TELEVISION
All three networks will provide live coverage of the Gemini 8 launch scheduled for Tuesday, March 15, and, if all goes as planned, will follow the three-day mission with films of the farthest and fastest walk in history--one and a half times around the world in 2 hr. 40 min.
Thursday, March 10
OPERATION SEA WAR: VIET NAM (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).* Movie Actor Glenn Ford narrates this color documentary on the U.S. Navy's role in Viet Nam.
THE DEAN MARTIN SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis and Shelley Berman are among the guests.
Friday, March 11
BALLET FOR SKEPTICS (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). This special, filmed in Paris, was choreographed by Roland Petit for his wife Zizi Jeanmaire. Yves St. Laurent designed the costumes.
Saturday, March 12
ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The N.C.A.A. Indoor Track and Field Championships in Detroit, plus the National Tourist Trophy Motorcycle Championship in Gardena, Calif.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Movie Director George Stevens has filed a $2,000,000 lawsuit against NBC and Paramount Pictures for this airing of A Place in the Sun, a film that won him an Oscar in 1951. Network continuity cuts and commercial interruptions, says Stevens, constitute a "rape" of the film.
THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Fred Astaire is host, and his visitors include Ethel Merman, Jack Jones and French Mime Marcel Marceau.
Sunday, March 13
ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). ABC News Correspondents Peter Jennings and Bill Sheehan interview Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A report on an experiment begun in 1962 when the Nevada State Prison allowed Synanon, an association of former drug addicts similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, to try to rehabilitate criminals who were not necessarily addicts.
BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Ray Bolger presides over a program devoted to music from motion pictures.
THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Carousel, the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, given a Hollywood spin by Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones.
Monday, March 14
PEYTON PLACE (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). The three-month homicide trial of Rodney Harrington, accused of killing Joe Chernak in an off-the-cuff scuffle, culminates in a verdict.
Tuesday, March 15
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). For Two Lovers, MGM built New Zealand in Culver City, cast Shirley MacLaine as a spinster schoolmarm who has this frigidity problem with men -- like Laurence Harvey and Jack Hawkins. The result is somewhat Metro-Goldwyn-Maori.
CBS REPORTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "I.O.U. $315,000,000,000," a balance sheet on consumer debt.
THEATER
On Broadway
PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! is an honest and lyrical, sentimental and humorous account of a young Irishman's preparations to leave his homeland for America. A uniformly excellent cast is headed by Dubliners Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford, who play the hero's inner and outer selves.
SWEET CHARITY. As a taxi dancer in search of lasting love, Gwen Verdon is Terpsichore's darling and fortune's foil. The choreography by Bob Fosse sizzles, but Neil Simon's book is a burnt-out case.
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. Sunk in mediocrity, trapped in middle life, self-accusing and self-condemned, John Osborne's anti-hero spews out a caustically funny anathema on his world and his fate. In the lead, Nicol Williamson is scaldingly good.
THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE is a shot of dramatic adrenaline. People who demand theatrical tranquilizers had better stay away.
CACTUS FLOWER offers Barry Nelson as a sybaritic dentist who is affair-prone, while Lauren Bacall plays the slightly soured nurse who saves him--then conquers him. Director Abe Burrows keeps this candied love apple dripping with amusement.
Off Broadway
THE MAD SHOW Styled after the sappy smile of Mad magazine's trademark moron Alfred E. Neuman, this revue tickles where it might have stung. But its cast still reaches the funny bone, satirizing everything from soap-flake operas to hi-fi nuts.
HOGAN'S GOAT. The dialogue is blather and brogue, but the issue is William Alfred's unvarnished view of priest and politician campaigning for authority over the Irish electorate in the Brooklyn of 1890.
THE WHITE DEVIL. If John Webster spilled too much blood onstage, he also drenched the boards with passion. His play leaps three centuries with ease and becomes a tragedy of more than blood in this modern-dress revival.
RECORDS
Opera
They will probably never stop recording Carmen, but record companies are increasingly turning to less-known operas. Many of them were box-office hits in their day but have been neglected since, such as Rossini's Mose, which created so much excitement in Naples in 1819 that 40 young women suffered hysterical attacks after hearing it.
BERLIOZ: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TROJANS (2 LPs; Angel). While Wagner was writing the Germanic epic of the Nibelungen, Berlioz turned to the Aeneid for his five-hour opera. The work is a masterpiece of French opera, but because of its length and complexity has seldom been performed and never recorded in full. These selections, with dazzling, brassy passages played by Georges Pretre and the Orchestra of the Paris Opera, seem specially chosen to display the virtuosity of French Soprano Regine Crespin, a singing actress of power and refinement.
STRAUSS: EXCERPTS FROM THE EGYPTIAN HELEN AND SALOME (RCA Victor). The little-known first work is based on a legend that there were two Helens and that the real Helen spent the Trojan War hidden away in Egypt. In this episode, the "Egyptian" Helen sings an intensely lyrical soliloquy about Menelaus' reawakened love for her ("Second bridal night!"). Leontyne Price is in top form as Helen and also as Salome, singing her familiar, lustful aria addressed to the prophet's severed head ("I will kiss thy mouth, Jochanaan!"). With the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.
ROSSINI: MOSE (3 LPs; Philips). Made in 1956 but issued for the first time in the U.S., this is the opera's only recording. Mose is closer in spirit to the oratorios of Handel and Haydn than to Rossini's own sparkling Barber of Seville, though a few light lovely Italian airs occasionally creep into the repertoire of the Egyptians. Basso Nicola Rossi Lemeni, as Moses, sounds too muffled and unfocused to convince anyone to follow him into the Red Sea, but the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro di San Carlo di Napoli play and sing splendidly. Tullio Serafin conducts.
EARLY GERMAN OPERA FROM THE GOOSEMARKET (Angel). Opera in Germany in the early 1700s was dominated by the Italians, except in Hamburg, where a company on Goosemarket Street performed homegrown works such as Handel's Almira, Queen of Castile and The Proud, Fallen and Re-Elevated Croesus, by Reinhard Keiser, one of the most prolific opera composers of his day. A formal dance suite from Almira and several scenes from Croesus, along with excerpts from two other Goosemarket productions, are played by the Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm Brueckner-Rueggeberg conducting.
CINEMA
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Humor and fantasy heighten the impact of this keen-edged Czech tragedy. In a complacent Slovakian village in 1942, a henpecked nobody (Josef Kroner) befriends but ultimately betrays the doomed old Jewess (Ida Kaminska) whose button shop is given to him by the Nazis.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW.
A rare Biblical film, made with nonprofessional actors and a script based wholly on Scripture, this modest, unassuming drama on the life of Christ is by Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.
KING AND COUNTRY. Injustice triumphs in Director Joseph Losey's story about a doomed World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) and the officer (Dirk Bogarde) who fights to save him.
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. Survival seems more urgent than usual when James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and a cynical crew crawl out of a plane crash in the Sahara and try to patch up their differences long enough to jerry-build a one-engined getaway plane from the wreckage.
OTHELLO. This filmed stage production stars Sir Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare's Moor in blackface with inexhaustible virtuosity, though his characterization shifts at times from classic to calypso.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Before and after the Russian Revolution, lovers move through a many-splendored landscape in David Lean's version of Pasternak's classic. Omar Sharif is Zhivago, Julie Christie his Lara.
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. The grey nether world of espionage, in a masterly re-creation by Director Martin Ritt (Hud) with Richard Burton as the disillusioned British agent on a cruelly subtle mission behind the Wall. Oskar Werner is his East German quarry.
BOOKS
Best Reading
AUSTERLITZ, by Claude Manceron. The campaign that Napoleon always regarded as his tactical masterpiece is meticulously reconstructed hour by hour, from inception to final triumph over the combined armies of Austria and Russia.
THE NOWHERE CITY, by Alison Lurie. Because Novelist Lurie can make preposterous characters come alive--or at least breathe a little--her tour of Los Angeles' gaudier unrealities is just, but just, worth the rubberneck fare.
MARQUIS DE SADE, SELECTED LETTERS, edited by Gilbert Lely. From Vincennes prison and the lunatic asylum at Charenton, the Marquis de Sade wrote to his mother-in-law, his wife and his valet hoping that someone would understand him. He remains an enigma whose habit of acting out monstrous fantasies made his name an eponym for the pain that, to some, gives pleasure.
A VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. Sergeant Ennis, protagonist of this mad Burgess novel, is out of step with everyone at the British army garrison on Gibraltar; but better still, everyone is out of step with him.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL, by Kenneth Rexroth. A novel it is not, but it is a novel autobiography of an old bohemian, who describes with much wit and some wisdom the anarchists, pacifists, ragged Utopians and ordinary cranks he encountered during a freewheeling life.
THE MEMOIRS OF FIELD-MARSHAL KEITEL, Chief of the German High Command, 1938-1945, edited by Walter Gorlitz. Completed just before the author was hanged as a war criminal, this memoir by Hitler's top military man gives a fascinating account of the last days of the Wehrmacht as well as a chilling insight into the moral myopia that afflicted the Nazi high command.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)
2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)
3. The Double Image, Maclnnes (3)
4. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (4)
5. The Comedians, Greene (5)
6. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (7)
7. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (6)
8. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (8)
9. Valley of the Dolls, Susann
10. The Rabbi, Gordon (10)
NONFICTION
1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)
2. Kennedy, Sorensen (6)
3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (2)
4. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (3)
5. Games People Play, Berne (4)
6. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (9)
7. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (5)
8. The Last 100 Days, Toland (8)
9. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (7)
10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre
* All times E.S.T.
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