TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 1

BATMAN (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* All of a sudden, it's a fearless foursome when The Green Hornet and Kato join forces with the Dynamic Duo to bring down the villainous Colonel Gumm (Roger Carmel).

I SPY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The race begins in "Get Thee to a Nunnery" when a British intelligence agent (Peter Lawford) known for his chicanery tells Agents Robinson and Scott that he is all set to recover a fortune in World War II contraband from a local convent.

Thursday, March 2

COLISEUM (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Dinah Shore taped two shows on her recent trip to Russia. The first one features the Moscow State Circus, with Popov the clown, the Bubnov aerialists and the Kantemirov daredevil horseback riders.

ABC STAGE 67 (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). In "Rodgers and Hart Today" the old favorites get a contemporary beat from the Mamas and the Papas, the Supremes, Petula Clark, the Doodletown Pipers, Count Basic and his orchestra and Host Bobby Darin.

Saturday, March 4

THE SMITHSONIAN (NBC, 12:30-1 p.m.). "Dem Dry Bones" explains how scientists trace the history of the earth through the study of ancient bones. Repeat.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). When a Communist film producer (J. D. Cannon) alters news films in order to depict U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam as murderers, the I.M. Force is sent on a search and destroy mission.

Sunday, March 5

MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Israel's former Prime Minister David BenGurion.

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). The National A.A.U. Track and Field Championships from Oakland, Calif.

THE CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). O. Henry's short story The Ransom of Red Chief, as done in Russia.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Education in the 21st century is the subject of "The Remarkable Schoolhouse," focusing on some of the many devices that will be on hand to smooth the paths of learning.

SAMUEL GOLDWYN'S "PORGY AND BESS" (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1959), with Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey.

Monday, March 6

BRIGADOON (ABC, 8:30-10 p.m.). A return engagement for that outstanding special, first shown in October: Robert Goulet, Peter Falk, Sally Ann Howes, Edward Villella doing Lerner and Loewe's fairy tale about a Scottish village that comes to life once every century. And may all good programs reappear every 100 days.

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Another gift, this time Hal Holbrook re-creating Samuel Clemens with the same warmth and understanding as he did on Broadway.

Tuesday, March 7

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 8:30-11 p.m.). Marlon Brando in The Ugly American (1963).

CBS REPORTS: "THE HOMOSEXUALS" (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A study of homosexuality as a human condition, and the attitudes people have developed toward it.

THEATER

On Broadway

BLACK COMEDY. What people do, say and discover when suddenly plunged into the dark is the single droll conceit on which Peter Shaffer's convulsively amusing farce is based. An acrobatically agile cast, including Michael Crawford, Geraldine Page and Lynn Redgrave, brings the monkeyshines to a high polish.

THE HOMECOMING is both realistic and surreal, on a mythic yet natural plane, and most unconventionally conventional. While defying the norms of family and society, this domestic drama by British Playwright Harold Pinter is an exercise in instinctual logic. Vivien Merchant and Paul Rogers lead a perfect cast in Peter Hall's pluperfect production.

AT THE DROP OF ANOTHER HAT. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann break into still another diverting ditty, such as that non-classic The Gasman Cometh, or let go with a bit of lopsided logic: "If you put a baby in the bath and it turns red, it's too hot for your elbow."

WALKING HAPPY is the musical version of H. G. Brighouse's near-classic, Hobson's Choice, introducing British Musicomedian Norman Wisdom to Broadway audiences, and a most entertaining acquaintance he is. While the score is pleasantly forgettable, Danny Daniels' choreography is fresh and memorable.

Off Broadway

EH? The hero of Henry Livings' farce is ideologically idiotic. Sample: "I'm satisfactory, all right. Always been satisfactory. All my school reports: satisfactory, satisfactory, satisfactory. 'Satis' meaning enough, 'factory' meaning works. Satisfactory: had enough of work."

AMERICA HURRAH. A most gifted young playwright, Jean-Claude van Itallie, stirs the waters of the contemporary scene to create dramatic whirlpools, investigating three mainstreams of American life in Interview, TV and Motel.

RECORDS

Orchestral

Some sound new investments for the classical music lover have appeared on the market recently. Columbia and London have added low-priced labels--Odyssey and Stereo Treasury--that offer top quality but somewhat older recordings for about $2.50 a record. Capitol has more exciting news. It has succeeded in signing a contract for all Soviet artists and orchestras, and has rushed its technicians to Russia lest any foreign sounds creep in. The label is Melodiya-Angel, and the first issues are excellent.

The imports:

STRAVINSKY: L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT and PROKOFIEV: QUINTET, OPUS 39 (Melodiya-Angel). Written at the end of World War I, Histoire is a clever little musical outrage featuring a demented tango, ragtime gone wrong, a satanic mockery of a Bach chorale, and countless other musical japes in the story of a soldier who sells his soul to the Devil, wins it back and finally loses it again. The Prokofiev is also dramatic, originally composed for a ballet about a circus. The Moscow Chamber Ensemble, led by Gennedy Rozhdestvensky, has just the right touch for both: cool, brusque, almost offhandish virtuosity.

SHOSTAKOVICH: THE EXECUTION OF STEPAN RAZIN and SYMPHONY NO. 9 (Melodiya-Angel). Razin was a 17th century Cossack rake who divided his energies between pillaging the Volga Valley and leading whole cities in uprisings against the Czar. When he was finally captured and executed, his severed head, so goes the legend, continued to shout defiance and inspired further rebellions. Evgeny Evtushenko has put the story in poetry, and Shostakovich here sets the theme to unabashedly patriotic music. Sung in stirring form by Bass Vitaly Gromadsky.

SHOSTAKOVICH: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Melodiya-Angel). The Fifth is Shostakovich's best-known work, part of the repertory of most major orchestras. In the U.S. it has been associated with Leonard Bernstein, who helped to popularize it and who has made a stunningly dramatic recording. Kiril Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic are more lyrical and reflective, so that the first and third movements have special eloquence--emotional search and intellectual despair.

The bargains:

BRAHMS: THE FOUR SYMPHONIES (4 LPs; Stereo Treasury). There are few better buys than this album. Rafael Kubelik leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance that is full of virtues: lustrous, well-balanced orchestral sound, particularly expansive winds, spirited pace. Kubelik's Brahms is never ponderous, nor does he go for the floods and eddies of sound that mar the more Wagnerian interpretations.

HAYDN: SYMPHONIES NOS. 1, 2 and 3 (Odyssey). The late Max Goberman was a protean figure on the New York musical scene. He was pit conductor for West Side Story, and his ambition was to record all 104 symphonies of Haydn. This record is the elegant overture to the unfinished project--a crisp, clear reading that points up Haydn's melodic questions and answers, the asides and one-liners that crowd his scores.

BEETHOVEN: EMPEROR CONCERTO (Odyssey). Walter Gieseking made the recording in London shortly before his death in 1956, and it is a fitting final statement by a major interpreter of Beethoven. Herbert von Karajan conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in a fiery, romantic interpretation of the masterpiece.

CINEMA

LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour) explores the mind of an old-guard Spanish Civil War Communist (Yves Montand), and builds a biography that may be overly literary but is never tedious.

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW. Writer-Director Francis Ford Coppola, 27, exudes energy, freshness and promise in his first major film--a wacky farce about a Little Boy Blue (Peter Kastner) who turns out to be as green as they come when he tries to paint the town red.

BLOWUP. Italy's anatomist of melancholy, Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), moves his cameras to London, where he commences by filming the mod scene with abandon and then, in midflight, abruptly transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. The result is one of the most talked-about and popular films around.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Paul Scofield's magnificent portrayal of Sir Thomas More again graces Robert Bolt's witty, thoughtful play, with some cinematographic dividends added.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE FUTILE LIFE OF PITO PEREZ, by Jose Ruben Romero. A Mexican classic gets its first English translation. Pito Perez is a south-of-the-border Everyman, and his story illuminates the national character of Mexico.

THE LAST ONE LEFT, by John D. MacDonald. Murder at sea, mayhem on land, and skulduggery everywhere in this tautly told story by one of America's masters of suspense.

PAPER LION, by George Plimpton. The author makes his personal dream come true for the reader too; his account of playing as a temporary member of the Detroit Lions pro football team puts every fan on the bench right behind the coaches.

A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Readers are given both a guide and an economy tour of the night life of H. C. Earwicker, mightiest of Irish dreamers, whose nocturnal visions embrace all human history, from the fall of man to Judgment Day. Burgess, a gifted novelist and linguist, plays a lively Virgil to the Dublin Dante.

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. New, idiomatic and closer to the black heart of Celine's comedy, this fresh translation helps readers share the gritty grandeurs and squalors of a Parisian orphan's progress through an underworld of comedy and horror.

THE MAN WHO KNEW KENNEDY, by Vance Bourjaily. The first effort to capture the triumph and tragedy of the Kennedy era in fiction. Bourjaily's flashback-filled book is a sometimes brilliant and always evocative account of how the generation closest to Kennedy in age and aspirations reacted to his death.

Best Sellers FICTION 1. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (1 last week)

2. Capable of Honor, Drury (2)

3. The Captain, De Hartog (5)

4. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (4)

5. The Birds Fall Down, West (3)

6. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (6)

7. Tai-Pan, Clavell (7)

8. Waiting for Winter, O'Hara

9. All in the Family, O'Connor (8)

10. The Fixer, Malamud (9)

NONFICTION 1. Everything But Money, Levenson (1)

2. Madame Sarah, Skinner (2)

3. Paper Lion, Plimpton (3)

4. Games People Play, Berne (5)

5. The Jury Returns, Nizer (4)

6. Rush to Judgment, Lane (6)

7. The Boston Strangler, Frank (7)

8. Random House Dictionary of the English Language (8)

9. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (10) 10. Winston S. Churchill, Churchill (9)

* All times E.S.T.

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