Wednesday, December 8 DANNY THOMAS SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* In what can only be described as a burlesque of burlesque, Shirley Jones sings Powder My Back, Lucille Ball recaptures the role of Tondeleyo in White Cargo, Jerry Lewis satirizes the "Leg of Nations," and so on.

Thursday, December 9

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Happiness is the Peanuts strip, animated.

Friday, December 10

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Thrush orders a bunch of Thrushlet juvenile delinquents to murder Mr. Waverly.

Saturday, December 11

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The National "100" Dirt Track Automobile Championships at Sacramento and the National Invitational Pocket Billiards Classic at Las Vegas.

NBC SPORTS IN ACTION (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). The National Parachuting Championships at Orange, Mass.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Bells Are Ringing, MGM's 1960 attempt to recapture the Broadway hit. They missed, but Jule Styne's score is still fine and Judy Holliday is her marvelously memorable self.

Sunday, December 12

DIRECTIONS '66 (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). The history of the worker-priest movement in France.

HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m. nationwide; WNBC-TV in New York, 3:30-4:30 p.m.). Burr Tilstrom and his Kuklapolitans host Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas opera, Amah] and the Night Visitors.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Hollywood's version of The Story of Ruth (which varies a bit from the King James Version) is not bad by Bible-film standards. Peggy Wood goest whither, and Elana Eden goes with her.

Tuesday, December 14

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERT (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Leonard Bernstein conducts a musical illustration of his discussion of "The Sound of an Orchestra."

THEATER On Broadway

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU has been restored to Broadway with loving care and craft by the gifted APA repertory company. The comic zaniness of the Sycamore family is a delight, and an unforeseen bonus is the tender re-creation of the '30s as a golden age of moneyless innocence.

MARCEL MARCEAU is a stylish musician of motion, an exciting architect of space, an eloquent poet of silence. He is the panto mimic accountant of the laughably saddening costs of being human, with the knowledge that no matter how funny the pratfall, the heart is where the hurt is.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN is an eye-pleasing spectacle, although it fails to provide dramatic stimulation. Christopher Plummer gives theatrical dimension to Conquistador Pizarro, who cannot achieve peace of mind though he conquers the Inca emperor and gains his gold.

GENERATION. Old Trooper Henry Fonda finds himself bucking the winds of youth and anticonformity when he visits his newly wed daughter and son-in-law. Their Greenwich Village loft is already a fortress of individualism and, if they get their way, will soon be a delivery room for their at-any-moment baby. They get their way. The audience gets the laughs.

HALF A SIXPENCE, a freshly minted musical, is Performer Tommy Steele's contribution to the British balance of payments and the Broadway entertainment quotient.

THE ODD COUPLE. Scarred on the battlefield of marriage, two husbands try to find peace and comfort in an all-male stronghold. After some sidesplitting domestic misadventures, they decide to go back into the marital fray.

LUV. Suburban Sartre and soap-opera sensibilities are the springs from which three moderns drink in Murray Schisgal's hilarious satire on the chatter of Freudian analysis and the jargon of the theater of the absurd.

Off Broadway

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE looks into the home and mind of a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys self and family rather than lose a beloved niece to another man.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED. The witty and urbane talent of the tunemaster is shown to full advantage in this sprightly revue of his lesser-known songs.

RECORDS

Orchestral

LEONARD BERNSTEIN CONDUCTS MUSIC OF OUR TIME (Columbia). Hungarian-born GyOergy Ligeti has passed beyond serial music to a new textural approach--music so dense that the individual voices are absorbed into the whole. His Atmospheres, written on 87 staves, almost physically suggests a lowering sky full of shifting clouds. Bernstein's other choices lean heavily toward "aleatory," or chance, music, largely composed on the spot by the New York Philharmonic. For his Out of "Last Pieces," for example, Aleatory Composer Morton Feldman provides graph paper that indicates how often each musician should play, but not at what pitch or rhythm. Cats and other sensitive but untrained listeners should leave the room before this recording is played.

SCHUBERT: THE SYMPHONIES AND THE ITALIAN OVERTURES (5 LPs; RCA Victor). A protege of the late Sir Thomas Beecham, Australian-born Denis Vaughan has been conducting for only eleven years but has nevertheless produced lyrical and lilting performances of the eight symphonies (with the Orchestra of Naples). He has also boldly finished the "Unfinished," providing the orchestration for the missing third movement based on a piano sketch for it by Schubert. Vaughan's Scherzo is vigorous and exciting, but rings too few changes on its bold, bright main theme and ends rather abruptly, without achieving the glory promised at the beginning.

MOZART: COMPLETE DANCES AND MARCHES: VOL. 2 (London). Mozart loved to dance and wrote many of the hit tunes for the Viennese balls of the 1780s: German dances that were forerunners of the waltz; contredanses, which were patterned affairs for the whole company; and courtly minuets a deux, doomed to disappear with the French Revolution. Willi Boskovsky and the sprightly Vienna Mozart Ensemble, members of the Vienna Philharmonic, will eventually record all the dances and marches. The second in the series is a good sampler.

STRAVINSKY: ORPHEUS and APOLLO (Columbia). The flashy colors of Fire Bird, Petrouchka and Le Sacre du Printemps have been dazzlingly displayed over and over during what Stravinsky calls "a half-century of destructive popularity." Seldom heard are these later, paler ballets, both successfully choreographed by George Balanchine. The composer conducts glistening, transparent performances of Orpheus with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and of Apollo, written for strings alone, with the Columbia Symphony.

CINEMA

SANDS OF THE KALAHARI. The makers of Zulu find lively if conventional excitement in the plight of five marooned men, led by Stuart Whitman, and one venturesome woman (Susannah York) who endure heat, hunger and sexual desire after a plane crash in the African desert.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. A betrayed wife (Giulietta Masina) lets her mind wander off to a far-out Freudian three-ring circus conjured up by Italy's Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), whose effects are breathtaking to behold.

THE LEATHER BOYS. Director Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File) revs up Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton for this exuberant British drama about a teen-age harridan whose husband prefers his homosexual motorcycling mate to home and hearth.

NEVER TOO LATE. Unplanned parenthood creates problems for Maureen O'Sullivan and Paul Ford, who repeat their Broadway roles as if the jokes about middle-aged love in bloom were new.

KING RAT. The struggle for survival in a Japanese prison camp spells prosperity for an unscrupulous G.I. conman (George Segal) in Writer-Director Bryan Forbes's brutal, brilliant drama, based on the novel by James Clavell.

REPULSION. In London, gentlemen callers seldom survive their yen for a deadly blonde psychopath (Catherine Deneuve) whose inch-by-inch descent into madness is unreeled with monstrous art by Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water).

THE HILL. A sandy pyramid separates the men from the boys at a British army stockade in North Africa where Sean Connery, as a bedeviled prisoner, proves his mettle without benefit of Bond.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Some of Kennedy's advisers stood nearer the President, but none was better equipped than Harvard Historian Schlesinger to pay public respect to his memory. Perceptive as history and vivid as memoir, this--despite its touches of partisanship--is the most balanced assessment of the Kennedy years yet.

THE LOCKWOOD CONCERN, by John O'Hara. Another report from the O'Hara country of eastern Pennsylvania, this one the story of George Lockwood, whose "concern" is to become a gentleman--a concern which has turned into an O'Hara obsession and, consequently, is a bit boring.

THE PEACEMAKERS, by Richard B. Morris. Historians have traditionally assumed that France was the loyal friend of American independence. Not so, says Historian Morris in this exhaustive study of the political maneuvers that led up to the Peace of Paris (1783). The Bourbon monarchy tried to scuttle the upstart republic, but the attempt was averted at the peace table by three shrewd Yankee leaders (Jay, Franklin and Adams) who played a bad hand so skillfully that they won the better part of the pot.

THE MAIAS, by Ec,a de Queiroz. The greatness of Ec,a de Queiroz (1845-1900) has been almost completely concealed from the English-reading world by the mere fact that he wrote in Portuguese. Happily, his stature is at last glimpsed in this handsome translation of a massive satire that anatomized Portugal's pathetic aristocracy and stands today, against any standards, as a major 19th century novel.

THE SEA YEARS, by Jerry Allen. Everybody knows that Joseph Conrad spent his youth before the mast and his middle years composing some of the finest sea stories in the language. What nobody knew, until Author Allen documented it in this sober but fascinating monograph, is that Conrad's stories in many instances are fact-for-fact, act-for-act transcriptions of the hairy adventures of his youth.

THE MAN WHO ROBBED THE ROBBER BARONS, by Andy Logan. The shoddy story of Colonel William d'Alton Mann, a courtly Manhattan publisher who looked like Santa Claus but carried a sackful of hush money, is told with skill and glee.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, by Peter Matthiessen. In this violent, chaotic and sometimes profoundly beautiful story of an Amazonian adventure, a soldier of misfortune returns to the womb of nature and there, in anguish and ecstasy, achieves a religious rebirth.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Those Who Love, Stone (3)

3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (4)

4. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (2)

5. Hotel, Hailey (5)

6. The Honey Badger, Ruark (6) 7. The Rabbi, Gordon (8)

8. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (7)

9. The Green Berets, Moore

10. Thomas, Mydans (9)

NONFICTION

1. Kennedy, Sorensen (1)

2. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (4)

3. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (2)

4. Games People Play, Berne (5)

5. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (6)

6. Intern, Doctor X (3)

7. The Making of the President, 1964, White (7)

8. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy

9. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (10)

10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (9)

*All times E.S.T.

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