TELEVISION
Wednesday, January 10
THE AVENGERS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.)* Charging into the program lineup, those English invincibles, John (Patrick Macnee) Steed and Emma (Diana Rigg) Peel, meet the inventor of a shrinking machine and wind up "livin' dolls" during "Mission: Highly Improbable."
Thursday, January 11
GREAT EXPLORATIONS: THE TRAIL OF STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). John Glenn and a 33-man safari trek 1,000 miles through Africa to re-create Journalist Henry Stanley's search for Dr. David Livingstone 100 years ago.
CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov in Topkapi (1964).
Friday, January 12
THE HOLLYWOOD SQUARES (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). A nighttime version of the daytime celebrity game, with Peter Marshall hosting a guest panel made up of Raymond Burr, Edie Adams, Milton Berle, Nanette Fabray, Abby Dalton, Buddy Hackett and Morey Amsterdam. Premiere.
PROJECTIONS '68 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "One Crisis Leads to Another." Chet Huntley moderates as eight NBC News correspondents review 1967 and look ahead to 1968.
Saturday, January 13
BING CROSBY PRO-AM GOLF TOURNAMENT (ABC, 6-7:30 p.m.). The third round of the $104,500 tourney from Pebble Beach Country Club, Calif. Fourth round tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:45 p.m.). Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper in Saratoga Trunk (1946).
Sunday, January 14
ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield does the answering.
SUPER BOWL (CBS, 3 p.m. to conclusion). The champions of the N.F.L. v. the champions of the A.F.L., with a payoff differential of $15,000 against $7,500 per man riding on the outcome. Live from Miami.
ANIMAL SECRETS (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). In "Born to Be Free," Dr. Loren Eiseley examines the well-regulated societies of ants, wasps, monkeys and birds, with their rigorous pecking orders, and compares them with the often chaotic but infinitely freer society of man.
Monday, January 15
THE DANNY THOMAS HOUR (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Bobby Darin, Dean Stockwell, Lloyd Nolan and Sugar Ray Robinson in "The Cage," a play about convicts plotting escape from a minimum-security prison.
Tuesday, January 16
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Gene Kelly in a part cartoon musical version of the giant-killing classic. Repeat.
CBS NEWS HOUR (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Why do people smoke and why don't they quit are some of the questions posed by Reporters Mike Wallace and Joseph Benti in "National Smoking Test."
NET PLAYHOUSE (Shown on Fridays). Dustin [The Graduate] Hoffman in Ronald Ribman's The Journey of the Fifth Horse, which won the Obie as the best Off-Broadway play of 1965-66. Repeat.
NET FESTIVAL. "Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe." John Malcolm Brinnin, Thomas' biographer, narrates a portrait of the Welsh poet in still photographs, recorded excerpts from Thomas' works and interviews with friends.
THEATER
On Broadway
HOW TO BE A JEWISH MOTHER culls some of the feebler witticisms from Dan Greenburg's fitfully satiric guidebook and further dilutes them with a few primitive racial cliches. Veteran Comedienne Molly Picon clucks and coos authentically, but Bubi, her baby, is, of all people, hulking Negro Comic Godfrey Cambridge wearing little-boy clothes (brought in, he says, because "there aren't too many Negro theater parties"). Some things in the book did strike home, yet Seymour Vall's two-character revue is nothing but the schlock of recognition.
THE SHOWOFF. A North Philadelphia family is forced to change gears when a monkey wrench, in the form of a loudmouth son-in-law (Clayton Corzatte), is thrown into the domestic proceedings. Helen Hayes leads the APA repertory company in a skillful revival of George Kelly's 43-year-old comedy.
PANTAGLEIZE is the creation of Belgian Playwright Michel de Ghelderode and a "lunar individual" to whom a funny thing happens on the way to his destiny. In a visually impressive production by the APA repertory company, Ellis Rabb plays the innocent who just happens to be there when a revolution is looking for a leader.
EVERYTHING IN THE GARDEN is Edward Albee's version of the wicked world of U.S. suburbia. When the little woman (Barbara Bel Geddes) finds she needs more money, she goes to work on the side as a, well, you know, a lady of pleasure. Hubby (Barry Nelson) adjusts quickly when he finds out all the girls at the country club are doing it.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD and, even while living, they weren't too sure who they were, why they were alive or why they were summoned to Elsinore. Tom Stoppard's work is both witty and wise, drawing its humor from the device of looking at the events around Hamlet through the eyes of the addled house guests, and its humanity from the universality of a situation in which men cannot understand the orders handed them by fate.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a comedy of terrors, tickling the funny bone with the feather of the absurd while scratching away at the skin with the razor edge of truth.
Off Broadway
IPHIGENIA IN AULIS. Euripides' parable of disastrous ambition is charged with timeless emotion, and Director Michael Cacoyannis keeps this production in swirling, stylized motion. Greek Actress Irene Papas brings to her role of Clytemnestra a smoldering tension that erupts in a cry expressing the pain of a woman whose husband destroys their daughter for his own ends.
RECORDS
Pop
DISRAELI GEARS (ATCO Records). This new music group, Cream, serves up a fancy dish of hard rock topped off with choice, albeit bittersweet, lyrics. Drums whip up a froth of steady background rhythms, while the guitars and vocals tread a steady path through the blues of commentary on the human condition.
STRANGE DAYS (Elektra). The Doors have reached that point in fame at which they can now simultaneously have police problems in New Haven, Conn., appear in Vogue, and be praised for this album. Some high points: Moonlight Drive and My Eyes Have Seen You have a rare quality of quiet sensuality, while Strange Days and Unhappy Girl tell of alienation and aloneness with cool emotion.
SMILEY SMILE (Brother Records). The Beach Boys have stashed their surfboards on the shifting sands of musical tastes, ready to embark on a completely new trip: the softly psychedelic sound. And this album marks their initial crossing of the musical bars with such tightly harmonized tunes as Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains.
PROCOL HARUM (Deram). The world turned on earlier this year to the scorching white light of the Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale, which now kicks off their first album. The rest consists mainly of vocal narratives backed by heavy drums and rolling piano incantations. A Christmas Camel, aglitter with intricate imagery, is a fast-paced contender but certainly no successor to Pale's quiet, soft-spoken accounting of a young man's acid test.
RELEASE ME (Parrot). For those skeptics who felt that Engelbert Humperdinck was really Frankie Laine reincarnated with a Jack Jones style, this first album with "Humph's" photo plus twelve pleasant tunes should dispel all doubts. As background for his rich, true voice, guitars rollick in Ten Guitars, strum slick country-western in There Goes My Everything, tighten up for a touch of Tijuana brassery in Talking Love, turn to mellow violins for Release Me.
ClNEMA
DR. DOLITTLE. Hugh Lofting's children's classic about a pleasingly plump physician who talks to animals has been transformed into a film about a lean, saturnine ectomorph (Rex Harrison) who treats them with all the intimacy of a Harley Street internist ordering up a set of X rays.
THE STRANGER. Italian Director Luchino Visconti [Rocco and His Brothers] has been fanatically faithful to Albert Camus' fine novel of alienation and despair, even to the point of including a long soliloquy on life, death and the meaninglessness of it all by the hero (Marcello Mastroianni), which mars an otherwise taut, abrasive, powerful film.
IN COLD BLOOD. Richard Brooks has followed Truman Capote's harrowing anatomization of a multiple murder in Kansas with remarkable fidelity, and the performances of the unknown actors who portray the killers (Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock, Robert Blake as Perry Smith) lift the film to near brilliance.
THE GRADUATE. A fine cast (Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross) and Director Mike Nichols cannot quite rescue this collegiate comedy of amours from a sophomore slump.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Numb is the only thing viewers are likely to feel after this film version of Jacqueline Susann's best-selling novel about three show-biz sickies in Hollywood's nightmare valley.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945, by Harold Macmillan. In the second volume of his memoirs, the former Prime Minister again shows himself as a man of generous mind and literary ability as he tells of his role in England's wartime government.
TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. The paradoxes, inconsistencies and greatness of Tolstoy's life and art are brilliantly re-created in the most thorough biography to date of the Russian literary giant.
WILLIAM MORRIS, HIS LIFE, WORK AND FRIENDS, by Philip Henderson. A biography of the many-talented artist who dedicated his life to restoring beauty and craftsmanship to the working class of 19th century England.
THE FUTURE OF GERMANY, by Karl Jaspers. In a remarkable work of national selfcriticism, the German philosopher appeals to his countrymen to relinquish the dream of a perfectly ordered state and to forge a nation based on individual political and moral responsibility.
JOURNEY INTO THE WHIRLWIND, by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. The horrors of Stalin's slave-labor camps are recalled with painful intensity by a woman who was a prisoner for 17 years.
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ANDRE MAUROIS. The female mind and heart are examined in these 38 tales by the late French partisan in the battle of the sexes.
MEMOIRS: 1925-1950, by George F. Kennan. A leading expert in American-Russian relations, the former diplomat details his career as student and shaper of American foreign policy.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (1 last week)
2. Topaz, Uris (2)
3. Christy, Marshall (4)
4. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (5)
5. The Instrument, O'Hara
6. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (3)
7. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (9)
8. The Chosen, Potok (6)
9. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (10)
10. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean (8)
NONFICTION
1. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2)
2. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (1)
3. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (4)
4. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (3)
5. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (6)
6. Tolstoy, Troyat
7. Incredible Victory, Lord (7)
8. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (9)
9. Report from Iron Mountain, Lewin, ed.
10. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower (5)
-All times E.S.T.
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