TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 8

ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* The 1961 science-fiction thriller that became a prototype for the current TV serial, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starring Joan Fontaine, Walter Pidgeon and Peter Lorre.

THE DANNY KAYE SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Giovanni's Wedding," an original five-act musical based on some of Kaye's earlier sketches about a shy Italian-tailor-come-to-America. Amzie Strickland plays the widow who breaks through Giovanni's shell and gently leads him to the altar.

Thursday, March 9

COLISEUM (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Part 2 of "Moscow State Circus," taped in Minsk, with Dinah Shore as hostess. The seven acts include the famed Dudykchau Teeterboard Tumblers, the Potchernikova Bears, the Berikovi Aerial Rockets.

ABC STAGE 67 (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "Trilogy: The American Boy," three short films that capture the precarious moments of youth entering manhood. Skaterdater, an 18-minute Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner, careens along on a skateboard; The River Boy and Reflections move the viewer from a Louisiana bayou boyhood to life in New York City.

Saturday, March 11

N.I.T. BASKETBALL (CBS, 2-4 p.m.). First round of the 30th annual National Invitation Tournament, live from Madison Square Garden.

SHELL'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF GOLF (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Doug Sanders meets Harold Henning at the Frankfurter Golf Club in Frankfurt am Main. Germany. Gene Sarazen and Jimmy Demaret describe the action.

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Telecast live from Cobo Hall, Detroit, the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships.

Sunday, March 12

DISCOVERY '67 (ABC, 11:30 a.m. to noon). Two children of American embassy officials show what life is like for 150 American youngsters living in Moscow. They tour the American embassy, Red Square and the Kremlin Palace, and they discuss their frequently lonely existence in a strange and sometimes hostile land.

THE VINE (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). Although it was filmed mainly in the Holy Land, this life of Christ achieves a new dimension as it ranges from a shell-wracked battlefield in Viet Nam to a New York City ghetto and a Paris fashion salon.

THE CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). The Boy with Glasses is a sensitive Japanese film about a youngster frightened by the prospect of having to wear glasses and his gradual understanding that a person is not judged by appearance alone.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "At Home, 2001." A startling and hopeful look at what modern technology, architecture and city planning promise for the future.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). "Toscanini: the Maestro Revisited" commemorates the 100th birthday anniversary of Arturo Toscanini with excerpts from symphony telecasts, home movies and comments on his approach to his art by Conductors George Szell, Eugene Ormandy, Erich Leinsdorf and Milton Katims. Harold Schonberg narrates.

ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Haunting (1963), an icy view of the supernatural at work in a New England mansion under investigation by a team of psychic researchers. Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson are the ghost wrestlers.

Tuesday, March 14

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A look at wartime changes in the life of Saigon.

In coming weeks check your educational TV stations for:

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "Schizophrenia--The Shattered Mirror," an hour-long examination of the causes, effects and current treatment for schizophrenia, all covered by leading doctors in the field. The program will focus on a pretty ballet student, recently released from a mental hospital, who walks a tense tightrope as she teeters precariously on the edge of a relapse.

NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "The Battle of Culloden" reconstructs the last battle on British soil, then turns to an examination of its ferocious aftermath.

THEATER

On Broadway

BLACK COMEDY. Borrowing a technique from Chinese theater, Peter Shaffer looses eight characters on a stage that is supposed to be in total darkness. Director John Dexter manipulates them in a fracturingly funny people jam, with Michael Crawford, Geraldine Page and Lynn Redgrave leading the acrobatics.

THE HOMECOMING is both realistic and surreal, on a mythic yet natural plane. And it is most unconventionally conventional. While defying the norms of family and society, the 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.

THE WILD DUCK. Although he was dedicated to candor in human relations, Playwright Henrik Ibsen recognized all too clearly that it is kinder to consider what men wish they could be than to deal with them as they are. In its revival of this 1884 play, the APA troupe performs with more precision than passion.

AT THE DROP OF ANOTHER HAT. Sound a bellow with a whisper, match a maharajah with a mouse, mix wit with whimsy, and you have the combination for an evening of charming entertainment by Flanders and Swann.

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

Off Broadway

THE RIMERS OF ELDRITCH. Lanford Wilson re-creates the mood and the milieu of a ghost mining town in the Midwest. Fluidly paced by Director Michael Kahn, Rimers is really a collection of vignettes that might have come from Winesburg, Ohio, set in the dramatic form of Under Milk Wood.

EH? In Cervantes' classic, a Spanish "knight" fights a windmill--and loses. In Henry Livings' farce, a British nit challenges a boiler--and the boiler loses.

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

RECORDS

Teen Hits

BETWEEN THE BUTTONS (London) catches the roughhewn Rolling Stones playing a little old-fashioned ragtime (Cool, Calm & Collected), but not before getting to business (Let's Spend the Night Together). The jacket photo of the five Stones is blurred at the edges and so is the sound; it keeps unexpectedly sliding a little west of east, without, however, losing a beat. The best song is a dreamy farewell to a mystery girl the Stones call Ruby Tuesday.

IN MY LIFE (Elektra). As the folk scene fades, the folk singers scatter. Judy Collins, one of the best, has not gone far afield to find this mixed bag of songs, some sentimental (including the title number, a sweetmeat from the Beatles), some revolutionary (Marat/Sade). Her songwriters include Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet who makes good use of Collins' dark, low voice and powerful delivery; his Dress Rehearsal Rag is a five-minute saga of a has-been on "the long way down."

MORE OF THE MONKEES (Colgem). Purists may object to the fact that the Monkees were hand-picked and trained to make money instead of deciding how to do it themselves. But the younger rock 'n' roll fans care nothing for the origin of the species. They have bought the second Monkee LP even faster than the first. It is all there: the early-Beatle beat and the simplistic lyrics ("I promise you the sun is going to shine again"). I'm a Believer is the hit of the disk.

GEORGY GIRL (Capitol). The movie's title song was performed by Australia's Seekers, who sing it here along with some of the more lyrical new standards, Yesterday and California Dreamin'. Old-fashioned melodic and gently harmonic pop singing takes on a strong folk twist in such numbers as Well, Well, Well and Turn, Turn, Turn. Sweet, sweet, sweet.

CHUCK BERRY'S GOLDEN HITS (Mercury) is a cram course in the origins of today's pop music, going back to Maybellene and on to Roll Over Beethoven. All were recorded for this album with new arrangements, plenty of old boogie-woogie and the tang of fresh country and western airs. Berry, who virtually invented it, still produces rock 'n' roll that really rocks and rolls.

CINEMA

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. Under the direction of Peter Brook, Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company has successfully transformed Peter Weiss's hit play into a cinematic rowdydow no less frazzle-dazzling than it was on the stage.

DUTCHMAN. Another shocking play effectively turned into a film--this time it is LeRoi Jones's one-act polemic on race hate. Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. enact a brutal brief encounter in the subway that builds danger with the insistence of steel wheels screeching through a curve.

BLOWUP. Actor David Hemmings comes into sharp focus as a pop photog who happens to take a picture of a murder (committed by Vanessa Redgrave) that he blows up, and which in turn blows up his whole mod scene.

LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Yves Montana's performance as an uncorrodible Spanish Civil War veteran is part of the melancholy strength of this Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour) study in desperation.

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

BOOKS

Best Reading

A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Readers get a guided 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. A gifted novelist and linguist, Burgess plays a lively Virgil to the Dublin Dante.

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 often evocative account of how the generation closest to Kennedy in age and aspirations reacted to his death.

THE LAST ONE LEFT, by John MacDonald. A busy, well-populated story of skulduggery at sea, tersely told by the current Big Daddy (53 books) of murder-suspense thrillers.

THE SOLDIER'S ART, by Anthony Powell. The eighth novel in a brilliantly executed marathon series depicting what British life was like between and during the two big wars, carries Narrator-Hero Nick Jenkins into the second year of World War II.

PAPER LION, by George Plimpton. The last long football season gave Americans the Super Bowl and the super book on the pro game. Plimpton's prose is worth a dozen coffee-table books filled with full-color pictures of golden boys in muddy pants.

Best Sellers

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

2. Capable of Honor, Drury (2)

3. The Arrangement, Kazan

4. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (6)

5. The Captain, De Hartog (3)

6. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (4)

7. The Birds Fall Down, West (5)

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

9. The Beautiful Life, Gilbert

10. Tai-Pan, Clavell (7)

NONFICTION

1. Madame Sarah, Skinner (2)

2. Everything But Money, Levenson (1)

3. Paper Lion, Plimpton (3)

4. The Jury Returns, Nizer (5)

5. Games People Play, Berne (4)

6. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, Stearn

7. Rush to Judgment, Lane (6)

8. The Boston Strangler, Frank (7)

9. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (9)

10. Inside South America, Gunther

* All times E.S.T.

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