TELEVISION

Wednesday, June 5

ABC'S MOVIE NIGHT SPECIAL (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* Truman Capote's TV version of the 1944 film Laura, starring Jackie's sister, Lee Bouvier Radziwill. Repeat.

Friday, June 7

JUSTICE FOR ALL? (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Edwin Newman narrates a news special examining the apparent inequities in the law experienced by the urban and migrant poor. Repeat.

Saturday, June 8

THE RACERS-CRAIG & LEE BREEDLOVE (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). A look at the famed husband-wife auto-racing team breaking records (he at 600.601 m.p.h.; she at 308.56 m.p.h.) on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats and relaxing during off-track hours.

Sunday, June 9

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Pearl Bailey leads the second half of a 20th anniversary salute to Ed.

Monday, June 10

THE CHAMPIONS (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Rowan and Martin's summer replacement is anything but a laughin: three supercrime fighters, who tackle next-to-impossible missions assigned to them by Nemesis, an international organization dedicated to law, order and peace. Premiere.

YOU'RE IN LOVE, CHARLIE BROWN (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Happiness is summer vacation for all the Peanuts except poor Charlie Brown, who is about to be separated from a cute little redhead before he can blurt out his affection for her. Repeat.

Tuesday, June 11

SHOWCASE '68 (NBC, 8-8:30 p.m.). A summer-long professional-talent search gets under way tonight in San Francisco. Young performers selected from eight other regions will appear in subsequent weeks, and a final grand winner will be named at series' end in September. Lloyd Thaxton hosts. Premiere.

SHOWTIME (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). In a cabaret setting, guest performers from Britain and the Continent join guest hosts in London on a series of international playbills. Tonight Shelley Berman introduces Britain's Matt Monro and Wales's Shirley Bassey. Premiere.

Check local listings for date and time: NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "Thirteen Against Fate: The Lodger," first in a series of Georges Simenon mysteries, tells the story of a family that discovers one of its favorite boarders is a murderer, but cannot bear to turn him in to the police.

THEATER

On Broadway HAIR. While fresher than the rest of the season's stale musicals, this tribal-rock extravaganza seems a decidedly dated and slightly square rendition of hippiedom. Loosely directed by Tom O'Horgan, the show appears to be dedicated to the propositions that noise equals singing, energy equals style, and bad taste equals invention.

JOE EGG. When two persons cannot deal with each other directly, they sometimes focus all their attentions on a third party. Zena Walker and Donal Donnelly exercise stage expertise as a man and wife who try to speak to each other through their hopelessly crippled child. An unlikely theme for a comedy but in Peter Nichols' quasi-autobiographical play, it works.

Off Broadway

THE MEMORANDUM. Joseph Papp's latest production is a harrowing parable on the perils of conformity and cowardice. Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel has written a nonsensical narrative about an office manager who delivers himself into the clutches of bureaucracy when an official language is introduced into his firm.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND, an overtly homosexual play, contains both caustic comedy and humane drama; it leavens biting wit and cruel exposures with compassion. Robert Moore's precise staging and the "boys'" concise ensemble acting contribute to a neatly orchestrated production.

RECORDS

Operatic

The greatest beneficiaries of the LP revolution in the 1950s were opera lovers; new techniques suddenly made it practical to produce and collect complete recordings of old warhorses. But after a while, the boom dwindled, and the record companies are now concentrating on the modern, the unfamiliar, the rare and the esoteric:

WALTON: THE BEAR (Angel). British Composer William Walton premiered this one-act gem only a year ago. He was fortunate in finding an excellent librettist (an increasingly rare breed of writer) named Paul Dehn, who based his freewheeling lyrics on Chekhov's farce. Walton's eclectic styles are more than equal to the idiotic but entertaining plot about Popova, a widow who so enrages a creditor that he challenges her to a duel, but they suffer the fate of operatic lightning-love and fall into each other's arms. The work is laced with musical and verbal wit. Widow Popova's complaints about her dead husband ("What could a poor, weak woman do / But humor his caprices,/ When acts more suited to a zoo / Took place with neighbors' nieces?") are set to an oompah rhythm and sardonic melody. Though The Bear is no immortal work from the Olympian heights of human creativity, it is blessed with fine craftsmanship and expert musicianship. The album's cast and orchestra are excellent as well.

BELLINI: NORMA (London; 2 LPs). Bellini's sylvan tragedy is rarely heard onstage, for since Giuditta Pasta introduced it in 1831, only a handful of sopranos have felt equal to the task of impersonating one of the most complex, heroic and appealing roles in opera. The latest soprano in the noble line of Normas is blonde Greek-Argentine Elena Suliotis, 25, who makes the role's demands sound like a cinch. But to entice those who already own the superb Callas Norma, or Sutherland's less successful try, London has reduced this album's price by cutting the score. Yet quality prevails. Everyone involved--from engineers to Conductor Silvio Varviso--has outdone himself.

MOZART: THE IMPRESARIO (RCA Victor). Few new releases could possiblv hove a narrower appeal than Mozart's small squib about the tribulations of a Rudolph Bing of the 18th century. Commissioned by Emperor Josef II for a party, Mozart received a generous 50 ducats (about $300) for the work. In an effort to make it a "20th century transplantation," the libretto was reworked in English by Dory Previn, Conductor Andre's wife. Her adaptation makes it a gossipy backstage operetta of fights, love affairs and campy humor. The music that interrupts the cutesy dialogue is standard Mozart, but a carefully selected cast helps to make the one-disk album worth at least one hearing by those interested in such esoterica.

CINEMA

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick sets out to define man's past and describe his future with a combination of visual pyrotechnics and subtle metaphysics.

LES CARABINIERS. Jean-Luc Godard's artful discourse on the brutalizing effects of war is quite possibly the director's best film since Breathless.

THE RED MANTLE. This beautiful and tragic version of the Romeo and Juliet story is set in medieval Iceland and deals with the conflict between love and honor.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR. Writer-Director Zybnek Brynych uses stark, brutal symbolism to raise this story about life in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to a high level of creative cinema.

THE ODD COUPLE. An alimony-poor sportswriter (Walter Matthau) and his divorce-bound buddy (Jack Lemmon) are at each other's throats again in an almost literal replay of Neil Simon's Broadway hit.

BELLE DE JOUR. Spanish Director Luis Bunuel caps his 40-year career with a baroque piece of pornography about a beautiful young wife (Catherine Deneuve) whose obsessive sexual fantasies dominate her life.

NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY. Homicide and schizophrenia are the unlikely ingredients of a black and bloody comedy, which matches a callow New York City cop (George Segal) against a clever killer (Rod Steiger) who uses a closetful of disguises.

BOOKS

Best Reading This spring's juvenile fiction in the seven-to-eleven range leans heavily to contemporary social problems--mental retardation, adopted and foster children, how black and white youngsters get along together, big-city neighborhood gangs and ghetto schools.

A RACECOURSE FOR ANDY, by Patricia Wrightson (Harcourt, Brace & World; $3.50) The story of a retarded boy who is convinced that he owns the local race track The book is warm but not sentimental, particularly in its treatment of four friends' sincere concern for a chum who does not quite understand the world he lives in.

THE FLIGHT OF THE DOVES, by Walter Macken (Macmillan; $4.50). Late one night, Finn Dove, 12, and Derval, his seven-year-old sister, run away from their nasty old uncle in England and head for a dimly remembered grandmother in some faraway town in western Ireland. All sorts of strangers aid them along the way, including one policeman, who knows he should return them to their uncle.

THE BATTLE OF ST. GEORGE WITHOUT, by Janet McNeill (Little, Brown; $4.50). Six London slum children discover an abandoned church in an overgrown city park and adopt it as their own special civic-rehabilitation project. The story has ingenious complications, as the children try to protect the church from vandals who want to steal the roof.

UNDERTOW, by Finn Havrevold (Atheneum; $4.25). The first English translation of an award-winning Norwegian story about two stouthearted youngsters on a wild sailing adventure.

AMERICAN TALL-TALE ANIMALS, by Adrien Stoutenburg (Viking; $3.95). In the style of Paul Bunyan, Miss Stoutenburg has put together ten humorous stories that make wonderful reading-aloud tales. Glen Round's delightful illustrations show the bear as big as a cloud, bedbugs the size of wildcats, and the hoss-mackerel, the big fish that cowboys ride like a bucking bronco.

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, by Naomi Mitchison (John Day; $3.95). When Petrus' schoolteacher brother is arrested for speaking against apartheid, his mother sends him for safety to his relatives in the Bechuanaland countryside. It is only 60 miles away, but the young South African boy finds many things different--most important the definitions of freedom and decency.

STAR ISLAND BOY, by Louise Dickinson Rich (Franklin Watts; $3.50). A foster child, pushed from home to home, discovers warmth and a sense of identity among the lobster fishermen on a bleak Maine island.

DEAD END SCHOOL, by Robert Coles (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95). The well-known author of Children of Crisis here tells the story of one Negro family's fight to have their children educated in a decent school.

THE SPY WHO TALKED TOO MUCH, by Amelia Elizabeth Walden (Westminster; $3.75). A brisk spy yarn, set in the Middle East, in which the double martini is replaced by "a fine towering strawberry parfait."

Best Sellers

FICTION' 1. Couples, Updike (2 last week)

2. Airport, Hailey (1) 3. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (6)

4. The Tower of Babel, West (4)

5. Topaz, Uris (5)

6. Vanished, Knebel (7)

7. The Triumph, Galbraith (8)

8. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (3)

9. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron(lO)

10. Christy, Marshall (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Naked Ape, Morris (1)

2. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (2)

3. Iberia, Michener (3)

4. Our Crowd, Birmingham (6)

5. The Right People, Birmingham

6. The Double Helix, Watson (4)

7. Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Chichester (9)

8. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (5)

9. The Center, Alsop

10. The French Chef Cookbook, Child (8)

-All times E.D.T.

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