TELEVISION
Wednesday, October 25 THE KING AND I (ABC, 7:30-10 p.m.).*Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical (1956).
WITH LOVE, SOPHIA (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Marcello Mastroianni, Peter Sellers and Jonathan Winters on a musical visit to Sophia Loren's villa near Rome.
Thursday, October 26
"IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN" (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Halloween is Linus lying in wait for the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown getting rocks in his trick-or-treat bag, and Snoopy flying to foil the Red Baron. Repeat.
DON KNOTTS SPECIAL (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Only yesterday Don Knotts was a 98-lb. weakling. Today he's star of his own musical-comedy show featuring Andy Griffith, Juliet Prowse and Roger Williams.
Friday, October 27
OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Conclusion of Lili (1953), starring Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer and Jean-Pierre Aumont.
JUSTICE FOR ALL? (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Edwin Newman searches for answers among the urban, migrant and rural poor, who have often been denied access to the law. Cameras focus on low-income people in Cleveland, Salinas, Calif., and rural Oklahoma. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and local administrators discuss the problems and possible remedies.
JOHN DAVIDSON AT NOTRE DAME (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Singers John Davidson and Judy Collins, Comedian George Carlin and the Notre Dame Glee Club rally for a homecoming-weekend concert.
Saturday, October 28
NCAA FOOTBALL (ABC, 2:15 p.m.). Old rivals Notre Dame and Michigan State bump heads again at South Bend.
ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5:30 p.m.). Floyd Patterson v. Jerry Quarry in the last of the quarterfinal elimination bouts for boxing's World Heavyweight Championship, live, from Los Angeles.
Sunday, October 29
DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30-12 noon). Host Bill Owen looks into the lives of an Illinois farm family in "The Farm Country (The Middle West)."
ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Correspondents interview U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg.
ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Hud (1963), starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas and Brandon de Wilde.
Monday, October 30
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE (CBS, 9:30 p.m.). Green Bay Packers v. the St. Louis Cardinals at St. Louis.
Tuesday, October 31
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Stranger on the Run, filmed as part of the "World Premiere" series especially for TV, with Henry Fonda, Michael Parks, Anne Baxter, Dan Duryea and Sal Mineo.
WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, WITH HARRY REASONER (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Rose Kennedy conducts a tour of the late President's boyhood home in Brookline, Mass., on "JFK--The Childhood Years: A Memoir for Television by His Mother."
Check your local listings for dates and times of these NET specials:
YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH. "On Face Value" poses the question "What is beauty?" Then, for answers, it leads viewers through beauty salons and New York department stores, to a fake-eyelash specialist and a wrinkle remover.
NET JOURNAL. "Report from Cuba" includes summer-1967 footage of speeches by Castro, a meeting of the radical Organization of Latin American States, nightclubbing in Havana, and a carnival in Santiago, birthplace of the Revolution.
THEATER
On Broadway
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter. In a season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here--dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers.
Off Broadway
SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. Jerry Orbach is jokingly brilliant as he indiscriminately sprays comic vitriol at countless pet hates. Brenda Smiley is a wriggly delight as a lass with a mini-mind and a Proustian remembrance of flings past.
STEPHEN D. is Irish Playwright Hugh Leonard's attempt to dramatize James Joyce's autobiographical tale of Stephen Dedalus. While the richly lyrical Joycean prose pleases the ear, the play is a series of vignettes that fails to bring to life the Artist as a Young Man falling from grace and faith in the fatherland and rising to meet the challenge of the world. While Stephen Joyce (no kin) gives a competent performance as the writer-hero, Stephen remains dead, alas.
RECORDS
Pop
JOAN (Vanguard). Joan Baez, with her arranger Peter Schickele (of P.D.Q. Bach fame), has provided one of the most satisfying recordings of the year. She sings songs by some of today's greatest poet-musicians, most of whom are actually--and inaccurately--typecast as rock singers: McCartney and Lennon's Eleanor Rigby, Paul Simon's Dangling Conversation, and Tim Hardin's If You Were a Carpenter. But a French song, titled La Colombe (The Dove), provides the most haunting impact, for it is a beautifully put plaint against the slaughter of wars.
JUDY GARLAND AT HOME AT THE PALACE (ABC). Judy should be living at home in a mansion reading her fan mail, occasionally demonstrating her still top-rate abilities as a comedienne on television and encouraging the careers of her talented children. But she played the Palace again last summer, and that stint, while exhibiting her still vibrant showmanship, displayed only a shadow of the Garland voice: her famous catch-in-the-throat turned into mere hoarseness, and even her magnificent sense of pitch and timing occasionally failed her. This album is a shockingly honest record of her opening night last July. For those Garland fans who dote on her tragedy, it's full of ghoulish interest. For those who doted on her artistry, it's too sad to play.
JOHN GARY: CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT (RCA Victor). John Gary is a nice crooner who nicely sings nice tunes like The Most Beautiful Girl in the World and I'm Sitting on Top of the World. But those fans who hoped to enjoy sweet singing (a commodity that Gary always supplies) should forget this irritating recording. The high-volume static of a noisy audience destroys whatever atmosphere Gary's voice might have created.
NANCY WILSON: LUSH LIFE (Capitol). This is a great record to play at a cocktail party while talking to someone fascinating about the troubles of being in love. Nancy Wilson has an intrinsic musicality that injects life into essentially bloodless songs like Midnight Sun and You've Changed, an asset that makes the record as listenable as it is unimportant.
PHIL OCHS: PLEASURES OF THE HARBOR (A & M). Ochs's melodic sense is so subservient to his lyrical exhortations that most listeners will feel that he might as well just stand up and talk. There are glimpses of bitter earnestness, such as "The hands that are applauding are slippery with sweat/And saliva is falling from their smiles," but the lyrics are set in a muddy context, ill-enunciated. Nevertheless, Ochs is a talented rebel; his instrumentation is far-out; and his songs defy most conventions, including the three-minute rule: some last nearly nine minutes.
BOBBIE GENTRY: ODE TO BILLY JOE (Capitol). A first collection of songs by the new belle of the pop world. Bobbie's theme song, bursting on the scene in July, made all sorts of promises that this album doesn't keep. The trouble is that Bobbie must improve on Billy, admittedly a masterpiece but not enough of one to cinch the revolution in pop music that it portends. In any case, it is dangerous to underrate Bobbie Gentry, and her initial album might well qualify as a collector's item one day.
ClNEMA
ELVIRA MADIGAN. This elegiac pastorale, directed by Sweden's Bo Widerberg, based on the true story of a cavalry officer's hopeless love affair with a circus tightrope walker, is spare and elegant, with great sensitivity of texture, color and light.
FINNEGANS WAKE. American Producer-Director-Scenarist Mary Ellen Bute, 60, has made a brave effort to translate James Joyce's monumental work, and does remarkably well within the confines of 94 minutes.
OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE. This splendid, moody film takes place in a penumbral pile of Victorian architecture in a London suburb, where seven orphaned children hide the death of their mother and try to maintain their old life with a mixture of love of one another and fear of the outside world.
THE TIGER MAKES OUT. From the brittle material of his off-Broadway play, The Tiger, Murray Schisgal has fashioned a cinematic cornucopia filled with enough laughs to supply an entire season of TV comedies.
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. A cinema-verite-style recounting of the Algerian guerrilla war against the French during the '50s, in which Italian Director Gillo Pontecorvo has used not one frame of actual documentary film footage, yet manages to make the movie explosively real.
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS. A Czech tragicomedy about a World War II railway apprentice who never gets his signals right and a carefree train dispatcher with an express schedule of seductions.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE MANOR, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A popular Yiddish storyteller proves that he also has the insights of a major novelist in this tragicomedy about the changes that wrench a Polish-Jewish family in the late 1800s.
THE SLOW NATIVES, by Thea Astley. The saga of how an Australian family of intellectuals tests its illusions against a philistine society, told by a lively social satirist who may be her country's best woman novelist since Christina Stead.
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. This brilliant, brooding "meditation on history" takes the reader into the heart of the Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion in 1831.
THE PYRAMID, by William Golding. A deceptively simple story of a man's simultaneous rise and fall, absorbingly told by Golding and buttressing his view that original sin is an anthropological fact.
ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION, by Will and Ariel Durant. The final volume of their 38-year labor on the story of civilization once again demonstrates the Durants' immense talent for transmuting tireless research into never tiresome storytelling.
THE HEIR APPARENT, by William V. Shannon, is an often critical, usually dispassionate but at times frankly sympathetic assessment of Bobby and his attempt to bring about a Kennedy Restoration.
A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, by Joyce Carol Gates. Miss Gates is a throwback to Dreiser--a realistic novelist, telling an old-fashioned story about a girl who puts success before virtue.
A HALL OF MIRRORS, by Robert Stone. From an unpromising cast of New Orleans drifters and wastrels, the author has fashioned a vibrant first novel.
THE NEW AMERICAN REVIEW: NUMBER 1, edited by Theodore Solotaroff. An exceptionally good anthology of recent writing --skilled, readable, varied.
O THE CHIMNEYS, by Nelly Sachs. At 75, Nelly Sachs, who lives in Sweden, writes in German, and was rescued from almost total obscurity by a 1966 Nobel Prize, appears as a powerful singer of the fate of the Jewish people.
TWENTY LETTERS TO A FRIEND, by Svetlana Alliluyeva. Stalin's daughter shines a beam of light into dark Kremlin corners as she tells how her friends and family were scythed by purges.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. The Chosen, Potok (1 last week) 2. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (5) 3. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (3) 4. The Arrangement, Kazan (4) 5. Topaz, Uris (8) 6. A Night of Watching, Arnold (7) 7. Night Falls on the City, Gainham (2) 8. An Operational Necessity, Griffin (10) 9. The Eighth Day, Wilder (9) 10. Washington, D.C., Vidal
NONFICTION 1. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2) 2. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (1) 3. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (3) 4. A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church, Kavanaugh (4) 5. Twenty Letters to a Friend, Alliluyeva 6. Incredible Victory, Lord (5) 7. Anyone Can Make a Million, Shulman (6) 8. The Lawyers, Mayer (9) 9. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower (7) 10. Happiness Is a Stock That Doubles in a Year, Cobleigh (8)
*All times E.D.T. through Oct. 28. E.S.T. from then on.
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