Gemini 6, if launched on schedule Monday, Oct. 25, will be exhaustively covered on all three networks.

Wednesday, October 20

HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* Eagle in a Cage stars Trevor Howard as Napoleon in exile on St. Helena.

MY NAME IS BARBRA (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A repeat of Barbra Streisand's Emmy-winning show. From Mother Goose Park to Bergdorf Goodman in song.

I SPY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Eartha Kitt helps Robert Gulp and Bill Cosby to break up a Hong Kong narcotics ring.

Thursday, October 21

TRIALS OF O'BRIEN (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). O'Brien is involved in the case of a woman who is being tried a second time for the murder of her husband.

Friday, October 22

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). In "The Re-Collectors Affair" Solo and Illya track down four Nazis attempting to make a profit out of stolen art.

Saturday, October 23

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The National Water Ski Kite-Flying championships in Austin, Texas, share the bill with the Charlotte, N.C., National "400" Stock Car championships.

ABC SCOPE (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m. in the New York area, nationally 10:30-11 p.m.). "The Men Around L.B.J." Aides Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, Lawrence O'Brien and others are interviewed.

GET SMART! (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). In "Washington 4, Indians 3," intrepid Agent Maxwell Smart is sent to dissuade a band of Indians intent on getting their country back by use of a secret weapon.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Stalag 17, the 1953 prisoner-of-war movie to end all prisoner-of-war movies. William Holden won an Academy Award for this one.

Sunday, October 24

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Victor Borge is host, and the guests are Joan Sutherland, Benny Goodman and Ballet Dancer Jacques D'Amboise.

THEATER

The new season is under way, but so far only one Broadway production (Generation) warrants more than desultory interest. The best of the rest are holdovers.

On Broadway

GENERATION. Playwright William Goodhart measures the distance between gen erations in a comedy imbued with fond regard for the humor implicit in human nature. In one of his ablest performances, Henry Fonda not only gives body to a role but substance to a man.

HALF A SIXPENCE and one Tommy Steele stir up a light, bright froth of song and dance.

THE ODD COUPLE. On leave from unhappy marriages, Walter Matthau and Paul Dooley try to set up a masculine menage a deux; their farcical failure makes for highly successful comedy.

LUV. Satirist Murray Schisgal pokes at the self-seriousness of a society and theater weaned on analysis and fed by Freud.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Alan Alda is an "author" (i.e., book clerk) and Diana Sands a "model" (i.e., prostitute) in this ironic version of the mating game.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Sholom Aleichem's story of a Russian village in 1905 becomes a lively musical with Luther Adler as Tevye, a dairyman who has wit, compassion, and five daughters.

Off Broadway

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Arthur Miller's near-tragedy tells of a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys himself and his family by feeding his incestuous desires and jealousies.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER owes little to Gibbon and much to Cole, whose lesser-known songs add life to a highly camp revue.

RECORDS

Opera

MIRELLA FRENI: OPERATIC ARIAS (Angel).

The 30-year-old Italian singer, who made her debut this season at the Metropolitan Opera in La Boheme, shows why she drew rave notices, and tears. She is meltingly tender--yet strong--as Liu in Puccini's Turandot, and she also gives promise of a glittering future as a coloratura soprano with her recording of Violetta's soliloquy at the end of the first act of Traviata.

VERDI: IL TROVATORE (Angel; 3 LPs).

Thomas Schippers leads an authoritative performance dominated by two swaggering, iron-voiced adversaries, Tenor Franco Corelli as II Trovatore and Baritone Robert Merrill as the count. Soprano Gabriella Tucci, the object of their affections, has to work hard to keep up with such powerful company, but Mezzo Giulietta Simionato as Azucena is both mellifluous and moving. Tucci does not equal Leontyne Price as Leonore nor does Merrill sing with the finesse of Leonard Warren, who plays the count with Price on a five-year-old RCA Victor album.

VERDI: LUISA MILLER (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). The plot, drawn from Friedrich Schiller, hinges on the conflict between true love and caste taboos. Luisa (soprano Anna Moffo) is a commoner and her lover (Tenor Carlo Bergonzi) is the son of a count. The music is early Verdi. It preceded Il Trovatore and La Traviata by four years, and though it opens a bit stiffly, by the last act it nearly matches the later works in romantic fervor and melodic beauty. Until now, Luisa has seldom been heard outside Italy, but it should be, if it can be performed with the spirit and style of this first-rate cast, including Basses Giorgio Tozzi and Ezio Flagello, with Fausto Cleva conducting.

MOZART: THE MAGIC FLUTE (Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). Karl Boehm conducts the Berlin Philharmonic and some fine singers: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, Fritz Wunderlich as Tamino, Evelyn Lear as Pamina, the powerful basso profundo Franz Crass as Sarastro. But the newest Flute follows by one toot a recording by Otto Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra (Angel) that in many ways is more magical. Most of Klemperer's leading singers are on a par with those in the new set, and in Lucia Popp he has a stellar Queen of the Night, a role in which Boehm's choice, Roberta Peters, lacks luster.

CINEMA

REPULSION. Poland's Writer-Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water) proves himself a master of menace in the case study of a fragile French psychopath (Catherine Deneuve) who works by day in a London beauty salon, spends her off-hours immersed in sexual fantasies and gruesome deeds.

THE RAILROAD MAN. Made in 1956, this minor drama owes its vitality to a major talent, Director Pietro Germi (Divorce-Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned), who also takes on the leading role as a hell-for-leather railroad engineer brought to a dead end by family problems.

TO DIE IN MADRID. Such narrators as John Gielgud and Irene Worth add eloquent words to rare newsreel footage assembled by French Producer-Director Frederic Rossif, who reshapes Spain's savage civil war of 1936-1939 into a powerful work of art.

DARLING. Julie Christie's stunning presence enhances this ironic tale of a jet-set playgirl who finds that the road to ruin leads straight to the top.

KING AND COUNTRY. Pity and terror are evoked by Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) and by Actor Tom Courtenay as a baffled army deserter en route to his execution during World War I.

HELP! The Beatles--romping through poison gas, trap doors, flamethrowers and Buckingham Palace in a custom-made comedy that is long on sight gags, short on spontaneity, but just funny enough to keep the legend alive for another season. THE MOMENT OF TRUTH. With Spain's Matador Miguel Mateo as the hero driven by tragic economic necessity, Italian Director Francesco Rosi rues the lot of a great bullfighter in a film of brutal and unnerving beauty.

RAPTURE. In an astonishingly subtle performance, Patricia Gozzi (the disturbing nymphet of Sundays and Cybele) plays a lonely, imaginative girl with a fixation for a handsome criminal (Dean Stockwell). The girl's embittered father (Melvyn Douglas) and a slatternly servant (Gunnel Lindblom) agree to harbor the fugitive for reasons of their own.

THE IPCRESS FILE. An insubordinate British secret agent (Michael Caine) stumbles through bureaucratic red tape into some no-nonsense adventures that often seem pointedly anti-Bond.

SHIP OF FOOLS. Grand Hotel afloat, with Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner expertly rocking Katherine Anne Porter's boat.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE VINLAND MAP AND THE TARTAR RELATION, by Thomas E. Marston, R. A. Skelton, George D. Painter. The circumstances surrounding the recent discovery of the only known pre-Columbus map of the New World lands and the painstaking research to authenticate the faded document are chronicled in this scholarly and expensive ($15) volume. But the reproduction of the 1440 map alone is worth the price; Europe is as large as Africa and North America is a mere island--lopped off a little west of Hudson Bay.

KENNEDY, by Theodore C. Sorensen.

These reminiscences by Kennedy's chief speechwriter are too long (350,000 words) and too ponderous, but they offer occasional fascinating closeups of the late President as seen by an ardent admirer.

THE SILENT SKY, by Allan W. Eckert.

The author, who earlier wrote The Great Auk, laments the fate of the passenger pigeon, whose species numbered in the millions before man trapped, bludgeoned and shot the bird into extinction.

ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND, by the Rev. C. L. Dodgson. The Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, Dormouse and Ugly Duchess may be absent in the original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but this charming facsimile of the preliminary manuscript is laced with Dodgson's (nom de plume: Lewis Carroll) own penmanship and fanciful, spidery sketches of White Rabbit, Mock Turtle and Alice as he first conceived them.

THE JOB HUNTER, by Allen R. Dodd Jr.

Every career man's secret fear nightmarishly materializes in the ordeal of one Manhattan executive, abruptly ousted from his ad agency berth.

REPORTED TO BE ALIVE, by Grant Wolfkill with Jerry A. Rose. Prisoner-of-war horrors are only the setting for NBC Cameraman Wolfkill's personal account of his 15-month imprisonment by the Communist Pathet Lao. The real story lies in the details of a human being's contest with himself and his sanity while at the mercy of the merciless.

AFFAIRS AT STATE, by Henry Serrano Villard. From his vantage of 34 years in the U.S. diplomatic corps, retiring Ambassador Villard measures the current effectiveness of the Foreign Service and finds it not only wanting but crippled.

THE AMERICANS: THE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE, by Daniel J. Boorstin. In booming pre-Civil War America, ingenuity, speed, and a belief in the future gave the settlers their grip on the vast land, and Historian Boorstin brings the period to life in a masterful blend of statistics and steamboat races.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (3)

3. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (2)

4. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (4)

5. The Green Berets, Moore (6)

6. Hotel, Hailey (5)

7. The Rabbi, Gordon (10)

8. Thomas, Mydans (8)

9. The Looking Glass War, le Carre (7)

10. The Honey Badger, Ruark

NONFICTION

1. The Making of the President, 1964, White (1)

2. Kennedy, Sorensen (4)

3. Intern, Doctor X (2)

4. Games People Play, Berne (6)

5. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (3)

6. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar

7. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (7)

8. My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, Lincoln (5)

9. Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown (9)

10. Never Call Retreat, Catton (8)

*All times E.D.T.

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