded during a performance, the voices sometimes overwhelm the orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera, but Conductor Joseph Keilberth still whips plenty of excitement into the lavish score.
MAUREEN FORRESTER SINGS OPERATIC ARIAS AND SONGS (Westminster). Forrester grandly pours her lustrous contralto into the heroic and tragic molds of Handel, Gluck and Purcell. She is capable of subtle shadings and is especially expressive in the superb threnody of the queen in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The accompaniment, with its darkly descending chromatic passages, is played by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Robert Zeller.
THE AGE OF BEL CANTO (2 LPs; London). A festive addition to the current revival of "beautiful singing," these 23 arias, duets and trios are by familiar composers (Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Handel) as well as unfamiliar ones (Piccinni, Lampugnani, Bononcini, Shield). Joan Sutherland is the heroine of the album, her brilliant voice describing perfect arabesques in the stratosphere. Richard Conrad's flowing tenor blends beautifully with hers, and there is also ample opportunity to judge the fast-rising Mezzo-Soprano Marilyn Home, whose range, power and flexibility are formidable but who is not yet in the same galaxy as Sutherland.
WAGNER: KUNDRY-PARSIFAL DUET (RCA Victor). Among all her recordings, this 25-year-old reissue was Kirsten Flagstad's favorite. Lauritz Melchior is her Parsifal, awakened to his holy search by her kiss and, one would think, by her voice.
CINEMA
NOTHING BUT A MAN. The anguishing reality of how it feels to be inside the skin of an American Negro is forcefully conveyed in the story of a proud but imperfect man (Ivan Dixon) who tries to run away from the whites, his wife and his own color.
MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. A slut's progress from a bawdyhouse to a legal bed takes 20 years, but time passes quickly--thanks to Director Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) and his well-tempered stars, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. All the soulful cliches of young love shimmer with freshness and style in this splashy, sparkling French musical by Director Jacques Demy.
WORLD WITHOUT SUN. In this fascinating, full-color documentary by Oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau (The Silent World), seven oceanauts spend a month in a manfish bowl full fathom five below the surface.
GOLDFINGER. In another exuberant travesty of Ian Fleming's fiction, James Bond (Sean Connery) braves a mad Midas and some hilariously horrible sight gags.
ZORBA THE GREEK. The hell, the horror and the sheer animal delight of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel are served up larger than life by Director Michael Cacoyannis, with Anthony Quinn magnificently cast as the goatish old Greek who butts his way through a series of disasters.
SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. Kim Stanley simultaneously masters the dark arts of bitchery, poignancy and deadly menace in a thriller about a demented psychic who conjures up a kidnaping plot.
BOOKS
Best Reading
PRINCE EUGEN OF SAVOY, by Nicholas Henderson. A polished biography of the Paris-born Savoyard who, after Louis XIV felt he was too frail for military service, defected to become the Habsburgs' top general and Louis' greatest nemesis.
JONATHAN SWIFT, by Nigel Dennis. The horror and tragedy of the God-haunted cleric who was English literature's most powerful ironist, consummately examined by a noted contemporary British satirist.
THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS OF JEAN MACAQUE, by Stuart Cloete. A series of bittersweet fables of love, stylishly narrated by a fictional philandering journalist who believes that "with enough beds, there might be no battlefields."
LOVE AND REVOLUTION, by Max Eastman. The autobiography of a onetime radical editor and longtime happy warrior against repression, be it sexual (he once shared a mistress with Charlie Chaplin) or Communist.
A COVENANT WITH DEATH, by Stephen Becker. A tale of two murder trials told with convincing characterization and uncommon wit behind a smooth facade of Perry Masonry.
FRIEDA LAWRENCE, edited by E. W. Tedlock Jr. In the correspondence and other collected writings of his wife, D. H. Lawrence is pictured as more prig than immoralist, she as a lesser but fascinating Lawrencian heroine.
THE FOUNDING FATHER, by Richard Whalen. The thorough chronicle of how Joseph P. Kennedy, the son of a barkeeper-politician, became a millionaire financier and the father of a President.
THE HORSE KNOWS THE WAY, by John O'Hara. Though he has written so many short stories that they are now debased by the illusion of sameness, O'Hara still gives the sting of fresh work to this, his fourth assemblage within four years.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)
2. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (2)
3. The Man, Wallace (6)
4. The Horse Knows the Way, O'Hara (5)
5. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (7)
6. This Rough Magic, Stewart (4)
7. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (3)
8. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre
9. Julian, Vidal (8)
10. Armageddon, Uris (9)
NONFICTION
1. Markings, Hammarskjoeld (1)
2. Reminiscences, MacArthur (2)
3. The Italians, Barzini (3)
4. The Kennedy Years, The New York Times and Viking Press (5)
5. The Founding Father, Whalen
6. My Autobiography, Chaplin (4)
7. Life with Picasso, Gilot and Lake (8)
8. The Words, Sartre (7)
9. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (6)
10. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (10)
*All times E.S.T.
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