Wednesday, October 16 SUMMER OLYMPICS (ABC, 1-2 p.m.; 7-7:30 p.m.; 8:30-9 p.m.).* Continuation of 1968 Summer Olympic Games live from Mexico City. ABC will cover major events daily through Oct. 27.
THE JONATHAN WINTERS SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Guests are Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and George Raft.
Thursday, October 17 THE FABULOUS SHORTS (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A combined live action-animation salute to Academy Award-winning cartoons, including discussion of the art of animation by Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny. Actor Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo) is host.
SOUL (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). The producers of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly, have more irreverence and irrelevance in store in this all-black musical variety special; stars include Lou Rawls, George Kirby and Nipsey Russell.
Saturday, October 19
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m.-midnight). The Hallelujah Trail (1965). Western comedy with Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, Martin Landau, Pamela Tiffin and Donald Pleasence.
Sunday, October 20
PAT PAULSEN FOR PRESIDENT (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). A wrap-up of Comic Paulsen's apolitical presidential campaign; films show how he crashed the Democratic and Republican conventions, as well as his 89-c--a-plate testimonial dinner held in a Beverly Hills cafeteria and a politically inspired flight in a biplane.
Monday, October 21
BABAR THE ELEPHANT (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m.) Peter Ustinov narrates an animated adaptation of the children's stories by the late French writer and artist Jean de Brunhoff. The program is based on the firs three Babar books: The Story of Babar The Travels of Babar and Babar the King.
HEMINGWAY'S SPAIN: A LOVE AFFAIR (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Jason Robards Jr. narrates a documentary on the scenes and people celebrated in the works of Ernest Hemingway. Film crews return to the ruins of the village of Valsain, the Sierra de Guadarrama, and the cities of Madrid, Malaga, San Sebastian and Cuenca. The program includes readings by Rod Steiger and Estelle Parsons and performance by Antonio Ordonez, the bullfighter immortalized in "The Dangerous Summer."
Check local listings for dates and times of these NET programs:
NET PLAYHOUSE. "The Mayfly and the Frog." Sir John Gielgud stars in a fanciful story about a tender encounter be tween a middle-aged multimillionaire and a scruffy teen-age girl.
THE POPULATION PROBLEM. "Born in Ja pan." A documentary showing how Japan, one of the most densely populated na tions in the world, has become the only Asian nation to reduce its birth rate since World War II.
THEATER
THEATER
On Broadway
THE GREAT WHITE HOPE is a sprawling semi-documentary that traces the career of the first Negro heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. The play itself is a drama of contrition stirred by the borrowed adrenaline of newspaper headlines, but James Earl Jones, as the brooding, arrogant boxer, commands the stage like an avenging black giant.
THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH exhumes the issues of German guilt, Jewish passivity during the "final solution" and the paranoid personality of the archkiller. The play offers no fresh insights, and its best excuse for being is Donald Pleasence, whose performance erupts into a characterization much like a neurotic blood relative whom the audience can neither abide nor disown.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Tom Stoppard's reincarnations of Shakespeare's bit players are part Beckett, part Charlie Brown. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood prove themselves linguistic acrobats.
PLAZA SUITE. Neil Simon's trio of comedies stars Maureen Stapleton and E. G. Marshall as three pairs of middle-agers.
Off Broadway
THE EMPIRE BUILDERS. The late French playwright Boris Vian, in a Kafkaesque allegory about a family haunted by a mysterious sound and an equally mysterious presence, "The Schmurz," offers a dismal view of life with death in relentless pursuit.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND gather to play at a homosexual birthday party, and the melody, while at times merry, is mostly minor key. Mart Crowley's characters parry wittily and wound easily.
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. Salome Jens, W. B. Brydon and Mitchell Ryan as Eugene O'Neill figures whose dreams never see the light of day.
RECORDINGS
Chamber Music
By some accounts, the course of the string quartet has been downhill all the way since Beethoven. Yet many modern composers continue to be fascinated by the form; Igor Stravinsky calls it "the most lucid conveyor of musical ideas ever fashioned." As a number of recent releases demonstrate, the 20th century's output has been, if not Beethovenesque, at least varied, and often challenging.
HINDEMITH: STRING QUARTET NO. 3; HONEGGER: STRING QUARTET NO. 2 (Crossroads). The Hindemith was written in 1922 when the composer was 27. It exemplifies the peak of his early "linear counterpoint" style, in which often dissonant harmonies are an incidental byproduct of the vigorous movement of each melodic voice. It is a muscular piece rounded off by Hindemith's logical imagination. The Prague City Quartet gives it an appropriately rough-and-ready performance. The Honegger work, composed in 1936, is woven of more flowing lines and less urgent rhythms. The disciplined playing of the Dvorak String Quartet reflects the composer's mixture of austere classical feeling with bristling contemporary materials.
NIELSEN: STRING QUARTET NO. 4 (Turnabout). Danish Composer Carl Nielsen, who died in 1931, is gaining a hearing as a symphonist nowadays because he worked out adventurous new constructions without abandoning the expansive romanticism of the post-Brahms tradition. Unfortunately, as a quartet composer he remained rather conventional, however expert. This disk, which completes a set of the four Nielsen quartets in clean, brisk performances by the Copenhagen String Quartet, offers no more than a pleasing minor work --buoyant, masculine, at times jocosely rustic. Listeners who want only a single sample of Nielsen's quartets will find the intense No. 3 more rewarding.
SCHOENBERG: STRING QUARTET NO. 1 (Deutsche Grammophon). If Schoenberg had never opened the modern epoch of music in 1908 by pushing into the realm of atonality, his earlier tonal works would still command attention. This 1905 piece is a late Romantic creation bursting with ideas, ingenious in its complexity, touched with melancholy in spite of its energy. Although it contains four distinct, sonata-form subdivisions, it was conceived as a single movement. Schoenberg gave it coherence by modeling it after the first movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. The New Vienna String Quartet's performance is rich, although American tastes may prefer the precision of the Juilliard Quartet's reading.
SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTET NO. 8 (London Stereo Treasury). The story goes that Russia's Borodin Quartet played this 1960 work for the composer in his Moscow home, hoping for pointers on their interpretation. Shostakovich was so moved that he wept, and the musicians quietly packed up and left. In this reissue of the Borodin's 1962 recording, few listeners will be affected as deeply as the composer, but many will have no trouble in recognizing Shostakovich's characteristic strengths along with his weaknesses. The piece abounds with hard-edge rhythms, clever quotations from his earlier work, occasional banal melodies, and such dubious programmatic effects as an imitation of a bomber under fire from antiaircraft guns--all welded together with Shostakovich's firm craftsmanship.
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Stanley Kubrick's cosmic parable of the history and future of man contains the most stunning technical effects and visual pyrotechnics in motion-picture history.
FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand is unmistakably the star of this rambling, almost anachronistic musical biography of Fanny Brice, whose brassy personality fits the leading lady like a feather boa.
THE BOFORS GUN. Superb acting, mainly by David Warner and Nicol Williamson, turns this slightly static film about life in the postwar British Army into a moving plea for individual freedom.
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. A subtle, probing performance by Alan Arkin as a deaf-mute brings poetry to this rather prosaic adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel.
RACHEL, RACHEL. Actor Paul Newman makes his debut as director in a quiet tale of a frustrated schoolteacher just entering middle age. His wife, Actress Joanne Woodward, gives the film an added stature with her achingly real portrayal of the heroine.
VOYAGE OF SILENCE. This deceptively simple story of a young Portuguese carpenter emigrating to Paris is a small masterpiece of compassionate observation and emotional restraint.
WARRENDALE. A magnificent, heartbreaking Canadian documentary that explores the troubled lives of a small group of emotionally disturbed children.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FIRST CIRCLE, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Using a model prison as an allegory for Soviet society, Russia's greatest living novelist constructs an endless labyrinth of despair.
GEORGE ELIOT, by Gordon Haight. This fond, scholarly biography finally does justice to a Victorian lady novelist whose life and works both deserve it.
MAKING GOOD AGAIN, by Lionel Davidson. A suspense novel explores the tangled lives and moral problems involved in the payment of reparations to families persecuted by the Nazis.
THE THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER AND OTHER STORIES, by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The mystical core of a significant Brazilian writer is revealed in this collection of sto ries, published posthumously.
THE ESSENCE OF SECURITY, by Robert S. McNamara. A wide-ranging collection of speeches and reports by the paragon of the Pentagon, whose concern for the world belies the myth that he is narrow and insensitive. The outstanding omission: discussion of the Viet Nam war.
TIME OUT, by David Ely. Horror stories in the modern manner, decked out with computers, spaceships and nuclear weapons --all seen with a fine observant eye for society's foibles.
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, by John Earth. When read straight through, these 14 experimental pieces of fiction by the author of Giles Goat-Boy interact to produce a series of enticing illusions.
OUTER DARK, by Cormac McCarthy. A Southern gothic novel about a backwoods brother and sister, their abandoned child, and three archetypal murderers.
FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL, by Eugene Ionesco. A leading playwright of the theater of the absurd displays his troubled spirit in a masochistic mosaic.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week)
2. Preserve and Protect, Drury (2)
3. The Senator, Pearson (8)
4. Couples, Updike (4)
5. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (5)
6. True Grit, Portis (3)
7. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (6)
8. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (7)
9. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn
10. Heaven Help Us, Tarr
NONFICTION
1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)
2. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (2)
3. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe (3)
4. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (4)
5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (5)
6. Iberia, Michener (6)
7. The Case Against Congress, Pearson and Anderson (9)
8. The Right People, Birmingham (7)
9. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet, Stillman and Baker (8)
10. Black Rage, Grier and Cobbs
* All times E.D.T.
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