Wednesday, January 24 KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.)* In "Physical Phitness," Art Carney plays host to such sports--and spectators--as Carl Yastrzemski, Joe Garagiola, Roosevelt Grier, Pat O'Brien, George Plimpton and Don Rickles.
LAURA (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Lee Bouvier (Radziwill), Robert Stack, George Sanders, Farley Granger and Arlene Francis star in this Truman Capote TV adaptation, the time for which was pre-empted last week by President Johnson's State of the Union address.
Friday, January 26
FLESH & BLOOD (NBC, 8:30-10:30 p.m.). Arthur Penn produces and directs William Hanley's play, originally scheduled for Broadway last year but bought by NBC for a TV premiere. It's all about a close-knit contemporary American family whose members discover they don't really know each other. Starring Edmond O'Brien, E. G. Marshall, Kim Stanley and Suzanne Pleshette.
Saturday, January 27
1968 HOLLYWOOD STARS OF TOMORROW (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Gene Kelly presides over this 15th annual contest, in which ten starlets compete for the title of "Hollywood Star of Tomorrow." Past winners: Raquel Welch, Sally Field, Carol Lynley, Kim Novak.
Sunday, January 28
ISSUES & ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen is the guest.
THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). For the season's opener, Van Heflin fishes for marlin off Chub Cay in the Bahamas, and Bing Crosby and Phil Harris hunt sand grouse in Tanzania.
THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERTS WITH LEONARD BERNSTEIN (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). "Forever Beethoven!" The first movement of Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, second and third movements of Concerto No. 4 in G Major and the Leonore Overture No. 3, featuring Pianist Joseph Kalichstein.
ANIMAL SECRETS (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). In "The Hostile Environment," Dr. Loren Eiseley shows how the study of animals reacting to various situations can help man adjust to the conditions of outer space.
THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite hosts "New Weapons Against Crime" and discusses gadgets being dreamed up to assist the police, such as voice "prints," electronic sensors, computers and mini-listening devices.
THE ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:45 p.m.). Ship of Fools (1965) with Vivien Leigh, Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer, Lee Marvin, Oskar Werner and George Segal.
Monday, January 29
LUTHER (ABC, 8:30-10 p.m.). John Osborne's 1961 drama of the 16th century monk who started the Reformation comes to TV, starring Robert Shaw as Martin Luther, Robert Morley as the Pope whom he opposed.
Tuesday, January 30
CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Inaugural Evening at Ford's Theater." The gala reopening of Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., which has not seen a performance since April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was shot there during a presentation of Our American Cousin. The invited audience will see Helen Hayes, Henry Fonda, Fredric March, Robert Ryan, Julie Harris, Odetta, Andy Williams, Harry Belafonte and others in performances keyed to Lincoln's love of the theater and the music of his day.
NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). Dame Sybil Thorndike in A Passage to India, based on E. M. Forster's novel about Englishmen in India in the 1920s.
NET FESTIVAL. Honored as the best cultural film at the seventh Monte Carlo International TV Festival, Double Concerto focuses on Pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim preparing for and performing Mozart's Concerto in E Flat for Two Pianos.
THEATER
On Broadway
BEFORE YOU GO. The way of a modern man with a modern maid is surpassing strange, but Playwright Lawrence Holofcener has got it onstage in a wry, perceptive and tender two-character comedy. Marian Seldes and Gene Troobnick are unerringly funny and vulnerable as a contemporary couple fused not so much by the chemistry of love as by mutual fear that they may be cultural dropouts.
STAIRCASE is a play about an odd couple who play the games people play. Eli Wallach and Milo O'Shea are matchlessly mated to their roles as a pair of aging homosexual barbers, but their fine acting cannot inject Charles Dyer's (Rattle of a Simple Man) domestic drama with enough voltage to keep it alive for two acts.
EXIT THE KING. Whatever comic spirit Eugene lonesco's play on death contained has been snuffed out in a static, slow production by the APA. Richard Eaton as King Berenger at the moment of facing death is a remnant-counter Lear, lacking in the needed regal authority, wrapped in tattered melancholy.
THE SHOWOFF. Into a middle-middle-class Philadelphia family comes a two-bit backslapping braggart who succeeds in captivating the young daughter and outraging the rest of the family. Helen Hayes has found her best role since Queen Victoria as the carping, cajoling mother of the family in the APA revival of George Kelly's 43-year-old comedy.
PANTAGLEIZE is the third APA offering. Belgian Playwright Michel de Ghelderode viewed history with an antic despair that spills over into this weirdly, wildly inventive play. Ellis Rabb plays the innocent Pantagleize, a puppet on the end of fate's string.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. Harold Pinter taps the adrenal flow of the audience's anxiety and guilt as he unleashes a pair of new roomers on the sole boarder of a rooming house at an English seaside resort.
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.
Off Broadway
SONG OF THE LUSITANIAN BOGEY marks the highly propitious debut of a fresh repertory group, the Negro Ensemble Com pany. The Peter Weiss play is an atrabilious tract on the evils of Portuguese colonialism, but the supple cast turns it into a mimetic dance of woe and joy.
IPHIGENIA IN AULIS. The man who sacrifices his personal life and family concerns for the sake of his public career is no recent phenomenon. In a play written 2,400 years ago, Euripedes, the most psychologically oriented of the classical tragedians, inspects the poisoned crop that Agamemnon sowed and reaped when his addled ambitions to win the Trojan War brought him to offer the life of his own daughter. Michael Cacoyannis' adept direction gives an ancient tale modern force.
CINEMA
SMASHING TIME. En route to fame and fortune in swinging London, Rita Tushing-ham and Lynn Redgrave mug their way through mud, sprayed paint and hurled pies amid a mod bedlam that is more goofy than spoofy.
THE STRANGER. Italian Director Luchino Visconti's film follows the action of Albert Camus' fine novel with hardly a comma missing--and therein lies both its strength and its weakness. The action of the book eventually moves into the mind, and Visconti does not find a cinematic way of translating the shift. Marcello Mastroianni plays the hero suffering from alienation and despair.
IN COLD BLOOD. In black-and-white photography that evokes the grimness of the real event, Director Richard Brooks records the murder of a Kansas family with remarkable fidelity and probes the characters of the two killers, expertly played by Robert Blake (as Perry Smith) and Scott Wilson (as Dick Hickock).
THE GRADUATE. Neither Director Mike Nichols, nor a fine cast (Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross), can rescue this collegiate comedy of amours from a sophomore slump.
DR. DOLITTLE. The Hugh Lofting children's classic about a pleasingly plump physician who talks to animals has been transformed into a film about a lean ectomorph (Rex Harrison) who treats them with all the intimacy of a Harley Street internist ordering up a set of X rays.
BEDAZZLED. Two members of the wily Beyond the Fringe foursome play Faust and loose with an old theme as a meek short-order cook (Dudley Moore) sells his soul to the Devil (Peter Cook) in return for seven wishes.
BOOKS
Best Reading
RIGHT & WRONG, by Paul Weiss and Jonathan Weiss. The engaging result of several hours of tape-recorded discussion on ethics between a father and his son attempting to close the generation gap.
MAKING IT, by Norman Podhoretz. In his controversial quasi-autobiography, the literary critic and editor of Commentary tells of his scramble from the obscurity of a Brooklyn slum to a position of prestige and influence in the New York literary world.
THE DIFFERENCE OF MAN AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES, by Mortimer J. Adler. The well-known philosopher and dialectician cogently defends man's unique nature against the encroachment of manlike machines.
THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945, by Harold Macmillan. The second volume of the autobiography of Great Britain's former Prime Minister presents a judicious and highly readable account of the part he played in England's wartime government.
TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. The eccentricities and achievements of one of history's greatest literary artists, brought brilliantly to life in a monument to the craft of biography.
THE FUTURE OF GERMANY, by Karl Jaspers. In a passionately reasoned appeal to his countrymen, a leading German thinker urges them to build a nation on the precepts of individual responsibility and moral order.
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. A vivid novel based on the diary of the man who led the 1831 Negro slave revolt in Virginia.
WILLIAM MORRIS, HIS LIFE, WORK AND FRIENDS, by Philip Henderson. Using the techniques of psychological biography, the author draws a sympathetic, at times ironical, portrait of the 19th century English genius who excelled as a painter, poet, architect, and interior designer.
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 distinguished 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 U.S. foreign policy.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (1 last week)
2. Topaz, Uris (4)
3. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (2)
4. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (6)
5. Christy, Marshall (3)
6. The Instrument, O'Hara (7)
7. The Chosen, Potok (5)
8. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean (8)
9. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (10)
10. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (9)
NONFICTION
1. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (2)
2. Our Crowd, Birmingham (1)
3. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (6)
4. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (4)
5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (8)
6. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (7)
7. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower
8. Report From Iron Mountain, Lewin, ed. (5)
9. Incredible Victory, Lord (10)
10. Last Reflections on a War, Fall (9)
* All times E.S.T.
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