TELEVISION

Wednesday, September 11

ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* A Macy's salesgirl (Natalie Wood) and a fun-loving jazz musician (Steve McQueen) find that one indiscretion can lead to lifelong complications in Love with the Proper Stranger (1964).

FROM CHEKHOV WITH LOVE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Sir John Gielgud, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Dorothy Tutin, Nigel Davenport and Wendy Hiller star in this biographical drama based on the life of the 19th century Russian playwright.

Thursday, September 12

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Act One (1963), the movie adaptation of the late Moss Hart's autobiography, traces the playwright's fruitful collaboration with George S. Kaufman, another giant of the Broadway stage. George Hamilton, Jason Robards and Eli Wallach star.

PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC, 9:30-11 p.m.). The first of five original dramas, Certain Honorable Men, by Rod Serling, focuses on U.S. Congressmen caught in the vortex of national politics. The cast includes Pat Hingle, Van Heflin, Peter Fonda.

Friday, September 13

WHITE PAPER: THE ORDEAL OF THE AMERICAN CITY (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). "Cities Have No Limits" is the first of three programs that will examine the nature of the urban crisis. Urbanologist Daniel P. Moynihan, Political Scientist Charles Hamilton and John Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition, discuss the problems with NBC's Frank McGee.

Saturday, September 14

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 2:15-3:45 p.m.). Floyd Patterson challenges Jimmy Ellis for the World Boxing Association's version of the heavyweight championship. Live from Stockholm via satellite. Taped events from the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials round out the program.

N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 3:45-7 p.m.). Tennessee v. Georgia in the season's opener from Knoxville.

Sunday, September 15

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "The Weird World of Robots" examines the mechanical slaves that will perform 21st century tasks that man cannot or should not attempt--such as working in contaminated areas of an atomic plant.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (NBC, 7-7:30 p.m.). Michael Shea as Huck Finn, Kevin Schultz as Tom Sawyer and Lu Ann Haslam as Becky Thatcher find themselves in a forest inhabited by leprechauns in "The Magic Shillelagh." Premiere.

LOMBARDI (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). A study of Pro-Football Coach Vince Lombardi, who took over a lackluster Green Bay Packers team in 1959 and fashioned a dynasty of champions.

BARBRA STREISAND: A HAPPENING IN CENTRAL PARK (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). A video tape of last summer's concert at the Sheep Meadow in Manhattan's Central Park, when Barbra charmed 135,000 people with ballads, show tunes and even a Christmas carol.

THE BEAUTIFUL PHYLLIS DILLER SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Phyllis Diller and her cohorts Norm Crosby, Rip Taylor and The Curtain Calls welcome Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin, Sonny and Cher and the Pearce Sisters to their first show of the season. Premiere.

Monday, September 16

ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). The rapid-fire artists are back with the program regulars Judy Carne, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Jo Anne Worley, Gary Owens and Ruth Buzzi.

N.F.L. FOOTBALL (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion). The Los Angeles Rams start off their season against the St. Louis Cardinals at St. Louis.

Tuesday, September 17

JULIA (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Diahann Carroll as Julia Baker, a lovely young Negro widow who is attempting to make a new life for herself and her six-year-old son, discovers that the boy is a matchmaker in "Mama's Man." Premiere.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Bob Hope stars as a widower with Dina Merrill as his own special diversion in "I'll Take Sweden," 1965.

THEATER

On Broadway

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Tom Stoppard borrows the Mutt and Jeff of the Globe entourage, keeps them in the Shakespearean situation, but endows them with 20th century complexes and complaints. John Wood and Brian Murray revel in the sometimes melancholic, ofttimes witty dialogue.

PLAZA SUITE. The impersonality of a hotel room has been the setting for many a personal encounter. Neil Simon arrives with three short comedies, in which Maureen Stapleton and E. G. Marshall play three different couples whose experiences in a Fifth Avenue hostelry range from the wistfully amusing to the farcical.

Off Broadway

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN is a play for those who are lost and lonely. W. B. Brydon, Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan are a father, his daughter and her almost-lover who see their lives slip away in the course of one lunar arc. Ted Mann's direction transmits much of the tenderness and sadness of Eugene O'Neill's tribute to the isolated.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND plays all the variations on the theme of homosexuality. Mart Crowley's composition has grace notes of hilarity but ends in a coda of bitter recognitions. Director Robert Moore conducts a finely tuned cast with precision and sensitivity.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS while his bold songs are sung nightly in Manhattan. Furious at life yet madly in love with it, Brel challenges it with bold imagery, sighs over it in sad verse, embellishes it with melodic observations of sly humor.

YOUR OWN THING. Shakespeare again proves himself to be a most congenial co-author as Twelfth Night provides the plot and cast of characters for an inventive rock musical about confusion of the sexes.

SCUBA DUBA. Playwright Bruce Jay Friedman makes a mockery of his "hero," a youngish, aging American on a holocaust of a holiday. The question is who is more intolerant, the intolerable protagonist or the creator who cannot tolerate him? Scenes of loving satire relieve the strain of an evening of tense comedy.

RECORDS

Opera and Oratorio

ROSSINI: RARITIES (RCA Victor). Montserrat Caballe sings some of Rossini's lesser-known arias in the florid style of another Spanish diva, Isabella Colbran, who was Rossini's first wife. Caballe's pianissimos are her forte, and her Willow Song from Otello is like an aching echo of sorrow. Also affecting is the love song Di tanti palpiti from Tancredi, which in its day was so popular that ushers in Venetian law courts were expressly forbidden to hum it during sessions. As in most such recorded assemblies of fancywork, the display is more evident than the drama. Nevertheless, this is bel canto at its bellissimo, and it ravishes the ear.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN: THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE (London). A musical drama for church performance, Furnace is in some ways similar to Britten's successful Curlew River of 1964. It begins with a medieval plainsong chanted by a procession of monks and acolytes who are about to present a play within a play, the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The melodies swirl to ever higher tension through Britten's dissonances, filtered through the medieval mood as through a scrim. In this first recording, the instrumentation is sparse but effective, as are the pure voices of the acolytes floating above the deeper tones of the monks.

BERG: LULU (Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). Alban Berg's brutish, nasty masterpiece is just beginning to win the moderate popular following that Lulu's bloody brother, Wozzeck, has already earned. Lulu is the story of a beautiful prostitute with a heart of sulphur who causes the death of most of the men who love her. Lulu herself, in the company of a lesbian countess, meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper. The gutter theme of the tale is appropriately accompanied by raucous atonality and harsh song-speech--all of which provides the raw material for the prevalent but irrelevant moralizing, philosophizing and musical theorizing that Lulu lovers are prone to manufacture. The intelligent artistry of Soprano Evelyn Lear and Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, under Karl Boehm's conducting, helps to make this an authoritative recording of a strange, chilling opera.

HAYDN: THE CREATION (Columbia; 2 LPs). The aging, devout Haydn painted God's creation of heaven and earth as a dramatic event of the first magnitude, and that is the way Leonard Bernstein conducts it. The New York Philharmonic is actually the star of the performance, although the Camerata Singers and Soloists John Reardon, Alexander Young and Judith Raskin keep up the rapid pace and theatrical fireworks.

THE MUSIC OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, VOL. VIII (Columbia; 2 LPs). This close-to-the-last package in Columbia's Schoenberg series includes a first recording of the composer's only comic opera, Von Heute auf Morgen. The complex twelve-tone style is perhaps unsuitable to the simple domestic plot: a husband strays toward a worldly woman, is won back by the artifices of his wife. The rich polyphony and varied textures of orchestra and voices provide a musical experience far beyond the promise of the uninspired libretto. Erika Schmidt is the wife, Derrik Olsen the husband, and Heather Harper the friend.

CINEMA

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick deploys all the dazzling trappings of the space age in an exciting, often demanding parable of the history and future of man.

HUNGER. This Swedish tale of a writer on the skids in a big city is given depth and resonance by the performances of Per Oscarsson and Gunnel Lindblom.

ISABEL. Under the direction of Husband Paul Almond, Genevieve Bujold generates an air of adolescent terror in this chilling ale of a young girl growing rapidly to womanhood while plagued by the ghosts of another life.

ROSEMARY'S BABY. Devil worship in Manhattan and other incidental naughtiness are given loving attention by Director Roman Polanski and Actress Mia Farrow in this sometimes too faithful adaptation of Ira Levin's bestseller.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Carson McCullers' poetic novel has received a rather prosaic screen adaptation, but Alan Arkin's performance as the mute John Singer binds the film together by making silence deafening.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. Stealing a leaf from the master's book. Franc,ois Truffaut has produced an homage to Hitchcock that makes up in humor what it lacks in suspense.

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT. Director Dusan Vukotic tells a sometimes ingenuous but often ingenious fairy story of two children who drift off to a magical, adult-free paradise.

BOOKS

Best Reading

FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL, by Eugene lonesco. In a chaotic but painfully fascinating self-analysis, one of the leading playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd discusses the neurotic roots of his art.

THE PUMP HOUSE GANG and THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, by Tom Wolfe. A collection of pieces about life styles in America, and a chronicle of the cross-country antics of Novelist Ken Kesey and his psychedelic sidekicks, by America's foremost pop-journalist.

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A literary time-machine trip, via short stories and essays, that gives the traveler a look at man's present dilemmas and the bleak Utopias promised for his future.

THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN, by Ayi Kwei Armah. A Ghanaian novelist's parable about man's struggle for liberty and dignity, staged in post-revolutionary West Africa.

THE CASE AGAINST CONGRESS, by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Misfeasance, malfeasance and other assorted knaveries by federal legislators are uncovered by the team of political columnists.

THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN, by Romain Gary. The classic Jewish gambit--finding macabre humor in extreme tribulation--is used with uncommon originality in this allegorical novel of genocide and national guilt.

BRING LARKS AND HEROES, by Thomas Keneally. The love, rebellion and death of a young soldier garrisoned at an 18th century Australian penal colony.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week)

2. Couples, Updike (2)

3. True Grit, Portis (3)

4. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (4)

5. Topaz, Uris (7)

6. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford (5)

7. Heaven Help Us, Tarr (8)

8. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (6)

9. The Senator, Pearson

10. Vanished, Knebel (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (2)

2. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)

3. Iberia, Michener (4)

4. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (5)

5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (3)

6. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe

7. The Right People, Birmingham (6)

8. Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, Collins and Lapierre (7)

9. The Naked Ape, Morris (8)

10. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet, Stillman and Baker (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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