THEATER
TELEVISION
Wednesday, August 11 ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "VD: Epidemic!" A report on the resurgence of venereal disease in the U.S. Repeat.
Thursday, August 12
THE DEFENDERS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Robert Redford plays an escaped convict trying to prove his innocence. Repeat.
Friday, August 13
INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY SPECTACULAR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Finals of the weeklong International Beauty Pageant in Long Beach, Calif., with representatives of 50 states and 50 foreign countries competing for the title of Miss International Beauty.
Saturday, August 14
P.G.A. CHAMPIONSHIP (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Third round of the golf classic from the Laurel Valley Country Club in Ligonier, Pa.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Trial, MGM's 1955 film about a university instructor (Glenn Ford) who defends a young boy (Rafael Campos) accused of murder.
Sunday, August 15
P.G.A. CHAMPIONSHIP (ABC, 4-6 p.m.). Final rounds.
NBC SPORTS IN ACTION (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). World Surfing Championships at Waikiki and Kontiki, mountain climbing in the Peruvian Andes. Color.
THE TALL AMERICAN (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A Project-20 portrait of Gary Cooper, including film clips from old movies and home movies. Repeat.
Monday, August 16
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Thrush agents plan brain surgery on Napoleon Solo in "The Green Opal Affair." Repeat.
SUMMER PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Another pilot that never became a series--this one stars Mercedes McCambridge as a college sorority housemother.
Tuesday, August 17
TUESDAY MOVIE SPECIAL (NBC, 8:30-11 p.m.). Never So Few (MGM, 1959) stars Frank Sinatra as a World War II captain in North Burma. To see how M-G-M gets a marble-tub bath scene by Gina Lollobrigida into the film is one reason to see it.
THEATER
Though many marquees go dark in summer, some of the most worthwhile shows of recent seasons stay on to enliven the doldrums. Highlights:
On Broadway
THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Director George Keathley's revival of Tennessee Williams' autobiographical story vividly re-creates the death of a family's dreams and the birth of a writer.
HALF A SIXPENCE, a musical minted from H. G. Wells's Kipps, gets its glitter from Tommy Steele, a toothy grin that sings and dances with the infectious exuberance of a young cockney Chevalier.
THE ODD COUPLE. Walter Matthau and Art Carney, on leave from unhappy marriages, try to set up a menage a deux, and their farcical failure makes hugely successful comedy.
LUV. Murray Schisgal displays three contemporary ids indulging in a slapstick conversational orgy, in the process brilliantly satirizes the playwrights of the absurd.
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. In this screechingly funny comedy, Diana Sands is more panther than puss as a prostitute who unstuffs a stuffy clerk (Alan Alda).
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Zero Mostel gives body to a spirited hit musical derived from Sholom Aleichem's tale of Tevye and his five daughters, their joys and troubles in a czarist Russian village. Mostel will be replaced by Luther Adler Aug. 16.
Off Broadway
LIVE LIKE PIGS. In British Playwright John Arden's shattering drama, the passions and frustrations of a nomadic band in a housing development detonate a series of emotional explosions.
KRAPP'S LAST TAPE, by Samuel Beckett, and THE ZOO STORY, by Edward Albee. Two fledgling classics--one about an old has-been, the other about a young never-will-be--are unsettling and provocative.
VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Arthur Miller's brooding tragedy fuses Greek themes with the story of a Brooklyn longshoreman and his family.
THE ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE. Harold Pinter's opaque one-acters are skilled finger exercises on the theme of dread.
CINEMA
SHIP OF FOOLS. This flashy popular melodrama by Producer-Director Stanley Kramer out of Novelist Katherine Anne Porter's mordant allegory concerns a German vessel bound from Veracruz to Bremerhaven during the early 1930s. Despite the Meaningful Dialogue they have to spout, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner provide fast company for the long haul.
THESE ARE THE DAMNED. Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) unleashes his razzle-dazzle camera techniques in a small science-fiction thriller about a tart (Shirley Anne Field) and a tourist (MacDonald Carey) who stumble onto some nightmarish experiments on the English coast.
THE KNACK. An embattled virgin (Rita Tushingham) fends off three zany British bachelors, millions of sight gags and reels of New Cinema gimmickry in Director Richard Lester's (A Hard Day's Night) version of the New York-London stage hit.
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. True to the spirit of Richard Hughes's classic adventure tale, seven not-so-innocent children put to sea with a scruffy pirate crew led by Anthony Quinn, who finds every tousled head a headache.
THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES. A corps of high-borne comedians (Gert Frobe, Alberto Sordi, Terry-Thomas) barnstorm through a London-Paris air race at the controls of delightful vintage-1910 aircraft--held together by heroism, slapstick and nostalgia.
THE COLLECTOR. In Director William Wyler's grisly but somewhat glamorized treatment of the novel by John Fowles, a lovely art student (Samantha Eggar) wages a war of nerves against a manic lepidopterist (Terence Stamp) who has locked her in a dungeon.
CAT BALLOU. Two no-good gunfighters (both played to perfection by Lee Marvin) brighten a way-out western about a schoolmarm (Jane Fonda) who trades readin' and writin' for a catch-up course in train robbery.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, by Giorgio Bassani. The author was responsible for the posthumous publication of The Leopard, and he has learned much from the master. Bassani's gracefully written novel depicts the elegant, decadent world of a rich Jewish family and its confrontation with Fascism and death.
THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, by John le Carre. The author of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold has written another bleak, absorbing novel about Britain's aging espionage agents, their archaic methods, and their attempts to relive World War II glories in cold war intrigue.
THE MAKEPEACE EXPERIMENT, by Abram Tertz. The pseudonymous author, a Russian satirist who has smuggled out four previous novels, writes a deft parable in which Communist bosses are likened to a village bicycle mechanic who learns to control people with "mental magnetism." With his new powers, the mechanic makes the village government "wither away," with disastrously funny results.
INTERN, by Doctor X. A young doctor's log of his internship in a city hospital is filled with continual, overlapping crises, costly mistakes and occasional triumphs.
MICHAEL FARADAY, by L. Pearce Williams. Faraday (1791-1867) was probably the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived; the first induction of electric current and the first dynamo are among his achievements. Author Williams shows how Faraday's almost limitless intelligence emerges and finally flourishes, with only a Sunday-school education.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. The Source, Michener (1 last week) 2. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (2) 3. The Looking Glass War, le Carre (3) 4. Hotel, Hailey (5) 5. The Ambassador, West (6) 6. The Green Berets, Moore (4) 7. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (7) 8. Night of Camp David, Knebel (8) 9. Herzog, Bellow (10) 10. The Flight of the Falcon, Du Maurier (9) NONFICTION 1. The Making of the President, 1964, White (1) 2. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (2)
3. Markings, Hammarskjold (3) 4. The Oxford History of the American People, Morison (4)
5. Intern, Doctor X (7)
6. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (5)
7. Games People Play, Berne
8. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley
9. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Wolfe (9)
10. How to Be a Jewish Mother, Greenburg
-All times E.D.T.
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