Television

Wednesday, November 20 HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).*Hugh O'Brian plays a pro football quarterback sidelined by injuries in David Mark's "A Punt, a Pass and a Prayer."

Thursday, November 21 THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11:30 p.m.). Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Richard Widmark, Arthur Kennedy, Carroll Baker, James Stewart and Edward G. Robinson star in a John Ford western about the U.S. government's mistreatment of Indians.

Saturday, November 23

N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 2:45-9 p.m.). Nebraska v. Oklahoma, followed by U.S.C. v. U.C.L.A.

MOUSE ON THE MAYFLOWER (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Ernie Ford narrates an animated Thanksgiving special about a frisky rodent who stows away on the Mayflower.

THE COWSILLS SPECIAL (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Hit tunes and folk ballads by the singing family.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Companions in Nightmare. Premiere of a made-for-TV motion picture about an experiment in group therapy that ends in murder. Stars Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and William Redfield.

Sunday, November 24

N.F.L. FOOTBALL (CBS, 4 p.m. to conclusion). New York Giants v. Los Angeles Rams at Los Angeles.

A.F.L. FOOTBALL (NBC, 4 p.m. to conclusion). New York Jets v. San Diego Chargers at San Diego.

HEMINGWAY'S SPAIN: A LOVE AFFAIR.

(ABC, 4-5 p.m.). Jason Robards Jr. narrates a documentary on the scenes and people celebrated in the works of Ernest Hemingway. The program includes readings by Rod Steiger and Estelle Parsons and a performance by Antonio Ordonez, the bullfighter who was immortalized in The Dangerous Summer. Repeat.

Monday, November 25

FRANCIS ALBERT SINATRA DOES HIS THING (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Diahann Carroll and The 5th Dimension join Sinatra in a musical special.

Check local listings for date and time of this NET special:

NET PLAYHOUSE Devi (1960). Indian Film Maker Satyajit Ray, best known for The Apu Trilogy, directs the story of a devout Indian whose religious fantasies lead to domestic tragedy.

THEATER On Broadway

KING LEAR. In the finest performance of his career. Lee J. Cobb plays an almost unplayable role with consummate skill, in fusing his portrayal of the foolish, suffering old man with an all-involving humanity. Director Gerald Freedman elicits beautifully modulated acting from the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.

THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH. Robert Shaw indulges in some pop psychologizing in this complicated yarn about a Jewish business tycoon in Manhattan who is uncovered as a Nazi war criminal, then brought to trial in Tel Aviv, where he is uncovered again as a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner from World War II. Even the amazingly agile acting of Donald Pleasence and the sensitive direction of Harold Pinter cannot give substance, theatrical or philosophical, to a spurious script.

THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY presides over two drawing rooms. In the Louis XIV salon of The Misanthrope, they are at ease with Moliere's verse spoof of hypocrisy in higher society. But they appear awkward amidst the English modern of a fashionable London flat, where T. S. Eliot's metaphysical comedy, The Cocktail Party, takes place.

THE GREAT WHITE HOPE, by Howard Sackler, attempts to re-create the prizefight world of the 1900s, using the dramaturgy of the 1930s, and drawing dubious parallels with events of the 1960s. James Earl Jones exudes vitality as the first Negro heavyweight champion.

LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS possesses grains of truth beneath some predictable chaff. The evening's four tales of men and women prove again that while there may sometimes be rhythm and rhyme in love and marriage, there is rarely reason.

Off Broadway

TEA PARTY and THE BASEMENT are a pair of Pinter puzzlers that amuse as well as bemuse. The first playlet deals with a successful businessman whose system short-circuits when all the forces in his life--secretary, wife, children, parents--come together at an office gathering. In the second, two men and a girl try to conquer each other and their living space.

HOW TO WIN AN ELECTION is a free wheeling revue, brashly taking to task all the U.S. Presidents from Washington to Johnson. D.R. Allen's portrayal of Calvin Coolidge is a particular delight.

RECORDINGS Folk

Some folk singers are both less and more than singers. When they themselves are the folk who compose the songs, their performances do not depend merely on vocal skill. What matters is a unique fusion of material and manner that ul timately projects personality and point of view. Four recent albums by composer-singers attempt this projection with varying success.

ARLO GUTHRIE: ARLO (Reprise). In his first album, Alice's Restaurant, Woody Guthrie's boy created a piece of instant Americana: a talking blues that wrapped an antiwar protest inside a hilarious tall tale. A classic is a hard thing to live down, especially for a performer of 21. This amiable but unmemorable release--recorded live at Manhattan's Bitter End cafe --indicates that it may be some time before Guthrie matches Restaurant again. Meantime, his satire may not bite but it nips playfully, and his comic drawl is impeccably timed. The Pause of Mr. Claus begins with a monologue spoofing the FBI, launches into a song about how Santa Claus is suspect because of his red suit and long hair, ends with the refrain: "Why do police guys beat on peace guys?"

TOM PAXTON: MORNING AGAIN (Elektra). This is folk without folksiness. Paxton's trimmings may sometimes be countrified or traditional, but in this, his fourth LP, his essence emerges as urban and contemporary. When he writes a talking blues, it is about pot-smoking platoons in Viet Nam who smell "like midnight on St. Marks Place" (in Manhattan's hippie East Village). Appropriately, style and melody take second place in his songs to the compressed sophistication of his lyrics. Somewhat world-weary and very world-wary, they capsule the Paxton mixture of soft sympathies and hard ironies. Among the best in this consistently rewarding collection: the wistful Now That I've Taken My Life, in which a man who gave up a free and happy ivory-tower existence, "pleading reality," tries to convince himself that he likes "solid-gold women" and his hollow new success.

TIM HARDIN: LIVE IN CONCERT (Verve

Forecast). Fresh from a long sojourn at a Colorado mountain retreat last April, Hardin recorded this album at Manhattan's Town Hall. Most of the selections are from his previous albums (If I Were a Carpenter, Red Balloon, The Lady Came from Baltimore). What those albums do not contain, however, is the degree of spontaneity and emotional depth that mark Hardin's in-person performing. He has one of the most poignant voices in the folk field, seemingly always about to crack or lapse into a sigh, as if the effort of every graceful phrase cost him pain. His melodic songs of love, loneliness and loss are romantic yet rigorously crafted ("You look to me / Like misty roses / Too soft to touch / But too lovely to leave alone"). This is by far the best record yet by a sensitive and gifted performer.

JERRY JEFF WALKER: MR. BOJANGLES (ATCO). A zestful romp of a first album by a 27-year-old graduate of the rock group Circus Maximus. The boundaries of Walker's country style are broad enough to take in rock, ballads and the blues. The Ballad of the Hulk, though a little long and repetitive, is an object lesson in how to protest without falling into a dreary drone. His targets include the Vatican, divorce and the draft ("I have but one country to give for my life"). The spirit is so infectious that even squares may applaud the lines: "What's right for me / Would be perversity / In any state lawbook."

CINEMA 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A space-age epic by Stanley Kubrick that explores the history and future of man. The technical effects may be the best in history.

BULLITT. A violent journey into the underworld, where the crook is a savage and the cop a man alone. Steve McQueen provides a supercool performance as a San Francisco police lieutenant.

FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand comes on strong in a musical biography of Fanny Brice. The film will appeal mainly to those who feel that the leading lady can do no wrong.

THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES. Patricia Neal, Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen kindle the spark of real life in this lace-curtain Irish drama about the woes of a middleclass family in The Bronx.

WARRENDALE. The melancholy lives of a group of mentally disturbed children are portrayed in this magnificent Canadian documentary by Allan King.

ROMEO AND JULIET. Director Franco Zeffirelli translates one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays into a surprisingly effective quattrocento West Side Story. As the star-crossed young lovers, Olivia Hussey and

Leonard Whiting perform with a maturity beyond their years.

WEEKEND. Some wordy Maoist political harangue is the major flaw in this satire of contemporary bourgeois society by Jean-Luc Godard.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL (four volumes). Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. A remarkable record of the political and intellectual history of Western Europe during the '30s and '40s by the author of Animal Farm and 1984.

O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. O'Neill did what only a major artist can do: make his public share his private demon. In this painstaking biography, the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer traces the tensions that defined the playwright's life.

THE CAT'S PAJAMAS & WITCH'S MILK, by Peter De Vries. In these two grotesquely humorous novellas, a gifted, discontented man works hard at being a failure, and a gentle, down-at-heart woman struggles with domestic disaster.

THE CANCER WARD, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Soviet author uses a cancer ward as a metaphor for Communist society; the doomed patients reveal jagged, damning insights into the everyday enormities of life under Stalin. Not so successful a book as The First Circle, it is still a relentless narrative and a powerful, often poetic novel.

LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS, by Albert Camus. Camus was a sensualist and humanist who found inspiration in the sun-soaked shores of his native Algeria. His great perception flavors this new collection of early essays, which are surprisingly mystical and serene.

MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES, by Saul Bellow. Six stories, balancing satire and compassion, are a reminder that Bellow is at the forefront of American writing today.

THE PUBLIC IMAGE, by Muriel Spark. A wickedly witty novel about a movie star who rises and falls on her public image.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Preserve and Protect, Drury (1 last week)

2. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (2)

3. Airport, Hailey (3)

4. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (4)

5. A Small Town in Germany, Le Carre (6)

6. The Senator, Pearson (5)

7. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (8)

8. Couples, Updike (7)

9. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (9)

10. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford (10)

NONFICTION 1. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (1)

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

3. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux

4. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg(3)

5. Black Rage, Grier and Cobbs

6. The Beatles, Davies (4)

7. Soul on Ice, Cleaver (5)

8. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (10)

9. Iberia, Michener (6)

10. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (7)

*All times E.S.T.

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