Wednesday, June 30

WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.).* This Could Be the Night (MGM, 1957), a singularly crisp, sophisticated comedy in which Jean Simmons plays a schoolteacher who takes a part-time job in a nightclub owned by Paul Douglas and Anthony Franciosa.

THE LUCY-DESI COMEDY HOUR (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The first in a series of eleven reruns of old Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz specials, this one has a guest appearance by Danny Thomas.

ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A critical evaluation of L.B.J. by men close to his four predecessors: Kennedy Biographer James MacGregor Burns, Eisenhower Speechwriter Malcolm Moos, Truman Economist Leon Keyserling, and Roosevelt Brain-Truster Thomas Corcoran.

Friday, July 2

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). "Think Pretty," Fred Astaire's first TV musical comedy, in which he plays the owner of a record company. Repeat.

Saturday, July 3

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The A.A.U. National Track and Field Championships from San Diego. Winners will compete in the U.S.-U.S.S.R. track meet to be televised from Russia via Early Bird satellite on July 31 and Aug. 1.

Sunday, July 4

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Part II of a profile of Songwriter Harold Arlen, including old film clips of Judy Garland singing Arlen's Over the Rainbow and The Man That Got Away.

WORLD WAR I (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Tipperary and All That Jazz"--songs of the home front and battlefield. Repeat.

NBC'S SPORTS IN ACTION (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Highlights of two British sporting events: the Ascot Gold Cup horse race and Wimbledon.

Monday, July 5

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Napoleon Solo and Illya beard George Sanders in a British castle in "The Gazebo in the Maze Affair." Repeat.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Although shadowed by miscasting, Tennessee Williams' 20-year-old family drama is still evocative and haunting--and the best serious play on Broadway.

HALF A SIXPENCE is a pleasant showcase for Tommy Steele, an ingratiating pre-Beatle Beatle. Bright tunes and dances seem brighter when brushed with the Steele charm.

THE ODD COUPLE. Two men breaking out of wedlock find the freedom of regained bachelorhood more agony than ecstasy. Walter Matthau and Art Carney are hilarious as mismatched roommates.

LUV frolics through the mazes and labyrinths of three pseudo-Freudian psyches --all suffering from nothing more than acute self-attention. Anne Jackson, Alan Arkin and Eli Wallach are brilliant.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. In Bill Manhoff's romantic merry-go-round, a neurotic prostitute (Diana Sands) has a priggish book clerk (Alan Alda) running around in sidesplitting circles.

Off Broadway

LIVE LIKE PIGS. Violence erupts when a band of nomads are forced to settle in a housing development in the north of England. British Playwright John Arden makes an auspicious U.S. debut with a boisterous and stunning play.

KRAPP'S LAST TAPE and THE ZOO STORY. In a fifth-anniversary revival of this double bill, Edward Albee's Story is still provocative and dramatic, and Samuel Beckett's Tape has the true ring of a classic.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED. Lesser known Porter tunes sparkle in this frisky revue.

RECORDS

Chamber Music

BARTOK: STRING QUARTETS 1-6 (Columbia; 3 LPs). The Juilliard String Quartet, after many performances of the works and a previous set of recordings, attacks each quartet with consummate skill and understanding. The musicians are warmly expansive in the romantic first quartet (1908), pungently Magyar in the second (1915-17), and harshly abrasive in the ugly, expressionist third (1927) with its abusive hammerings and pluckings, yawling glissandos and jerky rhythms. The strings sing again in the last three quartets, which in spite of some jagged polyphony, frequently dissolve into swaying melody. The result is an album of the finest chamber music of the 20th century.

SYLVIA MARLOWE: HARPSICHORD (Decca). The eminent harpsichordist looks to the future of her archaic instrument by commissioning new pieces by the dozen. Among them are chamber works by Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter, both contrasting the tangy harpsichord with bland woodwinds. Rorem strings together short, romantic "songs without words," while Carter builds a severe, towering structure out of tiny musical blocks. Highlight of the recording is the plangent Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin and Cello by Manuel de Falla.

SCHUBERT TRIO NO. 1 IN B FLAT (Columbia). Never have violin, piano and cello sounded more radiant than when played by the illustrious trio of otherwise solo virtuosos Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin and Leonard Rose. Schubert's music kindles this continuous glow, for it is filled with sunlight, in contrast to the black Winter Journey of the same period, shortly before the composer's death at 31.

BEETHOVEN: SEPTET IN E FLAT MAJOR (Deutsche Grammophon). "I wish it were burned," said Beethoven of his early septet, because he hated to let its popularity overshadow his other works. He would surely set a match to the piece if he could hear this singable, danceable performance by the sonorous strings and woodwinds of the Berlin Philharmonic Octet.

BEETHOVEN: QUARTET IN A MINOR OPUS 132 (RCA Victor). This intricate work was written 25 years after the septet and sounds a world apart, especially in this crisp, exact performance by the Juilliard String Quartet. Technically, the Juilliard is superb; the pianissimo passages, for example, are feather-light and still warm, but the third movement, the "song of thanksgiving offered to the divinity by a convalescent," sounds curiously reserved.

BLOCH: QUINTET FOR PIANO AND STRINGS (Concert-Disc). Best known for his powerful and sensuous Hebraic music (Schelo-mo and Sacred Service), Bloch also wrote other works, like the 1923 quintet, that are not specifically of Jewish inspiration but are also lavishly colored and emotionally evocative. The floating violins of the Fine Arts Quartet properly take precedence in virtuosity, even over the shimmering piano of Frank Glazer.

MOZART: SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS IN D (London). Vladimir Ashkenazy, poetic young Russian pianist, and Malcolm Frager, dynamic American virtuoso, have been friends since Ashkenazy made his American debut in 1958. They have fused their talents in a high-spirited but incisive performance of Mozart's sonata and a warm reading of Schumann's Andante and Variations for Two Pianos, Two Cellos and Horn (with two British cellists and Britain's Barry Tuckwell).

CINEMA

THE COLLECTOR. A psychotic clerk (Terence Stamp) turns from collecting butterflies to capture a vivacious young art student (Samantha Eggar) in Director William Wyler's gripping, if somewhat glamorized, thriller based on the novel by John Fowles.

THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES. While Stuart Whitman and James Fox fly to win the favor of winsome Sarah Miles, this disarming comedy assigns its zanier thrills, spills and laughter to Terry-Thomas, Gert Frobe and Alberto Sordi, all clowning in outrageous but flyable aircraft as competitors in a great London-Paris air race of 1910.

SYMPHONY FOR A MASSACRE. French Director Jacques Deray, smoothly working variations on the themes of The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi, follows five men through a suspenseful million-dollar caper that turns into a deadly game of dishonor among thieves.

LA TIA TULA. A beautiful spinster (Aurora Bautista) is tormented by mixed desire and disgust for her widowed brother-in-law in Spanish Director Miguel Pica-zo's impeccable first film, an essay on the rigors of Castilian-style virginity.

MIRAGE. Amnesia, murder and nuclear secrets spell trouble for Scientist Gregory Peck, though his burdens are lightened considerably by Walter Matthau as a whimsical private eye with no appetite for danger.

CAT BALLOU. Lee Marvin is hilarious twice over as a pair of roguish gunslingers, one to help, one to hinder a way-out Western lass (Jane Fonda) who gives up schoolteaching to become a desperado.

THE ROUNDERS. Two experienced cow-hams, Fonda pere (Henry) and Glenn Ford, deftly spoof the leathery roles they used to play for real as they try to break a stubbornly unbreakable horse.

THE YELLOW ROLLS-ROYCE. Among the luminous bodies who find love, then lose it, during three smooth but shallow intrigues staged in the back seat of a 1930 Phantom II are Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Shirley Mac-Laine, Omar Sharif and Ingrid Bergman.

THE PAWNBROKER. The nightmare world of Spanish Harlem awakens the humanity of a wretched old Jew whose past and present come stingingly to life in the performance of Rod Steiger.

RED DESERT. Director Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film is a provocative, painterly study of alienation in a young wife (Monica Vitti) whose neurosis thrives amidst a 20th century Inferno created by heavy industry in Ravenna.

BOOKS

Best Reading

MISSION IN TORMENT, by John Mecklin. The author, who was USIS chief in Saigon from 1962 to 1964, takes a balanced second look at U.S. policy toward Viet Nam and especially toward the late Ngo Dinh Diem. Mecklin feels that the U.S. measured Diem only by his intransigence, thereby condoning the coup that led to seven more coups.

LADY WU, by Lin Yutang. From the remoteness of 7th century Imperial China, Author Yutang has recalled an empress who was Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one fiery, demonic woman. Clawing her way from obscurity to power, she killed wantonly and hideously; finally on the throne, she became a model ruler.

IS PARIS BURNING? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. The exciting story of the 1944 rescue of Paris from Hitler's vow to dynamite it and from a Communist plot to seize it.

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, by Flannery O'Connor. These last brilliant stories by the late Miss O'Connor give no quarter to pity and seldom, even, to compassion. Instead, they illustrate the author's favorite themes: the bonds between parent and child, between the tyrannical weak and the consuming strong, and between Southerners -- white and Negro --leashed in hatred to each other.

ASSORTED PROSE, by John Updike. A fine collection of essays and reportage on subjects ranging from light verse to Boston's long love-hate affair with Ted Williams.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Ambassador, West (2 last week)

2. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (1)

3. The Source, Michener (4)

4. Hotel, Hailey (3)

5. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (5)

6. Herzog, Bellow (6)

7. The Green Berets, Moore

8. The Flight of the Falcon, Du Maurier (7)

9. Night of Camp David, Knebel (9)

10. A Pillar of Iron, Caldwell (10)

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (2)

2. The Oxford History of the American People, Morison (1)

3. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (8)

4. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (4)

5. The Italians, Barzini (6)

6. The Founding Father, Whalen (3)

7. Queen Victoria, Longford (5)

8. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (9)

9. Modern English Usage, Fowler, revised by Gowers

10. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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